Article abstract: Throughout his long career as one of the greatest directors in the history of the

cinema, Kurosawa explored a humane and profound vision of existence with a brilliantly
inventive use of the art of film.

Early Life

Akira Kurosawa was the youngest of seven children born to a family that recognized its rural
roots but prided itself on being Edokko, or third-generation dwellers in Tokyo. In Kurosawa’s
youth, Japanese country life was slow and peaceful and the culture of the city was just beginning
to absorb ideas from the outside world. Kurosawa’s father was a graduate of a school for training
army officers and was a severe disciplinarian who valued the varieties of experience that a man
might encounter; his devotion to the ancient code of the samurai, Bushido, was an important
influence on his son, both as a model and as a rigid pattern against which to react. Kurosawa was
also deeply impressed with his mother’s quiet strength and iron will and by his darkly sardonic
and brilliantly perceptive elder brother Heigo, whose suicide in 1933 led him to become
“impatient with my own aimlessness.”

As a student in primary and secondary school, Kurosawa concentrated on the art and literature
courses that he liked and ignored his required studies in math and science. He treasured teachers
who taught with imagination and creativity, despised those who operated by rote, substituted
reckless behavior for a lack of physical dexterity, and failed every aspect of military training he
was required to take. Although his father was a noted figure in army society, he was not a
military fanatic; he taught Kurosawa both calligraphy and poetry as a child and did not complain
when Kurosawa decided to become a painter after graduation from middle school in 1927.

When Kurosawa was rejected by the army in 1930 as physically unfit, he joined several leftist
political organizations, as much for the fascination of new experience as for his genuine
sympathy for the people in Tokyo slums, and while working as a courier for underground
political organizations, he spent his leisure time among friends of his brother, who had become a
noted narrator of silent films. Kurosawa was gradually becoming involved in the avant-garde
world of theatrical and artistic creativity, but his own career had not progressed at all. After his
brother’s suicide, he worked as a commercial artist (“illustrations of the correct way to cut giant
radishes”) to earn money to buy canvases and paints, but he was becoming anxious about his
inability to find a real calling. In 1935, he noticed an advertisement announcing openings for
assistant directors at the newly established studio Photo Chemical Laboratory (PCL). Kurosawa
had been an avid filmgoer since elementary school; his test essay on the fundamental
deficiencies of Japanese films was accepted, and he joined the studio. Although he found his first
assignment routine and trivial, his father persuaded him to stay on, saying that anything
Kurosawa tried “would be worth the experience.” His next assignment was with the director
Kajirō Yamamoto, “the best teacher of my entire life,” and his life’s work had begun.

Life’s Work

Kurosawa joined PCL immediately after the “2-26 Incident” of February, 1936, in which young
army-officer extremists assassinated cabinet ministers whose policies they found too moderate.
Kurosawa recalled that the studio was a true “dream factory” in those days, making films “as
carefree as a song about strolling through fragrant blossoms.” Kurosawa was assigned to the
group headed by his mentor, “Yama-san,” advancing from third assistant director to chief
assistant director, concentrating on editing and dubbing from 1937 to 1941, as PCL grew into the
huge Tōhō company, the single largest film studio in Japan. While the studio tried to avoid
political issues, the severity of the censors led to increasing tension between the creative artists
and the wartime government. When Kurosawa turned to screenwriting after spending a year with
the second unit on Uma (1941; Horses), his second effort, “Shizuka nari” (all is quiet), won the
Nihon Eiga contest for best scenario but was not filmed, nor were his next two scripts, which
were “buried forever by the Interior Ministry censorship bureau,” a group Kurosawa viewed as
“mentally deranged.” Two of Kurosawa’s lesser scripts, about the aircraft industry and boy
aviators, were filmed by others in 1942, but, when he read the story of a rowdy young judo
expert, he had an intuition that “This is it.” After convincing the studio to buy rights, he wrote
the script for Sugata Sanshirō (1943; Sanshiro Sugata) in one sitting. The censors regarded his
initial effort as a director as too “British-American,” but Yasujiro Ozu argued for its release, and
although some critics believed that it was too complicated, the film was a success.

Realizing that he would not be permitted to make any films that did not contribute to the war
effort but reluctant to support a government that he despised and alert enough so that, by 1943, it
was clear to him that Japan was going to be defeated, Kurosawa wrote a script about a group of
women working in a precision optics factory. Ichiban utsukushiku (1944; The Most Beautiful)
was intended to illuminate the beautiful spirit (kokoro) of the young women struggling under
trying conditions. This film introduced Takashi Shimura, an outstanding actor who went on to
work with Kurosawa in many subsequent films.

Between 1945 and 1950 Kurosawa made nine films. Some of these were clearly apprentice
works, but several—including Yoidore tenshi (1948; Drunken Angel) and Nora-inu (1949; Stray
Dog)—show his increasing mastery and retain their interest. Drunken Angel is also notable as the
first of many Kurosawa films to feature the great actor Toshiro Mifune. Later in the same year
that saw the release of the relatively weak film Shubun (1950; Scandal), which marks the end of
this period, Kurosawa completed the film that first brought him international recognition.

Working with a cast and crew he knew and trusted, Kurosawa adapted a story about an incident
in a forest in eleventh century Japan, told from four points of view. The theme, according to
Kurosawa’s explanation to a somewhat befuddled cast, was that “human beings are unable to be
honest with themselves about themselves.” In a rare fusion of superb cinematography,
exceptional music, inspired acting, and a perfect location coalescing through a director’s
guidance, Rashomon (1950) delighted its participants and won the Grand Prix at the Venice Film
Festival, a most prestigious award at the time, as well as the American Academy Award for Best
Foreign Language Film. Kurosawa’s next project was Hakuchi (1951; The Idiot), based on the
novel by Fyodor Dostoevski. The film was more than four hours long in its original version and
was a commercial failure in all of its released forms. Kurosawa clashed frequently with the
studio about its production and remarked in retrospect on the film’s failure, “One should be
brave enough to risk this kind of ‘mistake.’” According to Donald Richie, “Without the trials,
disappointments, mistakes and uncertainties of The Idiot,” the films that followed, among them
some of the true masterpieces of cinematic art in this century, “might not have appeared at all.”

Beginning with Ikiru (1952), Kurosawa reached his productive prime. Now in the middle years
and conscious of his mortality (“Sometimes I think of my death . . . of ceasing to be”), he shows
an anonymous clerk—a cipher, a brick in a huge wall—who is told that he has six months to live.
In his remaining time, the clerk becomes intensely aware of the value of life, escaping from the
bureaucratic prison that bedevils modern Japan. Ikiru is a compassionate affirmation of
existence, still contemporary and tremendously moving decades after its production, and it was
both a commercial and critical success, Kurosawa’s first real triumph in Japan. It was followed
by an even greater success, Shichinin no samurai (1954; The Seven Samurai), which Richie calls
“perhaps the best Japanese film ever made”—a judgment with which many critics have
concurred.

The Seven Samurai is a penetrating examination of the old samurai code as well as an epic
action-film in the grand style of the American Western. With the insight accumulated from his
own experience as the son of a soldier combined with his knowledge of Japanese history,
Kurosawa explores the nuances and complexities of self-expression and self-submission
embodied in the warrior’s code, rescuing the true samurai spirit from its debasement in numerous
Japanese exploitation films. The temporal glory of the warrior is presented in contrast to the
eternal grandeur of farmers struggling through the testing cycles of the seasons, and although the
film is one of the most dramatically and visually exciting ever made, it is also a marvelous,
detailed study of character and society. It was the most expensive production attempted by Tōhō
to that time, and it took more than a year to make.

Continuing to alternate between modern and period work, Kurosawa next turned to a theme that
had been tormenting Japan since atom bombs had been dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The nuclear tests of 1954 and the resulting fallout on Japanese islands led to
Kurosawa’s Ikimono no kiroku (1955; I Live in Fear; also known as Record of a Living Being), a
film about an industrialist with two separate families by wife and mistress who is being driven
insane by nuclear phobia and wants to move all of his dependents to Brazil—theoretically out of
danger. The film is sprawling and emotional, but Kurosawa put so much into it that he said at its
completion, “When the last judgment comes upon us, we could stand up and account for our past
lives by saying proudly: ‘We are the men who made Ikimono no kiroku.’”

Working steadily, Kurosawa then directed Kumonosu-jo (1957; Throne of Blood), his adaptation
of Macbeth (1606) and possibly the best visual correlative to a Shakespeare play ever filmed.
The supernatural elements, the psychology of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, the mood of violence
and the extraordinary ending are highlights of a powerful, gripping production. After three more
films in rapid succession, Kurosawa made one of his most popular works, the vastly
entertaining Yojimbo (1961).

Another homage to the Western, but with a twist, it is the story of a man who cleans up a corrupt
town; unlike a typical American lawman, however, he is cynical, amoral, and convulsively
funny. Mifune at his best played the wandering, disenfranchised ex-samurai and then extended
the conception in a demonstration of what a real sequel can be in Sanjuro (1962). Here the
protagonist is ten years older as well as wider, deeper, broader, and stranger; his singular stylistic
gestures now become bizarre expressions of eccentricity. The aging samurai is a man out of
place and time who still grudgingly maintains a set of realistic principles that structure his
actions.

Returning to the present, Kurosawa directed Tengoku to jigoku (1963; High and Low), an
incisive examination of life in upper- and lower-class sections of modern Yokohama, presented
in the form of a detective story. Then, in the culmination of his greatest period of productivity, he
worked with Mifune for the last time in Akahige (1965; Red Beard). Set at the end of the
Tokugawa period, it is the story of a young apprentice physician who learns how to become a
real doctor (and a real man) through his training in a rural clinic with an experienced older
physician known as Red Beard. Embodying the essential core of Kurosawa’s philosophy, Red
Beard has a kind of rage for good but is fully realistic about the evil in human nature. His anger
helps him to avoid cynicism and inspires the young doctor to become a man worthy of the
profession.

After filming Akahige, Kurosawa observed that “a cycle of some sort has concluded,” and he
began to work less frequently. He did not make another film until Dodesukaden (1970), a story
of slum dwellers in the modern era told in episodic form. The film is a sincere but somewhat
diffuse effort, lacking the energy and transcendent vision of Kurosawa’s best work. It was his
first color film, but, aside from some striking individual scenes, there is no real sense of a
coordinated palate. The commercial failure of Dodesukaden and his problems with the American
producers of Tora! Tora! Tora! (1970), who hired him to work on the Japanese sequences of the
attack on Pearl Harbor, drove Kurosawa to despondency and a suicide attempt at the age of
sixty-one. In Japanese culture, an artist’s suicide in his sixties is an acknowledgment of declining
powers and an homage to his craft, but Kurosawa was probably driven more by personal
frustration at the difficulty of getting financing for his work. Consequently, he accepted a
Mosfilm project to film Dersu Uzala (1975), set in the Siberian wilderness. The film was almost
more of an exploration of landscape than a study of character, but it showed Kurosawa’s
increasing facility with color.

The real indication of Kurosawa’s enduring power as a filmmaker was his direction
of Kagemusha (1980; Kagemusha: The Shadow Warrior), a film with the epic sweep of his finest
period studies, the character penetration of his most compelling work, and a real mastery of color
cinematography. The funding for the production was raised by the American directors Francis
Coppola and George Lucas. Although the film ends on a bleak, even desolate note, its scenes are
alive with passion and its effect is ultimately of the world of men viewed from the perspective of
time and history, neither judgmental nor falsely optimistic. This philosophical position was
continued in Ran (1985), a rather loose adaptation of the King Lear legend, replete with violence,
strife, treachery, confusion, and death. The clan of rulers is wiped out by the film’s end, but other
rulers arrive to replace them; life goes on.

Continuing to work as a filmmaker in his late seventies, Kurosawa concluded the 1980’s with a
nine-episode film based on some of the central images of his lifetime, tentatively entitled “Akira
Kurosawa’s Dreams.” The film was financed by Steven Spielberg and George Lucas and is a
kind of lament for what Kurosawa calls the loss of human goodness. “I am nostalgic for a good
environment and good hearts,” he said in describing his motivation. In 1990, Kurosawa was
awarded the Academy Award for Lifetime Achievement.

Summary

Akira Kurosawa introduced the Western world to the full richness of Japanese film and, in turn,
to the beginning of an understanding of the range and complexity of Japanese history and
culture; at the same time, he introduced the Japanese people to a deeper understanding of their
own traditions and heritage. Through his inventive mastery of all the elements of filmmaking, he
commented on the central moral issues of modern times and examined the eternal questions of
the mystery of existence for all times. “I think of the earth as my home,” he said, and like all
great artists, he tried to celebrate the richness of life on that home for all human beings who can
appreciate its vast gifts. At the same time, he understood the contradictory forces within human
nature which often make that home an uninhabitable hell and tried to dramatize the importance
of recognizing reality and overcoming illusion as a crucial step in the process of reconciling
human beings to the tragic grandeur of life. Like William Shakespeare, one of his own masters,
Kurosawa dealt with the largest questions humanity must confront but never forgot that the
traditional elements of narrative, character, and language are the fundamental blocks upon which
any serious artistic statement must be built.

Bibliography

Braudy, Leo, and Morris Dickstein, eds. Great Film Directors: A Critical Anthology. New York:
Oxford University Press, 1978. This volume contains four essays on Kurosawa, including one by
Akira Iwasaki which offers a commentary on Kurosawa’s work from the perspective of a
Japanese critic.

Desser, David. The Samurai Films of Akira Kurosawa. Ann Arbor, Mich.: U.M.I. Research
Press, 1983. An informative if somewhat academic examination of the Japanese cultural history
which underlies the samurai film, including a detailed discussion of Kurosawa’s work in this
area as well as a consideration of the influence of Kurosawa’s films on both Japanese and
American filmmakers.

Erens, Patricia. Akira Kurosawa: A Guide to References and Resources. Boston: G. K. Hall,
1979. While the biographical background and survey of Kurosawa’s work are rather pedestrian,
the synopses of the films themselves and the list of articles about Kurosawa are thorough and
accurate. A useful resource.

Kurosawa, Akira. Something Like an Autobiography. Translated by Audie E. Bock. New York:
Alfred A. Knopf, 1982. An extremely revealing, candid, and analytical account of the director’s
life up to the release of Rashomon in 1950. Ably translated, it is interesting and highly readable
and provides much information about the author as well as the Japanese film industry and about
Japan in the decades before World War II.
Mellen, Joan. Voices from the Japanese Cinema. New York: Liveright, 1975. Includes an
overview of Kurosawa’s work by an expert on Japanese films and a good interview with the
director himself.

Mellen, Joan. The Waves at Genji’s Door: Japan Through Its Cinema. New York: Pantheon
Books, 1976. Covers many of Kurosawa’s important films and includes an essay on
“Kurosawa’s women,” examining one of the more controversial aspects of the director’s work.

Richie, Donald. The Films of Akira Kurosawa. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1965,
rev. ed. 1984. Indispensable for the student of Kurosawa’s work, and one of the finest books ever
written about any film artist. Richie provides detailed discussion of each film, combined with
extensive background information, many illustrations, and a filmography.

His subsequent films, Akira Kurosawa's Dreams in 1990, which harked back to his early years as
a painter, Rhapsody in August and Madadayo never reached the critical or popular success
of Ran.

Though he often diverted the conversation when asked about his approach to filmmaking, Mr.
Kurosawa frequently described his attitude toward art in similar terms. "To be an artist," he once
said, "means never to avert one's eyes."

Mr. Kurosawa also once described a trip he made with his brother, Heigo, through the ruins of
Tokyo after a massive earthquake in 1923. More than 140,000 people died in the fires that
followed the quake. But as the pair moved through the ruins, Mr. Kurosawa said, his brother
insisted that the young Akira look closely at the charred corpses.

"If you shut your eyes to a frightening sight, you end up being frightened," Akira remembered
Heigo telling him. "If you look at everything straight on, there is nothing to be afraid of."
[Below, Prince gives a detailed summary of the progression of themes in Kurosawa's film career.
He shows how the sequences in the film Dreams revisits the subjects of earlier works and reflects
changes in Kurosawa's philosophy.]

Dreams is Kurosawa's twenty-eighth film and is, in every respect, a work of the director's late
period. It represents a last and perhaps final permutation of his visual style, offers an exploration
of the moral, psychological, and social significance of the dream-work, and marks a turning
point in the five-year production cycles that have marked Kurosawa's most recent films.
Consistent with every film since Red Beard (1965), Dreams was in gestation for a period of four
to five years, with Kurosawa beginning work on the screenplay in 1986. Now, however,
Kurosawa has already embarked upon his next film, Rhapsody in August, dealing with a
grandmother, who has been asked to travel to Hawaii to visit a long lost brother who left Japan
after the bombing of Nagasaki and is now seriously ill. This is the first time since 1965 that
Kurosawa has been engaged on two productions back to back. (Furthermore, Rhapsody in
August is the first Kurosawa production to be financed entirely by a Japanese film studio
since Dodes'ka-den, 1970.)

Dreams is not a narrative but a collection of eight episodes which visualize and dramatize a
series of dreams that Kurosawa claims to have had since youth, and the film continues the
revisionist project of his late works. Beginning with Dodes'ka-den in 1970, each of Kurosawa's
last five films has stood as a reconsideration and critique of the politically and socially
committed earlier works. The cultural, social, and personal imperatives for an engaged mode of
filmmaking which animated Kurosawa's career up through Red Beard (1965) have been
progressively dismantled by these subsequent films. The dialectic between the rebellious
individual and society has collapsed as have Kurosawa's hopes for the future. Before
exploring Dreams in detail, it will be helpful to clarify how and why this revisionist project
developed and the ways that it has skewed the formal and ideological emphasis of the earlier
work.

As in the work of his favored author, Dostoevsky, Kurosawa has long been fascinated with the
role that fantasy and hallucination play in human life, especially in helping bind the threads of
lives torn by hopelessness, despair, and poverty. In One Wonderful Sunday (1947), for example,
the despair of a young couple wandering amid the rubble of post-war Japan is alleviated by their
dreams of opening, one day, a coffee shop of their own. At the end of the film, Kurosawa invests
their fantasies with his own fervid conviction in their emotional and psychological integrity. To
amuse his depressed girlfriend, the young man conjures the first movement of Schubert's
Unfinished Symphony. As he conducts an imaginary orchestra, the symphony itself is heard on
the soundtrack as the young man's fantasies inflect, and are validated by, the very forms of the
film. In Scandal (1950), the tubercular daughter of the corrupt lawyer Hiruta (Takashi Shimura)
alleviates her suffering by escaping into a dream world where she is healthy. Kurosawa's most
elaborate and extensive exploration of the world of dreams, of course, occurs in The Lower
Depths (1957) and Dodes'ka-den. Both films focus upon the bleak lives of slum dwellers living
as outcasts. Excluded from society, the slum denizens escape into a heated mental world that is
viewed ambivalently, as a course of comfort, balm for the ravaged spirit, and as a means of
escape that leads to suicide or, alternatively, madness.

The blandishments and seductive power of dreams were carefully contextualized and limited by
Kurosawa's insistence that his protagonists resolutely face the bleakness and oppression of social
reality and, by facing it, struggle to reverse and overcome it. Watanabe, the dying hero
of Ikiru (1952), attempts to escape into the world of liquor and sensory pleasure during one
hallucinatory night on the town, but he must reject these forms of escape on his journey toward
enlightenment and social commitment. Kurosawa shared with Dostoevsky a sensitivity to the
ambiguous gifts of the dream world, springing as they did from the ruminations of the isolated
consciousness. Dostoevsky had written, "Frequently reality produces an onerous impression, one
hostile to the dreamer's heart, and he hastens to withdraw into his own inviolable golden noon….
Imperceptibly the talent for real life begins to be deadened within him." In this passage,
Dostoevsky clearly indicates both the charm of the dream world and its relationship to onerous
reality, its function as an escape from the unbearable. Throughout much of his career, Kurosawa
certainly shared this ambivalence because he never permitted his heroes to indulge in the
comforts of fantasy. Instead, a sober and clear-eyed confrontation with social ills is the ethical
prescription for post-war Japan dramatized by the narratives of Kurosawa's mature films, but
especially by that period of intense post-war political and social commitment begun with No
Regrets for Our Youth (1946) and lasting until Ikiru, including in the interval One Wonderful
Sunday, Drunken Angel (1948), The Quiet Duel (1949), Stray Dog (1949), and Scandal.

Kurosawa's previous ambivalence about the dream world is most apparent in the central political
and artistic metaphor that recurs throughout his earlier films. This metaphor is a reworking of a
commandment that Kurosawa received from his brother Heigo in 1923, following the Great
Kanto Earthquake. Viewing the destruction, confronted with huge mountains of decaying
corpses, Kurosawa recalls being profoundly disturbed and terrified. His brother Heigo, however,
offered him a more enlightened attitude and one which was to stay with him for the remainder of
his life. Heigo told Kurosawa, "If you shut your eyes to a frightening sight, you end up being
frightened. If you look at everything straight on, there is nothing to be afraid of." Throughout the
autobiography, Heigo functions as an enlightened master for Akira, assuming the role of a
spiritual guide and teacher. It is clear that Kurosawa was deeply impressed by his brother's
unconventional manner of living, one that seemed to burst the bounds of normal social life.
Indeed, his brother may be a source for all of the Kurosawa heroes who do the same. Heigo's
commandment was internalized by Kurosawa and emerged in the films as an important center of
visual and narrative meaning. In Drunken Angel, the doctor Sanada operates upon the gangster
Matsunaga without anesthetic. Brutally clamping open the wound in Matsunaga's hand, Sanada
forcibly extracts a bullet, refusing to give Matsunaga an anesthetic despite his entreaties. In Red
Beard, the older doctor Niide forces the young intern Yasumoto to witness a particularly bloody
operation and, later in the film, compels him to watch a dying man's last moments. In both cases,
Yasumoto is explicitly forbidden to look away. In The Bad Sleep Well (1960), the avenger Nishi
carries with him a photograph of his father's bloody and battered corpse at which he regularly
forces himself to look in order to stoke his hatred against his father's killers. Kurosawa himself
has remarked that being an artist means never averting one's eyes, and this has been the central
behavioral code for all of his heroes, as well as his general prescription for post-war Japan: a
direct confrontation with social illness and oppression and the fortitude necessary to work it
through. The linear narratives of his films embody a model of commitment, setting his heroes
upon spiritual and personal journeys ending in confrontations with social ills such as crime,
poverty, disease, class injustice, corporate corruption, and state nuclear terror. The dream world
was allocated as a privilege for the peripheral characters, not the heroes, as a balm for those for
whom the heroic quest was forever inaccessible. Foreclosed from following the heroic example,
the peripheral characters were permitted, instead, the escape into hallucinatory reverie.

The dream world, then, stood in dialectical tension to the heroic narratives of Kurosawa's finest
work and to the general social commitment that informed his film-making until 1965. That
commitment was tied inextricably to the challenges of the immediate post-war years, to the
general economic and social collapse and the political models of individualism and democracy
which the Occupation authorities were emphasizing. Kurosawa's post-war films are explicit
attempts to dramatize the cultural and psychological dilemmas that the country faced in the
aftermath of militarism. As critic Tadao Sato notes, Kurosawa's work suggested that "Japan's
recovery from defeat did not have to be only an economic one." Kurosawa himself has remarked
upon his conviction that social reform must be predicated upon a new mode of living and a new
social self, a more individualized one than existed in traditional culture. "I believed at that time
[immediately following the Second World War] that for Japan to recover it was necessary to
place a high value on the self. I still believe this." In his autobiography, Kurosawa reiterated his
commitment. "I felt that without the establishment of the self as a positive value there could be
no freedom and no democracy."

For Kurosawa, then, the strong, rebellious individual existing in a critical and oppositional
relationship with society would provide the vehicle for social analysis and political filmmaking
and could function as a symbolic example for generations of post-war Japanese for whom
Kurosawa has always insisted he primarily makes his films. The development of Kurosawa's
career from the late 1940s onward is an attempt to apply this model of social analysis to the
challenges of post-war cultural development. Eventually, however, beset by ideological and
social contradictions issuing from Kurosawa's dogged insistence upon applying an individualistic
mode of analysis to social problems that are structural in nature and not really susceptible to the
solutions of an individual hero (e.g., corporate corruption as treated in The Bad Steep Well,
disparities of wealth and class antagonism as treated in High and Low (1963), the problems of
nuclear weapons production as treated in Record of a Living Being (1955), Kurosawa's ethically
and politically committed cinematic project steadily broke apart until, finally, in Red
Beard Kurosawa sought refuge in an ahistorical and transcendental model of history and
time. Red Beard marks both the end of Kurosawa's mature period of committed filmmaking and
the pivotal moment at which that structure of commitment turns into the renunciation of politics
and the modern world characteristic of the films that followed.

As the dialectic to the heroic mode of Kurosawa's cinema and its underlying social engagement,
the world of dreams and illusions accordingly emerged with great power and prominence in the
films that came after Red Beard. As noted, in Dodes'ka-den, Kurosawa explicitly details the
fantasies and hopeful delusions which keep alive the spark of humanity in the slum dwellers.
In Dersu Uzala(1975), the enlightened master Dersu exists only in the nostalgic ruminations of
the explorer Arseniev because Dersu is already dead when the film's narrative commences.
In Kagemusha (1980), Kurosawa studies the commitment of the Takeda clan to sustaining the
illusion that their leader still lives. This illusion is necessary for the perpetuation of the clan itself
and, with the revelation of the death of Takeda Shingen, the clan marches to its own extinction.
Now, with Dreams, Kurosawa for the first time gives the dream world such prominence that it
completely overwhelms narrative itself and becomes the sole and only focus of an entire film.
This renewed emphasis must be seen as a symptom of Kurosawa's own intensifying renunciation
of politics, of the possibility for social reform, and of the willful and impetuous commitment to
social and cultural progress exemplified by his earlier film heroes.

Following his production of Ran (1985), a work of unrelieved pessimism in which Kurosawa
emphasized, as he did in Throne of Blood (1957), the inevitability of social disintegration and
human annihilation, Kurosawa explicitly indicated his shift away from a politically engaged
focus to a more contemplative if not philosophical one. "I believe that the world would not
change even if I made a direct statement: do this and do that. Moreover, the world will not
change unless we steadily change human nature itself and our very way of thinking. We have to
exorcize the essential evil in human nature, rather than presenting concrete solutions to problems
or directly depicting social problems." He added that he didn't think in these terms when he was
younger and that is why he could make such films then. "I have realized, however, that it does
not work. The world would not change." In place of a vanished politics, Kurosawa now
emphasizes the transcendental and ahistorical creativity of dreams. Dreams, he now believes, are
well-springs to the genius that lies within the brain and the heart of all human beings. A dream,
he says now, "is the fruit of pure and earnest human desire. I believe that a dream is an event
created in the uninhibited brain of a sleeping person, emanating from an earnest desire which is
hidden in the bottom of his heart while awake…. A human is a genius while dreaming."

As a transcription and adaptation of recurring dream memories, the emphasis upon nostalgia and
reverie entails a renewed exploration of the isolated consciousness. The problem now, however,
is that this isolated consciousness is Kurosawa's own. The isolation is certainly a product, in part,
of the production problems that have plagued his recent career, but it stems more deeply from his
own pessimism over the state of contemporary Japan and the modern world. The embrace of the
past, the celebration of traditional cultural virtues, and the renunciation of the modern age are at
their strongest in this film.

The first dream, "Sunshine Through the Rain," is an adaptation of a story that his mother used to
tell him about fox weddings that occur in dense forests during a rainstorm while the sun is out.
Kurosawa remarks, "I really believed that there were these fox weddings in that kind of weather.
My mother told me that if I ever saw one something terrible would happen to me." In his
screenplay, Kurosawa identifies the setting of this dream as his own home and the boy in the
dream as himself. "Now I have become a little child. As a boy of five, I stand beneath the roof of
the traditional Japanese gate in front of our house watching the rain." The set in the opening
scene is an exact reproduction of the house in which Kurosawa lived as a child, with the family
nameplate drawn by the artist Shusetsu Imai. Before he goes out to play, he is warned by his
mother about how dangerous it can be if he discovers a fox wedding in the woods. Naturally, the
boy goes to the woods where he discovers a procession of foxes. He is seen by them and runs
away. Returning home, he is told by his mother that she cannot let him in until he goes and begs
forgiveness from the foxes, lest they harm him. The dream ends with the boy setting out on a
journey, looking for the foxes. In the final image, he is walking away from the camera through a
field of brilliantly colored flowers beneath a huge rainbow.

Visually, the sequence draws upon some familiar features of Kurosawa's cinematic style. He
continues to rely upon his favored telephoto lenses so that the compositions all have the familiar
flattened and compressed space which have given Kurosawa's films such a unique look. As the
boy stands beneath the gate of his house, it is also the familiar Kurosawa rainfall—torrential,
relentless, and loud. Perfect continuity is maintained when Kurosawa cuts from the boy to shots
of his mother by the use of multiple cameras. As in his earlier films, Kurosawa is using two or
more cameras so that the cuts preserve a seamless flow of dramatic and temporal relationships.

In this episode, as in the others, however, Kurosawa avoids the marked visual angularity that has
characterized his best work. In previous films, for example, such as Drunken Angel, or most
notably Yojimbo (1961), and The Lower Depths, Kurosawa favored compositions stressing linear
tension. He liked to place the camera at a ninety-degree angle to the axis of a character's
movement or to the wall of a building. Only once in Dreams does Kurosawa emphasize this kind
of angularity, and it occurs in the first episode. When the mother refuses to allow the boy back
into the house after his return from the forest, Kurosawa sets his camera up so that its axis of
view forms a perpendicular with the wall of the gate in front of which the boy stands. The result
is a composition of marked frontality and foreshortening, both of which are qualities familiar
with Kurosawa's past work, and the extreme formalism of this particular composition recalls the
earlier shot in Sanshiro Suoata, Part II (1945), where Kurosawa framed Sanshiro and a brutal
American sailor tormenting a rickshaw boy as they stood parallel to a brick wall directly behind
them. Placing the camera at a right angle to the scene created a composition of marked frontality
and depth compression. While, in his earlier work, such compositions worked in tandem with the
telephoto lens to emphasize frontality and linearity as fundamental attributes of Kurosawa's style,
in Dreams only the emphasis upon the telephoto lens remains as a consistent feature.
Compositional angularity, which functioned in the earlier films as a signifier of visual and
dramatic tension, of the opposition between the reformist impulses of the hero and the resistance
of the social order, has been discarded in favor of more balanced and harmonious, static frames.

Montage cutting, too, has been largely discarded in Kurosawa's late films but, as with the angular
composition, some of the earlier style remains, as a kind of atrophying appendage. In earlier
films, Kurosawa's cutting was highly disjunctive. The shots would clash and bang together,
making Kurosawa, as Noël Burch has pointed out, the true heir of Eisenstein. The cutting
in Dreams, though, is considerably more placid. The images are joined with an emphasis upon
smoothness and harmony rather than rupture. As the young boy sets off on his journey to find the
foxes, however, Kurosawa cuts suddenly to a field of brilliant flowers, creating a montage of
color in the editing. The transition is not as disruptive and striking as his earlier methods of
cutting have been, but the effect is nonetheless similar, though isolated.
Finally, the other major attribute of Kurosawa's style, camera movement, is also greatly
minimized. In films such as Throne of Blood, Rashomon (1950), and Seven Samurai (1954),
Kurosawa executed tracking shots of a fluidity, grace, speed, and power unequaled by any other
director in the world cinema. As he has grown older, however, and his film style more
contemplative, the camera has tracked infrequently. As the young boy spies on the foxes in the
forest, Kurosawa moves the camera slightly to reframe his movements, but, rather than
developing an extended tracking sequence as in other films, here he repeatedly interrupts the
track by cutting to new camera set-ups. The result, consistent with his late film style, is a marked
de-emphasis upon movement in favor of the static frame.

These formal features typify the other dream episodes as well. The next, tilled "The Peach
Orchard," deals with the young Kurosawa surrogate following a girl to the back fields where a
large group of china dolls in the form of human beings are gathered upon a three-tiered hillside.
The dolls tell the boy that they will never again visit his home because his family has cut down
all of the peach trees. Confronted by the 60 human dolls consisting of five pairs of emperors and
empresses, ladies-in-waiting, musicians, courtiers, and servants, the young boy objects that he
loved the orchard in bloom and begins to cry because he will see it no more. Moved by his tears,
the dolls, who have introduced themselves as the spirits of the peach blossom, begin to dance and
to conjure the orchard for him once again in all of its beauty.

Filming the confrontation of the boy and the dolls, Kurosawa employs a telephoto lens so that
the three-tiered hillside becomes flattened into a single plane of space, and he intercuts shots of
the boy and the dolls using his familiar reverse-field cutting method, in which he crosses the
180-degree axis of action so that the visual field of each shot is the precise reverse of the one that
preceded. Eventually, however, the dance ends, the vision disappears, and the boy is left standing
in a desolate field surrounded by the mangled stumps of the peach trees. The boy wanders
through the field until he finds a single remaining bush. Its pretty blossoms are a nostalgic
reminder of the beauty lost forever from his life, as Kurosawa ends with a freeze frame of the
boy's face.

The qualities of isolation and loneliness are very strong in these first two dreams. "Sunshine
Through the Rain" ends with the young boy expelled from his home, setting out on a magical
and perhaps endless journey for forgiveness and atonement. In the second, the young boy is left
alone in a world bereft of traditional beauty because of the sins of ancestors. This sense that the
world has been deformed by preceding generations becomes even more explicitly marked in later
dreams dealing with the terrors of pollution and nuclear disaster.

The desolation and loss which are developed implicitly in the first two dreams are realized
explicitly in the third, titled "The Blizzard." This dream deals with a four-man mountaineering
team lost in a deadly blizzard. As they try to make their way back to camp, the howling winds
and driving snows begin to overwhelm them, and they succumb to fatigue and despair. As his
three companions collapse beneath the snow, their leader, the adult Kurosawa surrogate (played
here and in the remaining episodes by Akira Terao, who played Taro Takatora in Ran), animated
by a vestige of the willful individualism of Kurosawa's earlier heroes, pleads with them not to
give up hope, to continue on, and, above all, not to sink down into the snow and sleep because
there lies death. He, too, becomes fatigued, however, and, as he collapses into the snow, a snow
fairy descends and wraps him in a glittering blanket. As she does, Kurosawa switches to slow
motion and eliminates all naturalistic sound, replacing it with a vocal solo. It is apparent that the
snow fairy represents death wrapping him in her shroud, as this dream visualizes the extinction
of the self in an icy and empty world. This death or extinction of self, however, is not yet to be,
for the character struggles to rise even as the snow fairy grips him firmly and attempts to hold
him down. At last, however, she flies off and he gets to his feet as the storm breaks, and he
discovers that they are merely yards away from their base camp. The loneliness and isolation of
the first two dreams have given way to the death imagery of the third, which is chillingly
conjured even if it is refused at the last moment.

This preoccupation with death is placed into a historical and an artistic context in the next two
dreams. "The Tunnel" presents the adult Kurosawa surrogate as a survivor of World War II.
Walking through a dark, expressionist tunnel, he is greeted by another of those nasty Kurosawa
dogs, the kind that trotted out of the town in Yojimbo with a human hand in its mouth. Here, the
dog has a pack of hand grenades on its back and barks the sound of gunfire. Bypassing the dog,
the character emerges at the other end of the tunnel only to be greeted by the ghosts of the Third
Platoon which he commanded during the war. After a tearful confrontation, he urges them to
return to the past and to rest in peace.
This episode presents the war as a nightmarish experience that will not die and that has violently
wrenched the individual from the moorings of family, friends, and society. One of the privates,
Noguchi (Yoshitaka Zushi, who played Chobo in Red Beard and Rokuchan in Dodes'kaden)
looks at a light gleaming in the distance and murmurs that this is the home of his parents. He
knows they are even now awaiting his return, and he is overwhelmed with despair at his isolation
as a spirit from the world of home and family. The episode is not, strictly speaking, an
autobiographical one. Kurosawa did not serve as a commander during the war. In fact, he did not
see active service at the front at all. However, in his films and memoirs, the war is experienced
and portrayed very much as it is in this dream sequence, as a lingering national trauma. The war
and its aftermath haunts the landscapes and the characters of No Regrets for Our Youth, One
Wonderful Sunday, Drunken Angel, The Quiet Duel, and Stray Dog. Kurosawa has repeatedly
referred to Japan's period of militarism as a dark age, and he has written about his own
experiences as a filmmaker during that time with intense bitterness. He has described the
Japanese censors as "sniffing Dobermans" and as "beasts that exceed the power of the
imagination to conceive." He has likened life in Japan during the war as being like the inside of a
jail cell. "Being young in those times consisted of suppressing the sound of one's breathing in the
jail cell that was called the 'home front.'" With these perspectives in mind, this episode may
perhaps be understood as an anxiety dream about what might have happened had Kurosawa been
conscripted and sent to the front and as yet another indicator of the continuing legacy of the war
for Kurosawa and his cinema.

The death imagery that animates "The Tunnel" is placed in an aesthetic context in the following
episode, "Crows." Here, the surrogate wanders inside the paintings of Kurosawa's favored artist,
Vincent van Gogh, most notably, in van Gogh's painting "Wheat Field with Crows." This was the
final painting van Gogh completed before committing suicide, and, as such, it apparently
resonates with Kurosawa's own personal traumas, as when an earlier crisis in his life and art
drove Kurosawa to attempt suicide. When the surrogate encounters van Gogh (played by director
Martin Scorsese) inside the painting, he meets an artist totally committed to his work and
consumed by the will to create, much as Kurosawa is himself. Echoing the words of Watanabe
in Ikiru, anticipating his imminent death, van Gogh remarks, "I have to hurry, time is running
out, so little time for me to paint." He tells the Kurosawa surrogate, "I can't stand here wasting
my time talking to you," and he hurries off across the wheat field beyond an ascending flock of
crows. It is well known that Kurosawa, although training as a painter and maintaining throughout
his life an interest in painting, does not consider himself an especially talented one. As a young
man, he was able to make the transition to filmmaking, in part, because of this conviction that his
painting would always remain quite limited. There is something of this attitude in van Gogh's
abrupt dismissal of the Kurosawa surrogate. When van Gogh departs, the Kurosawa surrogate is
left to wander through the landscapes of van Gogh's paintings (in a sequence that features the
special effects work of George Lucas' Industrial Light and Magic). Clutching his painting tools
and wearing Kurosawa's trademark hat, the surrogate is trapped inside the images of this master
painter. Beyond the way it makes explicit Kurosawa's reverence and respect for van Gogh, this
episode clearly implies that, had he not elected the cinema as his chosen forum, Kurosawa might
have been lost as a minor talent in mediums not his own and that were already claimed by true
giants.

The remaining three dreams are all of a piece and are animated by Kurosawa's anxieties about
cultural and technological modernization. One of the most useful ways of understanding
Kurosawa's dialectical, conflict-ridden film style is as a visualization and symbolization of
profound cultural anxieties that were formative for Kurosawa and his generation. Born at the tail
end of the Meiji period and growing up during the succeeding Taisho era, Kurosawa has
visualized in his work the dilemmas and challenges of these periods, namely, the problem of
whether it was possible "to transplant Western industry and technology without adopting the
whole socio-political structure and value system of the West." Anxieties about whether Japan
could modernize while still remaining essentially Japan helped produce a cultural perception of
modernity in ambivalent and, at times, negative terms. Carol Gluck, for example, maintains that,
"the late Meiji rendition of modernity" as a potentially negative and divisive condition,
threatening to established traditions and social orders (e.g., breeding labor unrest, threatening the
peasantry's ties to the land) "was, until 1945, the authoritative one." Marius Jansen has pointed to
the ambiguities of modernization, noting that along with an abundance of material goods and an
improvement in living standards come other developments that are not strictly directed toward
"progress in the sense of better and happier lives…. Violence, uneasiness, and unhappiness have
everywhere been the companions of modernization processes. Everywhere there is a
consciousness of a loss of values, a search for reintegration with new groups."
In Kurosawa's films of the immediate post-war years, modernity brought with it the political
values of democracy and individualism, but it was also experienced through the imagery of
ghettoes, endemic poverty, nightclubs blaring raucous Western jazz, through corporate
corruption and the eclipse of the warrior ideal. In Dodes'ka-den, the wild, expressionistic color
design evokes not just a world of material and spiritual poverty, but also the terrors of pollution
and a poisoned environment. Dersu Uzala turns to the early part of the century to study the
natural man who exists outside of urban culture. Kagemusha and Ran both look back into Japan's
past and away from the modern period which Kurosawa finds so distressing.

In "Mt. Fuji in Red" Kurosawa evokes the disaster of a nuclear holocaust, as he had done in
rather different terms in Record of a Living Being. In this dream, a series of nuclear power plant
explosions cause even Mt. Fuji to begin a meltdown, and, as the terrified populace of Japan flees
to the sea, poisonous radioactive gases sweep over the tiny island nation. As one character
remarks, however, Japan is very small, and, bordered by the ocean, there is nowhere to escape.
The dream ends with the complete annihilation of the Japanese except for a few remaining
characters, including the Kurosawa surrogate who is last seen, as the dream ends, futilely trying
to beat back the advancing poisonous gases. In this dream, Kurosawa employs the visual rhetoric
of his friend Ishiro Honda, who served as a creative consultant on the film and who is better
known for his own series of Japanese science fiction films, such as Godzilla, Rodan, and Mothra.
The process photography and the shots of fleeing crowds recall similar sequences in Honda's
films, lending this dream a source of perhaps self-conscious visual humor.

The didactic tone of "Mt. Fuji in Red" carries over into the next dream, "The Weeping Demon,"
which is the weakest and most embarrassing of the entire film. This is a post-apocalyptic dream
in which the end of the world has apparently come, leaving only the Kurosawa surrogate to
survive. He wanders in search of the living, coping with loneliness, and encounters a single-
horned demon who takes him to a colony of dreams. They are writhing in pain in a pit filled with
bones and blood-red water. It transpires that the demons were all government, officials or
millionaires in previous lives, and they are now suffering through a kind of purgatory or hell.
The demon complains to the Kurosawa surrogate that nature has vanished from the earth, that
man has poisoned the environment with pollution and radioactivity, and the disfigurement of the
various demons is meant somehow as a reflection and embodiment of this destruction of the
earth. The camerawork is flat and uninteresting, and the images of giant, brightly-colored,
monstrous dandelions dotting the hillside, as well as the horned demons themselves, are an
insufficient visualization of the didactically expressed despair over the problems of pollution and
economic corruption which Kurosawa sees as inseparable from modernism.

The final dream, "The Village of the Waterfalls," evokes not the terrors of the present or the
future but rather the beauty and pleasures of a timeless, bucolic village presided over by a 103-
year-old man (played by Ozu-favorite Chishu Ryu). The Kurosawa surrogate wanders into the
village where he learns from the old man that no one uses electricity here so that the night will
remain dark as it should be, that firewood is only taken from trees that have already fallen in the
forest, and that everyone lives in harmony with the natural world. The old man warns the
Kurosawa surrogate that people today have lost touch with nature, and they will perish from
pollution, which has dirtied both the earth and the hearts of men. As the old man speaks, the
soundtrack is filled with the clean sound of running water from the stream, the rustle of leaves in
the wind, and the call of birds in the trees. Elsewhere, reflecting upon the sound of his own
childhood, Kurosawa has remarked that by contrast the noises of the modern world are
spiritually and emotionally impoverishing" … as I sit here and write about these childhood
sounds, the noises that assail my ears are the television, the heater and the sound truck offering
toilet paper in exchange for old newspapers; all are electrical sounds. Children of today probably
won't be able to fashion very rich memories from these sounds." In this passage from his
autobiography, Kurosawa expresses his own alienation from modern Japan through the aesthetics
of memory and sound.

Similar sentiments animate the final dream which is intended as an exercise in nostalgia.
Kurosawa has noted, "The theme here is nostalgia—nostalgia towards the loss of Mother Nature
and with it, the loss of the heart of mankind. Therefore, the images of nature in this sequence
must be extremely vivid. It must be so powerful that nature's energy must burst forth from the
screen." The "Village of the Watermills" is a timeless, mythical place of beneficence and beauty,
but, consistent with the sense of loss and isolation that suffuses the film, the Kurosawa surrogate
must leave it. As Kurosawa himself lives on through the dark age of modernity, his dream self,
significantly, is not permitted to remain behind in the village. Before he goes, however, one more
encounter with death must occur. The villagers celebrate a funeral with singing, dancing, and a
brass band. This time, death is not a lonely, terrible trauma in an icy and hostile world but is,
rather, the occasion for joy and celebration, song and dance. As the old man says, "Life here is
not hard. It is good to be alive. Living in harmony with nature makes a friend even of death." At
the end of this dream, the Kurosawa character leaves the village, but the camera remains behind.
As the credits roll, we gaze into the clear, pure waters of the village stream. The dreamer has
gone on, perhaps has even died, but the camera and the images remain in the village, in this place
of memory and joy.

Dreams is, in every sense, a work from the twilight of Kurosawa's career. It is of great interest
for those who know and have admired Kurosawa's work, though it is not a particularly
distinguished film by comparison with the major works that have preceded it. It offers a register
of Kurosawa's thoughts and emotional allegiances as he enters his eighties. The pictorialism of
the static frame and the overt theatricality of song and dance have replaced the earlier montage
style, and a valorization of inwardness and the imagination has overwhelmed a sophisticated
aesthetic engagement with the social world. Modernity for Kurosawa in this film is more than
ever a blight upon the future and upon Japan, the approach of death is keenly felt, experienced
alternately with dread and relief, and, in the wake of withdrawn political and social
commitments, the fidelity to one's muse remains as profound as ever. In a letter to his brother in
1888, van Gogh had written "Oh, my dear brother, sometimes I know so well what I want. I can
very well do without God both in my life and in my painting, but I cannot, ill as I am, do without
something which is greater than I, which is my life—the power to create." When all else is gone
or has been revealed as illusion, the need to create remains, unassailable as long as breath is
drawn. Kurosawa now works because he must, because his life is film and without it he has no
creative self. He has often remarked that he wants to die on the set while the camera is rolling,
and, in this late stage of his life, he shows every indication that he may do just that. In the
meantime, Dreams stands as a small coda to one man's life willingly given over to the beauties
and the power of cinema.

All of Akira Kurosawa's recent films are deeply tinged by motifs of death and destruction.
Both Kagemusha and Ran are tales of the destruction of the shogun's clan during the Sengoku
period, but in their repeated images of warriors endlessly facing death in meaningless battles,
there is a deep-rooted despair which transcends the special nature of that age. The very darkness
of these films forces us to wonder whether these dreams are not foretelling the destruction of
humanity itself. As expected, in Dreams, images of the end of the world and of the downfall of
humanity appear before us in concrete form. While two episodes hypothesize how the earth
might be after the destruction and pollution caused by The Bomb, at the same time, in this work
by a great master now past eighty, there are also several episodes of an unbelievable freshness
and innocence.

The contrast between these two kinds of scenes seems strange. It may be that adults who cannot
relinquish their selfish desire are doomed to self-destruction, but it seems that Kurosawa is also
naively asking why people who were once such pure children become like this as adults.

In Rhapsody in August, Kurosawa once again stands firmly on the side of children, and states
that there is hope if children can look reality in the face without flinching. One can't help but feel
that this is an excessively naive assertion: yet this is not a platitudinous sermon, but rather a
series of images replete with deep, touching emotions.

After a preview of Rhapsody in August in a leading Tokyo movie theater on March 14, 1991,
Kurosawa held a press conference in a separate venue. Instead of a discussion of the film, this
interview turned into a political debate. I wasn't at that gathering, but, according to some people
who were, non-Japanese reporters showered the director with harsh, critical questions. Kurosawa
answered each question sincerely, one by one, but the press conference ended without any sense
of mutual understanding.

The story of Rhapsody in August is as follows. One summer, four Japanese children from the city
go to spend the summer vacation at the home of their grandmother who lives in the country side
near Nagasaki. When this woman was a little girl, her older brother had emigrated to the United
States and later made his fortune in Hawaii. Suddenly a letter arrives from this brother (who has
realized that his younger sister is still alive), inviting her to come visit him in Hawaii. She has no
recollection of this brother and doesn't want to go to Hawaii, but she is persuaded by her sons
and grandchildren to go to Hawaii after August 9th. That date is the anniversary of the day the
atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki in 1945, and there is a memorial service every year for
victims of the bomb. The grandmother's husband died in the atomic blast, and the grandchildren
tell her to convey that information to her brother in Hawaii. As soon as he hears the news, her
nephew Clark (Richard Gere), the son of the older brother, comes to the village near Nagasaki.
He joins his aunt at the humble memorial service at the local temple, and then returns home.

The grandchildren hear about the atomic bomb from their grandmother, and go to the elementary
school grounds where their grandfather, a teacher, was killed. In this film, there is not even one
scene depicting the tragic aftermath of the nuclear explosion. Only a contorted mass of steel
pipes is shown, a jungle-gym twisted by the intense heat of the blast and left as a memorial. The
children think their grandmother probably doesn't want to go to the States because she hates
Americans; but she informs them that she used to feel such hatred, but docs no longer.

The first question put to the director by foreign journalists at that press conference was. "Why do
you depict only the damage caused by the atomic bomb, but not the Japanese attack on the U.S.,
or Japan's military aggression which caused it?" Most of the foreign correspondents agreed with
these repeated criticisms of a similar nature. Kurosawa's reply was that one film cannot depict
everything.

This is actually a dispute which has gone on for a long time between Japanese and non-Japanese.
Ever since the film records made immediately after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki,
there have been many documentary and feature films depicting the damage caused by the bomb.
These films mainly showed what a terrifying weapon the atomic bomb is, and what a pitiful
experience its victims had to endure. Scenes showing hatred of the country which dropped the
bomb are rare, but Americans don't believe this. Thinking that the Japanese would hate the
country which caused such damage with their bomb, the American Occupation forces severely
censored Japanese films, radio broadcasts, and publications, forbidding any mention of damage
caused by the bomb. The Occupation has ended and freedom of expression has become possible
once again, but Japanese films about the damage caused by the bomb have roused little interest
among non-Japanese. Exceptions to this rule are Shindo Kaneto's Children of the Atom Bomb
(Genbaku no ko, 1952) and Imamura Shohei's Rain (Kuroi ame, 1988). Kurosawa also
made Record of a Living Being (aka I Live in Fear; Ikimono no kiroku, 1955) about people
terrified of the radioactive fallout from nuclear test blasts, but this is one of the least well-known
abroad of any of his films.

A group of Japanese have travelled around the U.S. showing short films about the damage
caused by the atomic bomb to small groups of American viewers. They were repeatedly asked by
the viewers, "Didn't Japan strike the first blow?" When Imamura's Black Rain was shown at the
Cannes Film Festival, it was criticized as lacking a critical examination of Japanese militarism.
From the time of Japan's defeat in World War II until the present, Japanese directors have made a
great many films criticizing Japan's aggressive military behavior and the spirit of militarism in
that country. For Japanese this has become common knowledge; but non-Japanese don't know
this. Confronted with Japanese films depicting the damage caused by the bomb, they feel that the
Japanese have no grounds for bearing a grudge about that destruction; that, if the Japanese are
going to talk about the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, they must first examine their own
military aggression. This one-track response was the most noticeable aspect of the press
conference following the preview showing of Rhapsody in August.

The intensity of this reaction may have been due to Kurosawa's stature as a director. For
Americans, this might be an especially strong reaction because they feel that the Japanese
director whom they most respect is expressing resentment toward the U.S. When Clark, played
by the popular American star Richard Gere, first realizes that his uncle died in the atomic blast,
he cries with the rest of the family, saying he hadn't known, and he offers his apologies. To
American viewers, this line might sound like an apology to Japan for the use of the atomic bomb
by the U.S. Also, there is a scene in which the grandmother, while talking about the bomb,
becomes very angry over the fact that war hasn't disappeared from the world. To Americans
overjoyed by the recent victory in the Persian Gulf, this might sound like criticism of the United
States by the Japanese who didn't dispatch any troops to light in that war. In this way, Rhapsody
in August has been exposed to harsh critical attacks.

However, Rhapsody in August, first and foremost, is a beautiful film. Even though it deals with
injuries caused by the bomb, it is full of beautiful visual images: the scenery of the countryside in
mid-summer; the meeting of relatives long ignorant of each other's existence. Since turning
eighty, Kurosawa, who has been known for the rough, violent quality of his films, has finally
reached a state of mind in which he can depict peacefulness, love, the pure heart of children,
rather than aggression and destruction. This is the distinguishing quality of this new work, and of
the previous film, Dreams.

An especially moving scene is the memorial service at the rural temple where the elderly gather
to recite Buddhist sutras. Clark and a child who participate in this service suddenly look at the
ground and see a swarm of ants form a line and farther on the petals of a rose. The camera slowly
follows that line of ants; then it slowly gazes at the rose, then at Clark and the child who smile at
each other. For a director like Kurosawa whose films are famous for their powerfully dramatic,
confrontational scenes, this is a refreshingly quiet and unassuming scene.

One can't explain such a scene with words but, listening to the sound of the
elders' sutra chanting, one feels profound respect for all life, even that of the tiny ant. Instead of
showing us the pitiful form of those killed by the bomb, Kurosawa shows instead a swarm of tiny
ants, thus painting for us an image of the Buddhist spirit of compassion. I feel that this spirit of
compassion is itself the essence of this film. And I think this scene of the ants is of an excellence
unparalleled even by the most famous scenes in earlier Kurosawa films. If nothing else, it
embodies the feelings of the Japanese who, from 1945 until the present, have not once staged a
military war, because of a thoroughgoing pacifism insured by the constitution. Of course, had
more self-reflection on military aggression been included in the film, it might have been an even
better film. No matter what one says, as long as the Japanese government continues to avoid (as
much as possible) making public apologies to the countries against whom they had launched
aggressive battles, or expressing self-criticism about aggressive warfare, misconceptions about
the pacifism of the Japanese people will only increase.

Developing "Fair is foul and foul is fair" in the song of Shakespeare's witches and Macbeth's "So foul and
fair a day I have not seen." weather and lighting in this forest are a disconcerting mixture of fog, rain,
flashes of lightning, and gleams of sunshine, with thunder alternating with what sounds like distant
laughter. An interesting gloss on the traditional menace of such contradictions can be found in the first
episode of Kurosawa's more recent film Dreams (1990), entitled "Sunshine and Rain." This recounts a
Shinto story told to Kurosawa by his mother about evil fortune coming to a boy who stumbles on a
wedding of foxes in a wood where sunshine mingles with rain—foxes being frequent Shinto avatars for
malevolent spirits (as can be seen in the stone fox head presented to the evil Lady Kaede in Ran).
The eighth vignette in Dreams is called "Crows" and is about the suicide of Vincent Van Gogh,
Kurosawa's favourite artist, after completing his ominous final painting of "Crows Flying over a Corn
Field."

This agrees not only with the traditional Japanese reverence for Nature—and Kurosawa's own
especial sensitivity to natural beauty—but also to his presentation of Nature in other films,
particularly the unexpectedly lovely scenery of Ran. His attitude is spelled out, almost too
clearly, in another film, Dersu Uzala (1975), in which a Russian engineer learns respect for
Nature from a primitive Siberian hunter but is helpless to prevent the hunter's death and even the
obliteration of his grave by technological "progress." Similarly, in "Peach Orchard," the second
episode of Dreams, tiers of dolls in antique samurai costume tell the young boy who represents
Kurosawa himself that he will never be able to return home because his materialistic relatives
have cut down the family peach orchard, except for one small tree that bears a single flower.

These films are easily interpreted as Kurosawa's rejection of the ruthless industrialization of
postwar Japan, but there is another deeper influence involved. If his critique of
samurai bushido stems from his resistance to Japan's own militarism, his shifting attitude to
Nature is influenced, just as strongly, by the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the
continuing threat of accidental nuclear disaster. He has two films specifically about the American
bombings: as was mentioned earlier, Record of a Living Being (1955) was made as a protest
against the poisoning of Japanese fishermen by the Bikini explosion in the previous year, and the
refusal of a Japan intent on rapid industrialization to recognize its ecological danger; and, more
recently, Rhapsody in August(1991) is about the difficulty that Japanese even today have in
confronting the experience (and therefore learning the lessons) of the bomb that destroyed
Nagasaki. In Dreams there are also two sequences about accidental nuclear disaster: "Mount Fuji
in Red" simulates the holocaust that might be caused by the explosion of a nuclear power plant;
and in "The Weeping Demon," the sole survivor of such a disaster is conducted through a
nightmare landscape of mutations by a demon who complains that Nature has vanished from the
earth because humanity has poisoned the environment. This "Weeping Demon" is a kindred
spirit to the laughing, punitive demon in Throne of Blood, but relates also to the "Weeping
Buddha" on the saintly Sue's scroll in Ran.
 The last episode of Dreams, "The Village of Waterfalls," shows a beautiful bucolic village of
children, presided over by a wise old man who warns against destroying the paradise of Nature.
In the press kit for the film, Kurosawa notes, "The theme here is nostalgia—nostalgia towards
the loss of Nature and with it, the loss of the heart of humankind"; and during the course of the
joyful funeral with which the episode concludes, the wise old man explains that "Living in
harmony with nature makes a friend even of death." This is pure mono no aware, and the same
mood is caught in the beautiful panoramic sunset with which Ran on one plane concludes, while
the cortège of Hidetora and his son, passing in deep shadow in the foreground, represents on
another plane the tragic karma experienced in Throne of Blood; and between the two
experiences, alone in the middle distance, hesitating on the brink of his family's ruined castle, is
the enigmatic figure of blind Tsurumaru, who Kurosawa has said is representative of modern
man: "The solitary blind person represents for me the essence of humanity today … [But] my
film is not … despairing … it is more of a warning: 'Concentrate your efforts on becoming
happier, and not on heading for even greater unhappiness'." The karmic aspect of Nature
in Throne of Blood is thus incorporated into a larger, much more complex comment in Ran.
Within the system of Buddhist thought, Kurosawa's presentations of Nature in his samurai
adaptations of Shakespeare can be recognized not as the contradictions they seem at first to be
when interpreted out of cultural and historical context, but as complementary visions.

What are the themes in Akira Kurosawa's

film Dreams?
What are the themes in Akira Kurosawa's film Dreams?

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Expert Answers
SILVIA76-PHD | CERTIFIED EDUCATOR

Dreams is composed of eight short films representing the director's visionary dreams.
The central focus of the first two dreams is childhood. The attraction of the forbidden is the main
theme of the first dream ("Sunshine through the Rain").

In the second dream ("The Peach Orchard"), the ecological theme emerges.

"The Blizzard" represents the path of life full of pains. It also explores the dangers of
temptation often hidden by appearance.

In the fourth dream ("The Tunnel"), the following themes are dealt with: the stupidity of war,
the sense of guilt felt by those who survived, and the awareness of death. The soldiers who
follow the protagonist do not know—or do not want to believe—they are dead.

"Crows" draws a parallel between Vincent Van Gogh’s view of painting and Kurosawa’s view
of cinematic art. Both artists often use nature not just as a background, but as a protagonist.

The sixth and seventh dreams are interrelated. "Mount Fuji in Red" comments on the idiocy of
man by pessimistically representing the imminent future, where Mount Fuji awakens and brings
destruction to nuclear power plants built close by. The theme of anti-nuclearism is very clear in
this short film and will affect, in different ways, the last two films as well.

"The Weeping Demon" is a representation of a post-catastrophe future. Where grass and

flowers once grew, the land is now deserted, and, next to pools of blood, only disturbing
mutations of dandelions grow. Where once men walked, now there are only demons. One of
them is met by the protagonist, who listens to the demon's speech against the stupidity of man,
who has condemned the world to pollution. The ecological message promoted by Kurosawa is
clear.

The same ecological message is also found in the last dream ("Village of the Watermills").
Here, however, the atmosphere is no longer gloomy and apocalyptic. The luminous poetry from
which Kurosawa had moved away in the last two segments is taken up again. The protagonist
visits a nameless village where an old man praises the merits of living peacefully and in harmony
with nature.

APPLETREES | CERTIFIED EDUCATOR

I think there are a number of strong themes in this anthology of short stories collected into one
film (Kurosowa's final film). One theme seems to be the fear of death; we see this in the story
where the man thinks he is escaping a troll (the "Weeping Demon" of the title), and in doing so,
he runs down a hill, seemingly forever, and is unable to escape. This suggests the finality and
eternity of death and the fear accompanying its arrival. The theme of death and the hardships of
life also seems present in the story about the men struggling in the brutal snowstorm. All seems
lost, and their struggle is cursed by a witch who seems to be determined to torment them. First,
she appears as a beautiful woman and then she fails to help them find rescue. The story called
"Mount Fuji in Red" is also obviously musing on themes of death and nuclear annihilation (a
common theme in Japanese cinema given the nation's survival of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki
 bombings). In the story, there is little hope for the earth or the people on it; it has a very bleak
perspective on life and how painful it is under the circumstances. There is a feeling of doom
pervading the air, and the red skies and radiation are portrayed with lighting and sound that is
truly terrifying.

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READEROFBOOKS | CERTIFIED EDUCATOR

This is a fascinating film. It is based on eight short movies based on eight dreams. The main
character that unites the stories is a person named, "I" presumably Akira Kurosawa himself.

In a movie as complex as this one, there are many themes. What struck me was the idea of
transgression. In the dream "Sunshine through the Rain" and "Peach Orchard," there is a sense of
breaking boundaries. The little boy take a forbidden peak at the foxes wedding, and his family
chops down a cherry tree, which they should not have done.

This theme can be seen in other ways as well. In two of the nightmare sequence, there is a sense
that people has transgressed nature through technology. In the dream, "Mount Fuji in Red" there
is a nuclear meltdown and the radiation will kill the people no matter what they do. A similar
message is given in the dream, "Weeping Demon," where the setting is a post-apocalyptic world.
Technology has caused more harm than good.

Connected with this theme is the idea of going back to nature and shedding technology. The final
dream "Village of the Watermills" is about a group of people who have embraced a simpler
lifestyle.

Expert Answers
READEROFBOOKS | CERTIFIED EDUCATOR

As you can imagine, there are many motifs in Kurosawa's film, Dreams. Let me offer two of
them.

First, there is a motif of human persistence and the ability to succeed in the face of great
difficulties. In fact, many of the dreams have an agnostic quality to them. For example, in the
dream, "Sunshine in the Rain," the boy transgresses boundaries by looking at the foxes, but he at
the end courageously goes to face them to ask for their forgiveness. In the dream, "Blizzard"
there is incredible struggle as four mountaineer seek to climb a mountain in horrible weather. A
even a demon comes to persuade them to sleep (that is die), but the men continue and persist to
the point where they make it. Even in the dream, "Tunnel," there is a sense where the Japaneses
officer has to face and overcome the dead by commanding them to go back into the tunnel.
Second, there is also the motif of the horror of war. We see this in the dead soldier and the group
of dead soldier in the dream, "Tunnel." We also see this in "The Weeping Demon," where there
is a world in which little remains on account of a nuclear holocaust. We also see glimpses of this
idea in "Mount Fuji in Red," and "The Village of the Waterfalls." There is also an anti-
technology message, which can be linked with the ideas of the horrors of warfare.