It has been 25 years for the reason that dying of the good movie director Akira Kurosawa, but curiosity in his work stays sturdy, and contemporary insights proceed to floor. Two welcome additions to the vital research on this famend director are Olga V. Solovieva’s “The Russian Kurosawa” and David A. Conrad’s “Akira Kurosawa and Fashionable Japan.” Each writers fruitfully discover how Kurosawa’s movies, together with samurai epics, mirror the situation of Japan once they have been made.
Solovieva, a comparative literature specialist on the College of Chicago, analyses Kurosawa’s obsession with Russia, evident in a number of movies, his autobiography and lots of feedback made over time. The Russia that entranced Kurosawa was not the expansionary state that fought a brutal struggle with Japan in 1904-05, not to mention the Soviet Union of Lenin and Stalin. It was not a spot in any respect, however a humane literary tradition constructed by a outstanding sequence of writers and thinkers.
