Richie begins his analysis of Ikiru by going over Kanji Watanabe’s, the protagonist’s, actions in the film and explains how they relate to Watanabe’s search for affirmation, for life.  He explains how Watanabe searches for solace in self-pity, family, pleasure, his job and devotion to someone (his female coworker), all of which do not work in giving him solace.  He ends up finding solace and meaning in devotion to something, an idea, which is embodied by the park he wants to build in a poor Tokyo neighborhood.
Richie’s analysis of Ikiru focuses on the translation of the title, Ikiru, which is “to live.”  Richie touches on Kurosawa’s fondness for Dostoevsky, an existentialist, in order to frame Ikiru as a story of a man trying to validate his existence.  As Watanabe “layer after layer peeled away,”  we realize that it is Watanabe’s actions that make him exist both while he is alive and posthumously.  Richie explains how Kurosawa highlights the “irony of the film,”  by splitting the film into two parts: one told by an omniscient narrator while Watanabe is alive and one told by the attendees at his wake.  The men at the wake, mostly Watanabe’s co-workers, misrepresent Watanabe’s actions at first, but when they finally begin to understand what Watanabe accomplished and why, they are too drunk to follow through with anything.  Only one of the office workers takes Watanabe’s actions to heart, but as Kurosawa shows us, after being reprimanded, “he disappears behind his piles of papers as though he were being buried alive.”
An interesting element that Richie brings up in his analysis is the music used in the film.  The classical piece used in the opening, is known as a ricercare, which, Richie explains, “means to search for again, to hunt for, or to follow.”   While Richie acknowledges that there is nothing to suggest whether this was intentional or not, “this, after all, is what the film is about.”   Watanabe’s search for meaning in his life is the impetus behind the action in Ikiru.  Perhaps because of this, Richie’s analysis seems correct, because we all, as humans, search for meaning in our life and hope that our actions can speak for themselves both during our lives and after we are deceased.
    Richie’s final conclusion (which is actually a quote by Richard Brown), that “the meaning of [Watanabe’s] life is what he commits the meaning of his life to be,”  is a very positive take on the film, but the films beauty comes from the fact that it can be read many ways.  Richie harms his argument though, by using lengthy quotations from the film, which are not always completely relevant and ending his analysis with a description of the film by Kurosawa himself which does little to enhance Richie’s argument and only serves to show Kurosawa’s unhappiness with both the film’s creation and the final product.  The negativity of Kurosawa’s own analysis of his film puts a damper on the positive reading by Richie and the sense one gets after seeing the film that he or she has just seen one of the greatest films of all time.

The title of the third chapter in Prince’s book is “Willpower Can Cure,” and its opening paragraphs deal with postwar Japan and its need to cure its ills through sheer willpower (which it did).  The title also has relevance to Ikiru, because it is Watanabe’s willpower that gets the park built and gives meaning to his life (in his own eyes).    Prince begins his analysis of Ikiru talking about the nature of the “heroes of Kurosawa’s films,”  Watanabe included, and how their “lessons in responsible living are filtered through, altered, and sometimes deformed by the social order.”   Prince begins this analysis comparing the heroic character of Ikiru, Watanabe, to characters in other Kurosawa films, but then analyzes the film on its own.  Prince says of Kurosawa, “In Ikiru, he is concerned to contain and to limit the viewer’s empathic response so that it may yield enlightenment rather than catharsis.”   Prince then proves his hypothesis by analyzing various scenes in the film and how Kurosawa’s use of editing creates a narrative style that limits the viewers’ empathy with Watanabe.  Prince explains his theory that “the basic structure of the film” means “Watanabe will be manifest as a textual gap that the narrative tries to fill in and reclaim by inventing hypotheses for his behavior,”  with the term “narrative cavity.”   An example of a narrative cavity is the scene following Watanabe nearly getting hit by a car, where we expect to see Watanabe returning, but instead see his son and wife, which Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto comments on in his book.   Prince tracks the plot sequence of the film and explains various meanings and themes through Kurosawa’s use of camera angles and imagery.  He compares the “office scenes [where] human beings are contained and confined by an overwhelming and alienating environment” to Michelangelo Antonioni’s later films.   Prince frames Ikiru as the culmination of his earlier works, such as Scandal, Drunken Angel, and Stray Dog in its “new and more extensive bounding of the social challenges with which the forms of the earlier films grappled.”