Global Dialogues

The curious thing is that such revelations reverberate in our solitude too. We are brothered even when we are alone. Certain images and lines emerge. For example, the moment when Kanji Watanabe, the middle-aged protagonist of Akira Kurosawa’s 1952 film, Ikiru, a sensitive man who had somehow surrendered himself to a monotonous and meaningless government career, discovers one day that he is terminally ill and has but months to live. The journey he charts from that moment on is punctuated by encounters with sibling spirits. First among them is the fellow sufferer in the doctor’s waiting room, who, somehow by the very shape of Watanabe, is drawn to him. He comes close, rests his chin on his cane and the two men lock eyes. 

"Your stomach?" the stranger asks. 

Watanabe nods and gives a soft smile. From here the stranger asks no more questions. Instead, he says, "My stomach is bad too. They say it’s chronic." 

Watanabe nods politely and blinks. 

"These days," the man goes on, smiling weakly, "I hardly feel alive unless my stomach hurts." 

Watanabe points back the self-same regretful smile. But in the silence that follows, something about his aspect tells us that he suspects that his fate had brought him to this man who will now help translate the language and signs of this new terrain. The nurse calls another patient, who follows her out. Watanabe and his companion watch the man leave. Then the stranger draws closer.

 "The man who just went in," he whispers, getting up to sit beside Watanabe.

Watanabe picks up his coat and hat to make room for the man, and places them on his lap, as though at that moment he knows that a storm is pending. 

"His doctors told him he has an ulcer, but I am sure it’s stomach cancer." 

Watanabe is still composed, nods in earnest. 

"Has to be," the man says and Watanabe bows in agreement. "And stomach cancer is particularly a death sentence," the man goes on, and then he explains how, given the hopelessness of the situation, the doctor always prefers to tell the patient that it’s just a mild ulcer. 

So far, the ground beneath Watanabe’s feet is firm. But as the man lists the symptoms, the "dull, heavy pain. Frequent unpleasant burping. A dry tongue," Watanabe’s face grows sombre. He edges away, continuing to hold on to his coat and hat, squeezing them between his fingers. Without standing fully upright, he moves himself to the opposite seat to conceal his face, which Kurosawa entrusts us with in a very intimate framing. We see behind him his companion, that bearer of bad news, who, paradoxically, just at the moment that Watanabe gives him his back, understands what he has done, that his companion, the one he had been passing the time with, is dying and, what’s more, learnt it from him. 

It’s a strange moment, whereby the most crucial information arrives obliquely, through a sibling spirit, a fellow patient, going through the same predicament. This pattern continues in Ikiru, and comes to be one of the implications in the title of the film—which, in Japanese, means "to live." This is when Watanabe, the man who had up to then allowed himself to live as though hypnotized by routine, comes to the surface for air. It’s a brutal awakening. 

One of the things Kurosawa is thinking about here is whether to live—to live any sort of life—is to be mirrored and companioned to the grave, that our conduct, how we deal with one another and with our desires and our fears and fates, is partly instructed by our companions and, whether we wish it to or not, is instructive to them too, that to live willingly is to locate and practice our connections to others. Ikiru is a paradoxical tale, a story of a man who comes alive only when he realizes that he is about to die. It sheds a light on human fraternity, but also, I believe, on the fellowship between life and death. 

 Another image that comes to mind when I think about the subject of human fraternity, is a strange and entirely unexpected moment from Robert Louis Stevenson’s novel Kidnapped. David Balfour, the 17-year-old hero, and his unwanted shipmates—for he’s the kidnapped of the title—are pulling in warily toward land. They spot "a great sea-going ship at anchor." Soon enough, it becomes clear to them that it is not one of the King’s cruisers, something they had feared, nor a merchandise ship, as "not only her decks, but the sea-beach also, were quite black with people… Yet nearer, and there began to come to our ears a great sound of mourning, the people on board and those on the shore crying and lamenting one to another so as to pierce the heart." 

They realize then that it’s an emigrant ship bound for America. David then tells us how he and his shipmates, 

The appearance of this scene in an otherwise adventure novel, is unexpected and deeply moving. There is no judgement. The offered, and then echoed, song is both an expression of sympathy and solidarity, but also a parting gift for the exiles—who are yet to be exiled, or who have just become so by the mere fact of boarding the ship—for their friends and family on shore and, it turns out, for David Balfour too, who although is not leaving home, is kidnapped and searching for a way back to his life and liberty. 

It makes me think that part of what occurs in our exercise of fraternal feeling is the work of the spirit reaching to widen its unhindered correspondence to those around us. Perhaps this is why, when asked to think about fraternity, I thought about solitude. It is in moments of aloneness, when we are severed from those we love, that we glimpse the depth of our fraternity: our need to imagine others and be, in turn, imagined by them, that we are constantly involved in a dynamic existence with those we live and work with, those we pass by and those we have not yet encountered.

Hisham Matar, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, explores themes of exile, identity, and belonging.