Translate this Article...
I have never read Susan Sontag�s Illness as Metaphor, nor have I read its companion piece, AIDS and its Metaphors, and this is not out of any hostility towards Sontag, whom I have always held in very high esteem, but rather because I simply haven�t gotten around to it. Nonetheless, for the purpose of my discussion of Akira Kurosawa�s Drunken Angel (1948), I�m going to act as if I have, because I suspect I�ll probably be borrowing some of her ideas on the subject.
Drunken Angel is Kurosawa�s first film with Toshiro Mifune, who, even at this early stage of his career appears on-screen as a full-fledged master, mature and complete. He plays a yakuza name of Matsunaga, who is becoming progressively more and more ill with the tuberculosis he refuses to acknowledge that he has. Trying desperately to save him is the cantankerous and alcoholic slum doctor, Sanada (played by a gruff and bearded Takashi Shimura, another Kurosawa regular). Now, doctor and patient hate each other on a surface-level, and their meetings rarely end without them coming to blows; but Sanada sees in Matsunaga traces of humanity that he wants to save, while Matsunaga, although he has trouble admitting it, really, really, doesn�t want to die.
Let�s start with the reality of tuberculosis before we address the metaphorical role that it plays in this movie. As Matsunaga�s disease progresses, his face become drawn, hollow, and increasingly haunted. A shadow of death has settled over him, and his eyes betray a deep, existential horror that his thuggish image and reputation could never disclose. Stripped of its metaphors, tuberculosis means weakness, suffering, and death. Rarely have I seen an actor convey this reality with the same horrified gaze as Mifune wears in this movie (he will summon it up again for Kurosawa�s 1955 film of nuclear paranoia, I Live in Fear: Record of a Living Being).Now, as Dr. Sanada repeats throughout the movie, tuberculosis is certainly treatable, if one is willing to admit that one has it and if one pursues treatment accordingly. But Matsunaga is bound by the impassiveness and cruelty that his role as a prominent yakuza imposes on him. His position within the feudalistic structure of the yakuza makes it difficult for him to admit his weakness and mortality. And this is where it gets a bit metaphorical: Matsunaga repeatedly defends what he believes to be the yakuza virtues of honor and loyalty and maintaining �face,� and as he tries to live these virtues within the post-WWII Tokyo slum that he calls home, it becomes evident that these feudal values of the yakuza were also the feudal values of militaristic, imperial Japan. And Matsunaga is sick with them, and just as the tuberculosis is poisoning his body, so did these corrupt values poison and eventually destroy the Japanese empire. Sanada sums it up neatly: �Human sacrifice has gone out of style. Japanese make too many pointless sacrifices.� Elsewhere in the film, Sanada, while discussing treatment of tuberculosis with an uncooperative Matsunaga, says viciously, �You could die and be cremated. That would kill the tuberculosis.� And it would seem that that is how Japanese militarism was �cured,� and from the death of imperial Japan rose the prosperous, peaceful, and democratic Japan of the post-war era. However, that�s just a metaphor. In Matsunaga�s case�in the reality of tuberculosis�if he dies, he will merely be dead. There will be no rebirth for him.
