Will to Live / Ikitai (1999)

Made in his mid-eighties, Kaneto Shindo’s Last Note had taken a look at aging for performing artists, with the last screen appearances of Nobuko Otowa and Haruko Sugimura. Now at age 87, Shindo takes a look at aging portrayed by a man, with Rentaro Mikuni, one of the last of the major postwar male stars to still be active,* as the aging Yasukichi.

Since his wife had died in a nursing home, he has felt guilty about abandoning her, though she insisted that she go to the home. After a trip to Mt. Otsube, the mountain depicted in the earlier Ballad of Narayama movies (spelled Nariyama on the train station sign) where he hears a roar, he becomes obsessed with the Narayama story which he sees first as a parallel to his abandonment of his wife in her senility and then as a potential parallel to his own situation. As he reads the book, we see re-enactments of the Narayama story in black & white (with Hideko Yoshida (who first appeared in Oshima’s Sing a Song of Sex) as the aged mother).

However, this is not shown as an old man’s rage against the dark. Shindo turns it into a serio-comic look at aging itself as well as a look at the collapse of the traditional family. Yasukichi is still strong and his mind is reasonably solid but he has lost control of his bowels and bladder and often falls asleep on the floor. He likes to go drinking at the bar of a woman with whom he once had an affair, but she throws him out after he messes on the bar stool and floor. He comes back again, swearing he wears diapers now, but the smell makes her throw him out again, leading to another trip to the hospital. Yet he is still strong enough to carry his grown daughter on his back.

We don’t know for sure what Yasukichi did before retirement, but the house is far from a poor man’s home; it even has stained glass walls depicting nude females between rooms. The elderly in Narayama are taken to the mountain because of poverty. In all the versions, including this one, the mother insists on going though her son wants her to stay. For Yasukichi, it is his daughter Tokuko (Shinobu Otake) that wants to get rid of him.

She is manic-depressive or at least she claims to be – she has a habit of announcing beforehand when she is going to be manic or depressed. However, we do see her at some kind of arts and crafts therapy group, so some of her instability is real. She also has a habit of falling in love with men she never speaks to and is still a virgin, which she blames on having to take care of her parents. The family itself has broken down. His son, who by tradition should take care of his father, appears during one of the old man’s visits to the hospital to introduce his fiancée then tell his father that he never wants to see him again and will not even let him see the grandchild they are expecting.

We also see a glimpse of an all-too-familiar problem for the aging in a society that finds itself with an older generation surviving for much longer than in the past. Just as the bar owner keeps throwing Yasukichi out, so does the hospital. As shown here, the government insurance, like American Medicare, has limits on how long it will pay and there is thus tremendous pressure from the hospital owners to get the patients out before the insurance runs out.

Though we have heard mention of retirement homes in earlier movies, this is the first time the movies I have seen have gone inside one. It is very modern and light-filled, with chair exercises and the inevitable karaoke sessions, so it is not a terrifying, short-staffed, or stuffy place. Still, it is not home.

This is serious business, yet as I said earlier Shindo adopts a tone that mixes comedy with the seriousness. Even within the Narayama scenes, for example, the village elder is a deaf-mute (Masahiko Tsugawa) who gives orders in sign language and funny faces that can only be interpreted by his young wife. We first see the old mother with a group of old men who are drawing lots, but they are not lots for who is sent to the mountain but for a young widow (it is a very small and very isolated village). She “wins” and dances around because she can now provide her eldest son with a wife and thus is free to go to the mountain, but the second son will just have to wait for some other man to die to get his wife. The trip up the mountain is shown just as seriously as in any of the other versions, with the addition that the son tries to return for his mother and sees a wolf decide to leave her alone as she prays so calmly in the snow.

Yasukichi eventually decides to admit himself to the home but appears for the occasion in a top hat and a tail coat with several medals. Otake’s moods are varied and unpredictable, even as she announces them, so they become serious and comic simultaneously. (We can see why Shindo would come to see her as his replacement for the irreplaceable Nobuko Otowa in all his later movies.)

If we try to judge it as another retelling of Narayama, the two sections don’t quite fit together. Tokuko, after all, comes to bring him home from the retirement community. The real tie between Yasukichi’s story and the Narayama tale is the crows who gather, waiting for someone to die so they can eat the flesh off the bones. Just as they gather over all of Narayama and follow the old woman up the mountain, they gather around Yasukichi’s house and even at last come inside to watch him sleep. And it is a flurry of dead crow feathers rather than of snow that greets Yasukichi at home.

At the time this was made, Shindo was the oldest man still screenwriting, much less directing movies in Japan – possibly in the world — a dozen years older than Imamura and Okamoto, who each were able to make another later movie, and twenty years older than Oshima, whose last movie appeared in the same year. Thus, it is tempting to see the movie as autobiographical, but at the time it was made, Shindo was reportedly living alone and still as mobile as Yasukichi and was also on very good terms with his son, who produced the movie.

At an age when every new work might be the last, Shindo struck out in a new direction, much more comic than any of his earlier movies, even Edo Porn, but which would be followed by the out-right farce of Owl.  To borrow a phrase, Who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him? It is an energetic and eccentric movie, full of life.

* Mifune, Nakamura, and Katsu all died in 1997, each after some years of inactivity. Of the fifties generation of male stars, only Nakadai and Mikuni were still active, with Mikuni continuing in the popular Tsuribaka nisshi series until 2009 and playing his last film role just before his death at 90 in 2013, while Nakadai’s last known appearance was in 2020, following a modern-dress Lear film in 2017.  Of the women, most of whom first appeared on screen at a much younger age, Keiko Kishi, Mariko Okada, and Ayako Wakao were all still active until 2015 or later, and Machiko Kyo had essentially retired by 1980, making one or two TV re-appearances per decade until 2000.