The neighborhood is Tokyo, but it might as well be a giant puddle of poison. At the center of the city is a filthy, bubbling, disease-infested pond, sort of like the Bog of Eternal Stench. It looks like a bombed-out crater from the war, burping with disease, farting with bacteria, teeming with garbage, bile, cancer and corruption. Stare into this festering crater long enough and your eyes will start to sting with postwar despair, toxifying you into a gangster. The pond, you see, is a mirror of a very sick Japanese society, an extension of the rotten moral state of the yakuza, the influence of organized crime, of black markets, of hoodlum codes, and of the ill-felt, lingering presence of Americanization under U.S. military Occupation. 

There’s a relationship between the noxious pool and the characters in this story sick enough to stare into it. Sickness, as it turns out, is what the doctor and gangster share, each diseased in their own personal way, defeated by a condition of kyodatsu (war exhaustion). The gangster is inflicted by a self-destructive lifestyle, rooted in violence, extortion and intimidation. He’s a danger to himself and others, a loose cannon brooding for control yet strangely seeking reform. The doctor fights a different battle, against a different kind of disease: alcoholism. Getting drunk might be the only outlet he has to quell the creeping sense of despair, born from anything between the gangsters he hates, the war his country lost, to the poisonous pond that reminds him of how corrupt the postwar climate has become. 

Both the doctor and the gangster are irreparable enemies, each fighting what the other is yet strangely needing what the other has. The doctor needs the sick, he needs to fight the disease in others, to cure them. He fights against the sick gangster as though he’s fighting against a younger version of himself. “This gangster,” he says, “he reminds me of myself when I was young. He acts tough but he is lonely inside. And he cannot kill that feeling.” The gangster, on the other hand, needs his health, he needs the doctor to heal his tuberculosis, but he fights against the doctor as if trying to flex, or perhaps display some code of honor, known only to the criminal yakuza.

Complex inverses start to emerge. The doctor sees a spiritual malady in the gangster beyond his physical (TB) malady, and for some reason decides to shepherd the brute into shedding his gangster costume. His motivations are unclear however: Is he helping the gangster out of a genuine desire to do good? Is this an act of self-redemption? Does the gangster’s health somehow correlate to the doctor’s personal salvation? Kurosawa keeps these questions ambiguous, locking the doctor-patient relationship into an existential reading perhaps similar to Jacob wrestling the angel. 

Gangster: “You are really pretty nasty.”

Doctor: “No. I’m here out of kindness. I’m a sort of angel.”

Gangster: “A dirty, nasty angel.”

Doctor: “Oh, you think that angels are nice and clean and pretty? They’re not. They’re just like me.”

What a strange pair, these two. Each plays adversarial angel to the other, attacking and being attacked in a way that brings out their personalities and forms a candid brotherhood. It’s traumatic for both, but it’s also a shared bonding experience that keeps them tightly drawn to each other. By lingering around the doctor, the gangster slowly starts to identify with his own failures and wasted living, as if hoping that his spiritual malaise—felt through relentless fear, anger and exhaustion as a gangster—will be reformed by the intense wrestle. Ironically, the gangster initially deals with these revelations by physically assaulting the doctor, the one who diagnosed his own corrupt condition. His illness angers him, but it also acts as the catalyst he needs to confront himself. Facing up to his illness will mean fighting a representation of himself, someone who isn’t trying to help him, like the doctor, but instead someone driving him further into the world of gangsterism—a former boss. An act of self-immolation during an epic Jackson Pollock paint fight reveals an interesting reverse: By confronting the lead crime lord, the gangster isn’t just confronting his own weakness, he’s confronting the image of his former self through a system that enabled his own oppression. 

The gangster is fighting another gangster, fighting himself, and in doing so, he’s fighting against everything rotten about his life and seeking salvation. Kurosawa doesn’t let the gangster win, at least not in any traditional way that would allow him to become the hero. Instead, the gangster ultimately becomes something other. He becomes that which is granted only to those who wrestle with angels, who struggle against the complex, noir-lit shades of light and shadow. In the words of Ritchie, the gangster “has become something else, an avenging angel, out to vindicate himself, for himself, anonymously, with no hope of being understood.”

Kurosawa Ranked