How should we be 'Living'? Kurosawa and Ishiguro tackle the question, 70 years apart
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Akira Kurosawa's film Ikiru came out in 1952Courtesy of the Criterion Collection -
In Living, Bill Nighy stars as Mr. Williams, a bureaucrat he is told he is about to die.Ross Ferguson / Number 9 films / Sony Pictures Classics
Kazuo Ishiguro was born in Nagasaki, Japan in 1954 but moved with his family to Britain when he was 5 years old. He, of course, grew up to become one of the world's most renowned writers in the English language, winning the Booker Prize, the Nobel Prize in Literature, and a Knighthood.
But one of his earliest and most enduring artistic influences was a late-night television broadcast of a black and white Japanese film by Akira Kurosawa called Ikiru.
Shot in Japan in the early 1950s, it's an existential and philosophical film about an aging Tokyo bureaucrat who receives a terminal cancer diagnosis. The illness sets off an internal journey as the film's central character examines the choices he's made and decides to live more fully. What was for Kurosawa in part a critique of postwar Japanese bureaucracy and workaholism became for Kazuo Ishiguro a formative guide to living.
"One of the things about the original Japanese film that really appealed to me," he explains, "it emphasizes the fact that you can't rely on the applause of the wider world to tell you whether you've lived well or not. Public acclaim may be nice to have, but ultimately, it's not worth very much. It's treacherous, fickle, it's usually wrong... you've got to take a lonely private view of what is success and failure for you. I think that is what it's saying. You've got to try and find a meaning that's within yourself, and I found that quite inspiring."
Ishiguro says his most widely-read novels, The Remains of the Day and Never Let Me Go were each influenced in part by Ikiru, as his fictional characters are jolted awake, suddenly attuned to the limits of time and their mortality.
Now seventy years after Ikiru was released, Ishiguro has earned his first Oscar nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay for his new film Living.
Instead of a remake, Living transplants the story of Ikiru from postwar Tokyo to 1950s London where the writer himself arrived as a young boy – a city of top hats, public bureaucrats, and chilling emotional reserve, recreated as a lush cinematic universe by director Oliver Hermanus. The central character is an aging government employee named Mr. Williams, played by the acclaimed British actor Bill Nighy. Just as in Ikiru, Williams receives a terminal diagnosis that sets off both a crisis and a deeply moving journey to catharsis. Nighy's performance, with its fragile balance of pathos and kindness also earned him an Oscar nomination for Best Actor.
The British writer and critic Pico Iyer, who lives in Japan, and wrote the Criterion companion essay to Ikiru, says Living is a remarkable example of how Ishiguro's art bridges his many cultural identities to create work that is deeply universal. What may seem on the surface to be a simple costume drama, is infused with the spirit and the message of Kurosawa's original film, and a poignant Japanese concern with the temporary nature of things.
"I've been following Ish's work ever since it first came out 40 years ago. Famously, whenever he sets a book in Japan, it's the perfect description of the Britain of the past...whenever he sets a book like The Remains of the Day in the the Britain of the 1930s, it's a precise evocation of the Japan that's all around me" says Iyer. "I think what he's done ... is almost explode ideas of East and West, and give us something universal. In fact, I think his Living is more universal than Kurosawa's Ikiru, because it's not concerned particularly with English society or Japanese society, but much more with universal mortality."
Ishiguro says he takes heart from the idea that he is free to express his identity and his heritage not only by literally "telling stories about Japanese people who come to Britain, and do X, Y, Z... It just comes out in a certain kind of way. I have influences that come from Japanese culture, particularly Japanese cinema, that just go into the stories I tell even if on the surfaces there are no Japanese characters. Our movie Living is indeed a very Japanese film, I think in many ways, but it's also a very English film."
In what is already a landmark year for Asian actors and Asian-American nominees at the Academy Awards, Ishiguro says he is honored to be part of a robust conversation about the possibilities and the boundaries of cinema. He says unlike literary prizes, which are often singular achievements for a finished work, film awards highlight where cinema is going.
"I think basically what the award season is, is the film industry people having a discussion," he says, "about what are the values they should take forward in their work, what kinds of films should they be making, which kind of people should be exalted." He says he welcomes the range of films nominated in the Best Adapted Screenplay category at the Oscars, from the intimate story at the heart of Living to the spectacle of Top Gun: Maverick.
"What's important is... are the stories being told well, are they being told honestly, do they resort to emotional manipulation or do they actually contain something you could call some version of the truth about the way we live."
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Transcript
AILSA CHANG, HOST:
Writer Kazuo Ishiguro may need a bigger bookshelf soon. He's up for the Academy Award for best adapted screenplay for "Living," his remake of a Japanese film. And if he wins on Sunday, he would have a Nobel Prize, a Booker Prize, a knighthood and an Oscar. NPR's Bilal Qureshi spoke with Sir Ishiguro and has this story.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
BILAL QURESHI, BYLINE: In 1952, Japanese director Akira Kurosawa released what is now considered a classic of world cinema, "Ikiru."
KAZUO ISHIGURO: I first saw "Ikiru" when I was about 11 or 12 on British TV at a time when it was very difficult to see any Japanese movies in England, and it made a terrific impact on me.
PICO IYER: It's a story about a bureaucrat in a dead-end job in postwar Japan who receives a diagnosis of cancer and learns he has six months left to live and therefore starts to think about what living really means.
QURESHI: That's Pico Iyer, who lives in Japan and has written about the film.
IYER: Ikiru means to live, and that's what suddenly he has to address.
QURESHI: Kazuo Ishiguro was born in Nagasaki, two years after "Ikiru" was released. He moved to England with his family when he was only 5, and Japanese cinema became a bridge to his past. Seventy years later, he's written his version of the story, transplanted to postwar London.
ISHIGURO: The idea wasn't just to do a kind of translation of the original film into a British setting. I mean, it was to take that material and kind of marry it with other things that I and, you know, others wanted to say about British society.
QURESHI: The film opens with a sea of gentlemen in bowler hats and umbrellas marching to their London offices.
(SOUNDBITE OF TYPEWRITER TYPING)
ISHIGURO: "Living" is about a guy who is almost buried by bureaucracy. He's a guy who works in a local authority, and he's just ground down by work. He's just become a kind of a zombie.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "LIVING")
BILL NIGHY: (As Mr. Williams) Mr. Rusbridger, why has this D19 come back to us?
QURESHI: The actor Bill Nighy is also nominated for an Oscar for his lead performance as Mr. Williams, reserved to a fault but crumbling beneath the surface following his diagnosis.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "LIVING")
NIGHY: (As Mr. Williams) You see, this is rather a bore, but the doctors have given me six months, eight or nine at a stretch.
QURESHI: Again, critic Pico Iyer.
IYER: Ishi's (ph) great strength has always been for catching that bittersweet moment that just pierces you towards the end of your life, when you're wondering what your life has amounted to.
QURESHI: That strength was part of the official citation for Kazuo Ishiguro's 2017 Nobel Prize for literature, which described him as a writer who has, quote, "uncovered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world."
ISHIGURO: To be honest, Bilal, I never quite understood that Nobel citation. (Laughter) I stared at it for a long time. (Laughter) It sounds good. I wasn't about to complain.
QURESHI: But he acknowledges that his focus on internal reckonings is indeed a recurring theme. It's at the heart of his two most famous novels, "The Remains Of The Day" and "Never Let Me Go," which were adapted for the screen by other filmmakers.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "THE REMAINS OF THE DAY")
ANTHONY HOPKINS: (As Stevens) A man cannot call himself well-contented until he has done all he can to be of service to his employer.
ISHIGURO: If anyone knows those novels or the movies that have been made from them, they can probably see that there's a relationship with "Living" and with "Ikiru."
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "NEVER LET ME GO")
SALLY HAWKINS: (As Ms. Lucy) None of you would do anything except live the life that has already been set up for you. And sometime around your third donation, your short life will be complete. That's what you're created to do.
ISHIGURO: It's a way of setting up that urgent question - so what do you do with your life? You know, what is really important in life when you become highly aware of its - you know, how limited it is, how short it is?
QURESHI: One of the most powerful scenes in the new film version of "Living" is a musical sequence. After his diagnosis, Mr. Williams, as played by Bill Nighy, goes on a bit of a bender and during a raucous night out at a piano bar, sings a Scottish folk song that he shared with his wife.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "LIVING")
NIGHY: (As Mr. Williams, singing) Thy leaves were aye the first of spring, thy flowers the summer's pride. There was nay such a bonnie tree...
ISHIGURO: I wanted the audience to remember that he's singing this song that he associates with his late wife and that that part of him that perhaps died way back then, he has found again - he's revived somewhere.
QURESHI: The writer Pico Iyer says the new version of "Living" retains the bittersweet essence of its Japanese original, but it is not just a remake.
IYER: "Ikiru," by Kurosawa, seems to be a film about Japan. "Living," by Ishiguro and his colleagues, seems to me a film about humanity.
QURESHI: "Living" is a very small, intimate film, and it's nominated this year for a screenwriting Oscar in the same category as "Top Gun: Maverick." But the competition isn't the point, says Kazuo Ishiguro.
ISHIGURO: What's important is, are the stories being told well? Are they being told honestly? Do they resort to emotional manipulation, or do they actually contain something you could call some version of the truth about the way we live? You know, I think these are very important questions, and I think these are the questions that get asked at awards season.
QURESHI: Bilal Qureshi, NPR News. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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