Ikiru begins with an aging civil service employee's discovery that he has a fatal case of gastric cancer. The narrative twists through some five months, ending just after his death. The plot and characters are common place and simple. The film is an unpretentious Japanese story of a no more momentous event than the quiet death of an old man who has spent most of his life rubber-stamping documents no one cares about. Yet Ikiru is a powerful film, well worth the cost of a ticket and the time away from the books.

The discovery of his illness comes very close to crushing Watanabe, the old man. Death so appalls him that to escape the thought of it he must drink, although he realizes alcohol will only worsen his condition. He tries to tell his son and daughter-in-law what is wrong with him, but they completely misunderstand his first few remarks and prevent him from explaining his predicament. His son's aloofness is a severe blow; for Watanabe, widowed soon after his marriage, has devoted his life to his son.

Sinking lower and lower, Watanabe finally meets a back novelist in a bar. He overhears a writer asking where to buy sleeping pills, and offers the stranger an unopened bottle of his own. To die slowly is difficult and painful for Watanabe, but the sudden death of an over-dose is impossible.

With suicide eliminated, Watanabe swings back toward an increased desire for life. He asks the novelist to help him spend some money he has saved, and together they head off for the city's night spots.

But the evening is unsatisfactory. Instead of happiness, Watanabe finds only crowding masses of humanity, as in a huge dance hall so packed that the couples can barely move. He ends the night thoroughly drunk.

The writer and his conventional sources of entertainment cannot provide the answers Watanabe needs. The next person he turns to, however, indirectly suggests a different recourse: activity and achievement. A young girl who has worked under him in city hall but finds the occupation boring comes to his house to ask him to sign her retirement papers. Watanabe becomes acquainted with her, and it is her future employment--in a toy factory--which suggests that he may still further the happiness of others. He returns to the city hall and takes up the first possible project, a proposed park in a slum district. The rest of the movie concerns his struggle to save his park from the bureaucratic lethargy which has enchained him for thirty years.

His work on the park is unrelenting and determined: one of his subordinates unwittingly supplies an explanation of the park's importance to Watanabe by comparing the old man and his project to a father watching his children.

Ikiru describes a death occuring over the space of five months. But literally translated, the title means "to live." Watanabe's last day would be the final entry in a plot summary, but skillful use of flashback makes possible a switch between the presentations of his death and the struggle for the park, Ikiru's last scene is not Watanabe dead, but Watanabe watching children in the park he has forced through city hall. It is a very moving ending to a superbly acted and photographed film.