2025 Readings 108

 I've been watching a lot of Japanese cinema lately, and not simply all the films in my Japanese film noir class. Anyway, I was thinking of watching my favorite Akira Kurosawa film, Ikiru, again. It's a film that I always want to show in class, but, being a Kurosawa film, it's much too long. It's influenced by Leo Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilyich, which made me realize that I hadn't reread that classic in way too long a time. If you haven't read it (and shame on you if you haven't), it's essentially a novella (especially by Tolstoy standards), and on Audible it was only two and a half hours. It's message, that of a dying man, if only for about fifteen minutes about two hours before he dies, realizing how foolish his life decisions had been. completely still resonates today: "Ivan Ilyich's life had been most simple and most ordinary and therefore most terrible." Highly recommended.