"A tour-de-force reading of Kurosawa's films. Yoshimoto adds greatly to current Kurasawa scholarship and to situating the construct 'Japanese Cinema' in a way that it has not been situated before."--E. Ann Kaplan, author of "Looking for the Other: Feminism, Film, and the Imperial Gaze"

Acknowledgements ix
Introduction 1
I Japanese Cinema in Search of a Discipline 7
II The Films of Kurosawa Akira 51
Kurosawa Criticism and the Name of the Author 53
Sanshiro Sugata 69
The Most Beautiful 81
Sanshiro Sagata, Part 2 89
The Men Who Tread on the Tiger’s Tail 93
No Regrets for Our Youth 114
One Wonderful Sunday 135
Drunken Angel 138
The Quiet Duel 140
Stray Dog 147
Scandal 179
Rashomon 182
The Idiot 190
Ikiru 194
Seven Samurai 205
Record of a Living Being 246
Throne of Blood 250
The Lower Depths 270
The Hidden Fortress 272
The Bad Sleep Well 274
Yojimbo 289
Sanjuro 293
High and Low 303
Red Beard 332
Dodeskaden 334
Dersu Uzala 344
Kagemusha 348
Ran 355
Dreams 359
Rhapsody in August 364
Madadayo 372
Epilogue 375
Notes 379
Filmography 433
Bibliography 451
Index 471

Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto is Associate Professor of Japanese, Cinema, and Comparative Literature at the University of Iowa.