W Why are we here? What is our purpose? What does it all mean?
For millennia, philosophers from Plato to Monty Python have pondered the biggest question of them all: the meaning of life. Akira Kurosawa’s 1952 humanist masterpiece Ikiru answers this question about as well as any film ever has. Among those shaped by the Tao of Kurosawa was a then-18-year-old Kazuo Ishiguro. “It’s no exaggeration to say that [Ikiru] affected the way I approach my own life and my career,” the Nobel Prize-winning novelist and (very) occasional screenwriter tells Total Film. “It’s always kind of guided me.”
The story of a buttoned-up government bureaucrat who finds renewed purpose when he’s diagnosed with a terminal illness, resonates not because its tragic central figure undergoes a simplistic transformation, but because he chooses to make the most of the hand he’s been dealt. “Even if you think it’s a small life - it’s not that small,” Ishiguro says. “You can find real meaning in it. I just thought
