It has been 25 years since the death of the great film director Akira Kurosawa, yet interest in his work remains strong, and fresh insights continue to surface. Two welcome additions to the critical studies on this renowned director are Olga V. Solovieva's "The Russian Kurosawa" and David A. Conrad's "Akira Kurosawa and Modern Japan." Both writers fruitfully explore how Kurosawa's films, including samurai epics, reflect the condition of Japan when they were made.
Solovieva, a comparative literature specialist at the University of Chicago, analyses Kurosawa's obsession with Russia, evident in several films, his autobiography and many comments made over the years. The Russia that entranced Kurosawa was not the expansionary state that fought a brutal war with Japan in 1904-05, let alone the Soviet Union of Lenin and Stalin. It was not a place at all, but a humane literary culture constructed by a remarkable series of writers and thinkers.
