Kurosawa

The films of Akira Kurosawa have had an immense effect on the way the Japanese have viewed themselves as a nation and on the way the West has viewed Japan. In this comprehensive and theoretically informed study of the influential directors cinema, Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto definitively analyzes Kurosawas entire body of work, from 1943s Sanshiro Sugata to 1993s Madadayo. In scrutinizing this oeuvre, Yoshimoto shifts the ground upon which the scholarship on Japanese cinema has been built and questions its dominant interpretive frameworks and critical assumptions. Arguing that Kurosawas films arouse anxiety in Japanese and Western critics because the films problematize Japans self-image and the Wests image of Japan, Yoshimoto challenges widely circulating clichs about the films and shows how these works constitute narrative answers to sociocultural contradictions and institutional dilemmas. While fully acknowledging the achievement of Kurosawa as a filmmaker, Yoshimoto uses the directors work to reflect on and rethink a variety of larger issues, from Japanese film history, modern Japanese history, and cultural production to national identity and the global circulation of cultural capital. He examines how Japanese cinema has been invented in the discipline of film studies for specific ideological purposes and analyzes Kurosawas role in that process of invention. Demonstrating the richness of both this directors work and Japanese cinema in general, Yoshimotos nuanced study illuminates an array of thematic and stylistic aspects of the films in addition to their social and historical contexts. Beyond aficionados of Kurosawa and Japanese film, this book will interest those engaged with cultural studies, postcolonial studies, cultural globalization, film studies, Asian studies, and the formation of academic disciplines.