I Live in Fear / Record of a Living Being / Ikimono no kiroku (1955)

I have not written much about Kurosawa’s films because so many others have done so, but I Live in Fear is both relatively unknown and extremely unusual for Kurosawa.

The film operates on at least two levels. The obvious one is the fear of an atomic holocaust. Gojira had just appeared and the Japanese had just gone through the Lucky Dragon incident, which, coupled of course with the memory of Hiroshima and Nagasaki,  made them especially sensitive to the issue and a bit ahead of the curve for the rest of the world. Nevil Shute would start writing On the Beach shortly afterward, and the novel in 1957 and movie in 1959 would become a world-wide expression of the realization that atomic war was genuinely unwinnable. The fear that Nakajima experiences was as palpable in some parts of Japanese society as it is in Toshiro Mifune’s performance.

But the more unusual aspect is that this is really an Ozu movie turned on its head, in which the parent is not automatically obeyed even if he is truly acting in the family’s best interest.  It is Kurosawa’s only movie about family life, and in a way, it is Kinoshita’s humorous Broken Drum pushed to its logical, and very non-humorous, extreme. Nakajima is the owner of a steel business that he built from nothing (though the war probably helped) and he expects to be the traditional head of the family. When he decides that he should sell up everything and take the family to Brazil because he thinks that will be a safe place after the bombs start dropping, he expects the family to fall in line, no matter how each might personally feel. But the kids, now adults themselves, have put down their own roots in modern Tokyo. They have no interest in leaving, much less going back to the poverty of a family farm in a foreign country. They decide to fight back.

This is a new Japan, where father no longer makes all the decisions for everyone. Nakajima is naturally outraged, even at times becoming violent, but the kids do not buckle under, nor do they try to humor him. When argument doesn’t work, they try to get him declared insane, ousted completely from the company, and committed to a hospital. This leads them to another new social invention, the “family court,” presided over by Kurosawa’s ever dependable Takashi Shimura, who is actually a dentist in real life, not a lawyer. The “court” in practice is what Americans would now call a family counsellor, trying in the traditional Japanese way to reach a consensus. But Nakajima can not accept a consensus or a compromise. Not only is he trying to save the family from nuclear extinction, but he is also trying to save his position as the traditional father and leader of the family. Added to this is the feeling that, since he built a successful business, he must know better than anyone else about everything.

These factors lead to one of Kurosawa’s most complex movies, though told in a very straight-forward manner. It also leads to one of Mifune’s most complex and daring performances as Nakajima. But — and it is a very big but —  Mifune is thirty years too young for the role. We spend far too much of the movie looking at his heavy makeup, fine for the stage but ludicrous on the big screen, which makes it difficult to pay attention to the movie itself. It is very easy to believe that someone like Mifune could build a business empire, and it is traumatizing to see all that energy and authority and charisma humiliated and abandoned. But it feels like it is all “performance” rather than a real characterization. Shimura would have been more “believable” in the role, but far less interesting to watch, a better movie but at the same time a much duller one. Such is the nature of real stardom and charisma that it can destroy a movie as well as lift it above itself. Watching this I can wish Mifune and Kurosawa had managed to make up their disagreements when it came time for Ran, much as I admire Tatsuya Nakadai,  both in that role and in his overall career. It is a pity of film that, unlike the stage, we can not see two great actors in the same role.

Nevertheless, this is a Kurosawa movie with Mifune, so it is never dull. And as a picture of a particular moment in Japanese history, it is an important social document. It should also be noted that it was a document that the Japanese public were not much interested in seeing. It was a failure at the box office, despite high critical ratings.