Table of Contents

Acknowledgements ix
Introduction 1
I Japanese Cinema in Search of a Discipline 7
II The Films of Kurosawa Akira 51
Kurosawa Criticism and the Name of the Author 53
Sanshiro Sugata 69
The Most Beautiful 81
Sanshiro Sagata, Part 2 89
The Men Who Tread on the Tiger’s Tail 93
No Regrets for Our Youth 114
One Wonderful Sunday 135
Drunken Angel 138
The Quiet Duel 140
Stray Dog 147
Scandal 179
Rashomon 182
The Idiot 190
Ikiru 194
Seven Samurai 205
Record of a Living Being 246
Throne of Blood 250
The Lower Depths 270
The Hidden Fortress 272
The Bad Sleep Well 274
Yojimbo 289
Sanjuro 293
High and Low 303
Red Beard 332
Dodeskaden 334
Dersu Uzala 344
Kagemusha 348
Ran 355
Dreams 359
Rhapsody in August 364
Madadayo 372
Epilogue 375
Notes 379
Filmography 433
Bibliography 451
Index 471

Promotional Information

This work will become not only the newly definitive study of Kurosawa, but will redefine the field of Japanese cinema studies, particularly as the field exists in the west.

About the Author

Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto is Associate Professor of Japanese, Cinema, and Comparative Literature at the University of Iowa.

Reviews

"Yoshimoto's Kurosawa is destined to take its place along with the most important achievements of cinema studies, which is to say that it is a book about something more than cinema itself. Yet it offers a stimulating, running commentary on the films that makes one want to see them all over again, while also offering a new theory of auteurship as collective negotiation. This is a grand performance sustained by a voice of rare authority."--Fredric Jameson [*Note: We'll need to run this edit by him.] "A tour-de-force reading of Kurosawa's films. Yoshimoto adds greatly to current Kurasawa scholarship and to situating the construct 'Japanese Cinema' in a way that it has not been situated before."--[PERMISSION PENDING] [RR, PP, edited] E. Ann Kaplan, author of Looking for the Other: Feminism and the Imperial Gaze"[Yoshimoto's] primary concern, as an academic working in the United States, is with western criticism of Japanese cinema as it moved from humanism to structuralism, to post-structuralism and to postmodernism. His erudite and near-comprehensive book is about what we non-Japanese understand in the work of Kurosawa. He finds much of our understanding tainted because it views Japan and Japanese cinema in an exotic light... Yoshimoto's aim is to build up a detailed case that westerners do not understand Kurosawa. If we think we do, he implies, we are wrong, because we know so little of Japanese culture...He tries to help us by giving a full account of the context in which Kurosawa worked and in which his films were made. It is something of a crash course: cinema, theatre, society, politics, history and so on. His knowledge is encyclopedic and his scholarship impressive."--Mamoun Hassan, Times Higher Education Supplement, December 15 2000