Songbook

To the Tune of Mortality: “The Gondola Song” in Ikiru

Features—

Aug 17, 2021

It will always figure for me as an interval of eerily suspended time: not only a formative moviegoing experience but a jolt of awareness when the line between screen and life dissolved. In a dimly lit Tokyo cabaret the pianist has wrapped up a clattering boogie-woogie number amid an explosion of firecrackers, and is asking for requests. The drunk old guy in the overcoat and the newly purchased bowler hat murmurs the opening line of a song. The pianist agrees with a look of amusement—“That love song from back in the nineteen teens?”—and taking another swig of beer pounds out a slow waltz tune, making it sound like the antiquated accompaniment for a silent movie. (We’ve already heard the melody briefly over the main titles, but the aftertaste of its fragile lyricism barely withstands the film’s opening shot: an X-ray of a cancerous stomach tumor, identified as such by a dry and matter-of-fact narrator.)

Through a beaded curtain couples are seen moving onto the dance floor, while the old man, offscreen, begins to sing in a muffled voice dredged up from a nearly inaccessible depth of regret: “Life is brief; fall in love, maidens, before the crimson bloom fades from your lips . . .” The couples stop and turn in the direction the voice is coming from. The cabaret dancer flirtatiously curled up on the old man’s lap detaches herself and begins to back away. The pianist looks at him quizzically while keeping up his mechanical accompaniment. The old man continues to sing. As he begins the second and final verse, the camera stays fixed on his face. There are tears in his eyes. He stares straight ahead. For a moment everything else has ceased to exist.

We are, at this point, some forty-five minutes into Akira Kurosawa’s Ikiru (1952). In that time there has not been a pause. We have been introduced to this old man, Kanji Watanabe, Section Chief of the Public Affairs Division, and received a quick exposition of the red tape and circumlocution of the bureaucratic system of which he is a functionary, a system designed to frustrate the needs of ordinary citizens—in this case a group of poor women seeking to reclaim a toxically polluted bit of urban wasteland and turn it into a children’s playground. The narrator has already informed us that Watanabe has only months to live, and before long he knows it himself. In the role of Watanabe, Takashi Shimura incarnates a man who has already retreated so far into himself as to be barely present—his shoulders hunched, his eyes cast down—and after grasping his prognosis he is scarcely able to speak. The soundtrack goes silent while he walks home from the clinic until, as he steps off the curb, the cacophony of traffic noise kicks in at full and extended blast.

Face to face with his son and daughter-in-law, who are primarily concerned with the assets in his pension fund, he can blurt out nothing of what is happening to him. Music adds to the disconnection: through the wall of his bedroom, while he goes through his automatic motions of hanging up clothes, arranging the futon, taking off his wristwatch, he can hear his daughter-in-law in the next room listen to the American pop singer Toni Arden singing one of the year’s big hits: “Too Young.” He looks at a photograph of his dead wife. He buries himself under the covers and sobs.

Never a drinker, he begins to drink, and in a bar meets up with a long-faced, grandiose novelist who professes to find something Christlike in his terminal illness, and volunteers to serve as a Mephistopheles guiding him through the Tokyo night world that Watanabe has never experienced. The journey is as much sonic as visual. In a pachinko parlor we are assaulted by background hubbub, the clinking of pachinko balls, the busy electronic beeps marking their passage. The roar of a café is further amped up by a blaring trombone section that gets in the face of the befuddled Watanabe. As he and his guide push through the teeming streets, the constantly changing angles and perspectives are matched by fragments of music that shift and overlap at each step. The relative respite of an intimate bar where they make a brief stopover is signaled by another foreign record, Josephine Baker singing “J’ai deux amours.”

It is the soundtrack of an escape from unbearable silence, reaching a peak with the intimate chaos of the cabaret, rolling along in an atmosphere of booze, cigarette smoke, and sloppy exuberance, as a dancer performs an energetic, angular jazz hop while Watanabe drunkenly staggers after her to retrieve the bowler hat she has appropriated. He seems barely to notice when she flirtatiously drapes herself over his slumped form. But when the pianist calls for requests he does not hesitate. To ask for this particular song is the most assertive thing he has done since getting the bad news.

His selection is “The Gondola Song,” an exotically titled ballad of seduction from another era (introduced as “Life Is Brief” in the English subtitles), written in 1915 for a stage version of Ivan Turgenev’s novel On the Eve. The lyrics, with their imagery of evanescent beauty and living for the moment, were written by the tanka poet Isamu Yoshii. The music was one of the early hit compositions of the prolific composer Shimpei Nakayama, credited with fusing Japanese and Western popular music into a hybrid idiom. The song carries a particular tragic freight, having been written for Sumako Matsui, the actress who galvanized the Japanese theater world with her performance in Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, and whose very public adulterous love affair with the innovative stage director Hogetsu Shimamura culminated in her suicide following his death in the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918. (In 1947 Kinuyo Tanaka played her in Kenji Mizoguchi’s The Love of the Actress Sumako.) For Watanabe it is an echo of the time of his youth, the Taisho era (1912–1926), with its aura of new possibilities and freedoms—before the Great Depression, before the war, before the American occupation.

The choice of the old song amuses the pianist, but the atmosphere changes very quickly as Watanabe begins to sing. Kurosawa wanted the effect to be “otherworldly,” and Shimura—an accomplished singer who was featured in the 1939 musical film Singing Lovebirds—summons a voice from deep underneath. He establishes a zone of silence in which his annihilating grief, his sense of losing a life never even lived, can finally be acknowledged. Yet while he sings, for as long as he can sustain it, he is completely alive. It’s as if he has found his way to a ritual act of connection with the unseen, a thread of sound by which all that other noise of traffic and roaring crowds and imported music is canceled out. The song is a precarious way station between the world Watanabe is already departing from and the glistening absence—the “no tomorrow”—toward which the song’s words point. His singing is directed entirely inward, hovering just above the level of audibility. Stunned into silence, the other customers back off in awe or unease as if from a forbidden portal.

To the Tune of Mortality: “The Gondola Song” in Ikiru

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