JAPANESE FILMS

Postwar Kurosawa: Rashomon

My first encounter with the film “Rashomon” was almost thirty years ago, when I was still a teenager in the local city in the western part of Japan. The story was a familiar one: “Rashomon” and “Yabu no Naka (In the Grove)”, two Ryunosuke Akutagawa’s short novels on which the film is based on, were required reading materials for high school students back then. Since I had known the story already, I was not at all surprised about the premise of the film. What I was surprised at was the familiarity of the scenery. Nightmares, a millennium ago The story …

 
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Postwar Kurosawa: Scandal

Between Furrows The man I met at Komagata-ya (local bar/izaka-ya) created the character of Hiruta. Not me. Akira Kurosawa In his autobiography, Kurosawa confessed he could not stop writing lines after lines for Hiruta’s character. As Kurosawa develops the details out of the promising synopsis on yellow journalism, the character of Hiruta becomes more vivid, more morally defunct, even more pathetic, and more real. After the release of the film “Scandal”, his memory suddenly flashed back to the scene he had forgotten, the night he had met this man. That was when Kurosawa was still a young assistant director, drinking …

 
JAPANESE FILMS

Postwar Kurosawa: The Stray Dog

Noise in suburb and city Two detectives on hot trail of the suspect: Detective Sato, a seasoned detective who knows what it takes to solve a crime. Detective Murakami, a rookie driven by a sense of guilt because his Colt Automatic was stolen and used in the attempted armed robbery. They walk around all over the city immersed in heatwave, meeting shady characters, asking lots of questions. At the end of the day, Sato takes the rookie to his home in a quiet suburb. No urban vulgarities trespasses the sanctuary of family here. Over glasses of beer, they talk about …