is a 1952 Japanese film directed and co-written by
Akira Kurosawa. The film examines the struggles of a minor
Tokyo bureaucrat and his final quest for meaning. The script was partly inspired by
Leo Tolstoy's 1886 novella
The Death of Ivan Ilyich, although the plots are not similar beyond the common theme of a bureaucrat struggling with a terminal illness. It stars
Takashi Shimura as Kanji Watanabe.