Will to Live (1999): Cast & Plot

On a somber trek to Mount Kamuriki, Rentaro Mikuni as Yasukichi confronts a painful piece of cultural memory—the ubasute legend, a cruel tradition in which aging parents were left to die by their children on a remote mountain. The journey anchors the film in a fragile space between myth and lived experience, as Yasukichi grapples with aging, responsibility, and the fragility of family bonds. The narrative threads between present-day events and a paired, book-embedded story about a seventy-year-old widow named Okoma who prepares to follow that same path, its tale presented in stark black-and-white interludes that echo memory and folklore, creating a dialog between personal history and collective myth.