The season may impose it, but the comparison’s worth making anyway. Ikiru, Akira Kurosawa’s moving 1952 masterpiece, is, among other things, an alternate version of Frank Capra’s Christmas classic, It’s a Wonderful Life. The ideology is different (Ikiru represents the reformist idealism of postwar Japan, just as It’s a Wonderful Life expresses postwar America’s longing for continuity with the past), but the similarities are striking. Above all, both films hinge on a crucial moment of vision, in which a man confronts his own annihilation as a possibility. But Capra’s movie flirts with the dread of nonexistence only to banish it from its realm. In Ikiru, death is embraced.

Near the beginning of Ikiru, Watanabe (Takashi Shimura), a section chief in a city government, learns that he will soon die of cancer. He resolves to seek value in his wasted life. This second chance is the equivalent of that granted to Capra’s George Bailey, who’s tempted to throw away his existence as worthless and then saved by the sight of what his small town would be like had he never been born. But in Ikiru, everything we see, are told, or can infer about Watanabe’s career corroborates his own judgment on it: for 30 years he’s been like a dead person.

For his co-workers, his son, and his son’s wife, he barely exists: he’s already a ghost, a "mummy" — the nickname given him by a co-worker (Miki Odagiri). The death sentence he receives at the hospital merely confirms it. And for the first days after this sentence, Watanabe lives more than ever as if he were already dead. He vanishes from his office, leaving behind an empty workspace surrounded by accumulating paperwork (for which no one is waiting too impatiently, it seems). He tries but fails to make contact with the son for whom, in his own mind, he has sacrificed everything. We see Watanabe paralyzed, withdrawn from the world: frozen on the stairs leading to his son’s room, huddled weeping under a blanket.

His wild night out with a chance acquaintance ends in an exhausted stalemate with the unfamiliar world of good times. He seeks the company of the girl from the office, trying to buy her youth; she’s frightened and repelled by his need. But she inadvertently gives him the hint — "Do something" — that makes him finally come to life.

At this point — a little more than halfway into the film — Kurosawa takes Watanabe away from us, by a narrative ellipsis whose audacity astonishes no matter how many times you’ve seen the film. "Five months later," the narrator says, "the hero of this story died." It’s crucial that once Watanabe chooses the mission that will define his life (transforming an insalubrious lot into a children’s playground), we should lose direct knowledge of him. From that point on, everything we know of him will come through the reports of the people at his wake (in the second long section of the two-part film), and Watanabe will appear only in the short flashbacks illustrating what they tell of him.

Kurosawa’s strategy here is double. He asks whether Watanabe can serve as a positive value not just through the consequences of his act, but in his example to his survivors (us included). And he suggests that the authentic life can’t be represented, that it’s deeply private. The tension between the representable and the private is the source of the immense pathos of Ikiru. It can be felt most strongly at moments when Kurosawa’s sentimentality — a word I see no point in avoiding — meets his love of striking visual contrast. In a nightclub filled with dancing young couples, Watanabe softly sings an old song called "Life Is So Short" while the camera, lingering behind a swaying beaded curtain, shows the dancers’ faces as they realize they’re in the presence of a deep sadness. Among Ikiru’s other indelible images: the mute excitement with which Watanabe, seeing the vacant lot for the first time during a rain shower, steps out from under the umbrellas of his entourage to explore it. Or the electric close-up of him drinking from a pan of water whose reflections flash on his cheek.

All these moments rely on the slow, sad, and amazed face of the marvelous Takashi Shimura. His Watanabe is a sublime creation, around whom Kurosawa constructs a film of commensurate beauty and strength.