After the war, the American Occupation heralded freedom and democracy, but Kurosawa was hardly free to move in just any direction. Japan’s defeat, far beyond the terms of its military surrender and staggering material losses, was indeed unconditional. The country lay broken. Two of its cities had been incinerated in an atomic flash. The massing fear in Japan, not just of atomic weapons already dropped—which would spawn the monster Godzilla in Honda Ishiro’s cult classic of 1954—but of the nuclear fire next time, was something Kurosawa would grapple with repeatedly. He did so first in Ikimono no kiroku (Record of a Living Being, 1956), about a King Lear–like patriarch, brought to his knees by every sonic boom overhead, so certain is he of another nuclear strike. He will announce to his extended family, to their amazement, his plan to sell the foundry and move everyone posthaste to safety in Brazil. They promptly haul him to family court, hoping the law will protect their assets from the old man’s “insanity.”
In an earlier script rendition, the safe haven was slated to be Tohoku, Kurosawa’s ancestral homeland, the very one stricken following the tsunami and the “accident” at the Fukushima nuclear plant in 2011. For whatever reasons, short of prophetic insight, Kurosawa let South America win the day. There is, too, the “Red Fuji” sequence in his late, episodic Dreams (1990), itself eerily predictive of the Fukushima disaster, about the meltdown of a nuclear power plant in the near vicinity of Mt. Fuji, turning that iconic landscape an irradiated red. We may recall how the color red was featured, shockingly, in one of his earliest childhood memories, involving a stray dog laying astride the tracks, “split” by technology.
In the fall of 1945, Kurosawa was living in the western outskirts of Soshigaya, near to the Toho Studios in Seijo Gakuen, in a zone beyond the worst of the firebombings. This time he was not a thirteen-year-old, wandering through the wreckage of the earthquake, which was after all a natural event. Japan’s imperialist war, fueled by dreams of empire, was a disaster attributable to human beings. Kurosawa had been an actor on that historical stage:
I offered no resistance to Japan’s militarism. Unfortunately, I have to admit that I did not have the courage to resist in any positive way, and I only got by, ingratiating myself when necessary and otherwise evading censure. I am ashamed of this, but I must be honest about it.
He elsewhere surveyed the cultural dead zone left in the war’s wake, including the damage done to Japanese film, not all of it by bombs. Over the previous decade or so, Kurosawa writes in 1945, “films have lost their youth, vigor, and high aspiration.” Movies continue to be made, but look like the work of tired, old men, “who make petty judgments, have dried up feelings, and whose hearts are clogged. ” He adds, “if we say films made by such people are mature, we should throw such ‘maturity’ to the dogs.” This is tough language compared to his later, warmer reflections of his apprenticeship under Yamamoto. But Kurosawa only broadens his critique to assail conditions in modern Japan at large, whereby “our culture in the main has lost its way, ever since it was bewitched by mistaken ideologies.”
Kurosawa roughly dates the downfall to 1933, the year by which it became clear that Japan was in the grip of a militant nationalism and when the last significant wave of subversives was made to “confess” to their imported, ideological sins—Marxism and Christianity among them—and to convert to a purer, nativist Way (itself, of course, an ideology). Because he joined PCL in the spring of 1936, Kurosawa implicitly holds up to censure all of the work that the studios produced over that long, “lost” decade, including many he had a hand in making as an assistant director and the four feature films he directed solo.
The intricate flashback structure of Rashomon, repeated again in Ikiru, key us to Kurosawa’s first impulse, as he started up again amid the ruins; namely, to go back over that troubled ground and interrogate the past.
For Kurosawa, Japan’s defeat occasioned a loosening of constraints, though hardly a full-blown reprieve. He seems grateful to be outside the grip of the Japanese civilian and military censors, acknowledging they were more perversely efficient than the Occupation censors would ever prove to be. Like anyone else at Toho, he now had to work with or around a new set of “forbidden topics” on screen, decreed by the American Supreme Commander. The media had been handed thirty-one categories subject to “deletion and suppression,” including references to censorship, glorification of feudal ideals, fraternization (between allied personnel and Japanese women), black market activities, starvation, and a catch-all: “untrue statements.” When the Occupation censored blue-penciled sections of a submitted screenplay (a slew of them in the case of Drunken Angel), Kurosawa deftly modified, negotiated, or found clever ways to reinstate the forbidden. Rashomon, after all, under the guise of a period costume fantasy, is a shameless rendition of “untrue statements.”
Kurosawa stayed carefully attuned to the ongoing material and physical consequences of the war, leading him to make a series of “contemporary life films” and some critics to assume (until Rashomon’s victory in Venice) that he was as committed to a gritty neorealism as were the Italians. He had never backed off his commitment to literature as a source of inspiration, but balanced it with a need to stay grounded. “You write a screenplay with your feet” is another admonition Kurosawa passed along to budding scriptwriters.
Central landscape, Drunken Angel
Starvation—a forbidden topic on the Occupation censors’ checklist—lurks in the background of his first postwar film, No Regrets for Our Youth, which features a heroine who devotes herself to rebuilding and replanting abandoned rice paddies. A bowl of rice will be treated with such reverence in Seven Samurai that it all but single-handedly converts the lead samurai into joining the farmers in their struggle against marauders. Communicable diseases, rampant throughout Tokyo following surrender, are at the core of Drunken Angel, configured as it is around a cholera-breeding sump, with a dying, tubercular gangster at the center of its action. Ikiru, likewise, uses another polluted sump as the locus of its own drama about a requiem, a rebuilding, and a rebirth. Kurosawa also took up the phenomenon of the postwar “missing,” including those who were repatriated but whose battlefield trauma left them impaired, amnesiac, or otherwise lost to normal life. The criminal in Stray Dog has this prehistory.
Such issues, however obliquely or symbolically taken up by Kurosawa, dealt with the more visible, material consequences of war. In Rashomon, he would more explicitly address the moral consequences of the conflict. Kurosawa began talking with his co-scenarist, Hashimoto Shinobu, about the two Akutagawa stories they would adapt for Rashomon, even as the Tokyo War Crimes Trials were ending late in 1948. There was controversy over this tribunal almost from the outset, having chiefly to do with MacArthur’s decision to exempt the emperor from prosecution. In a shrewd appraisal of Kurosawa’s Stray Dog and its war-traumatized soldier turned criminal on the loose with a stolen gun, the author Noma Hiroshi once asked, “Who was the stray dog’s master, if not the Emperor?”
But besides those who lived high and were spared a rendering of “victor’s justice,” others who lived low, who were not in uniform yet knew they had contributed to the war effort, were similarly exonerated. The screenwriter and director Itami Mansaku, who was one of Kurosawa’s earliest champions, made a telling remark about who exercised control over filmmakers and the population at large during wartime:
If you try to find the actual faces of those who continually repressed us and made us suffer the most, just whose face do you come up with? They are near to hand and easily brought back to mind—the face of some local merchant, of that of a farmer on the outskirts of town or one of the petty clerks in the district government office or at the post office. In other words, they were the people all around us. (trans. Peter High)
Itami’s scan of the wartime social scene likely hit home for Kurosawa, recalling his own acts, in writing and on film, of collusion or acquiescence. The “mistaken ideologies” Kurosawa castigates nevertheless had led him to do things or say things that were often in conformity to doctrines propounded by those in authority during the war. The fact that he was a noncombatant and a far less enthusiastic propagandist in his filmmaking than many of his peers did not take him off the hook, as his own confessions make clear.
Meanwhile, another strain of significant Japanese postwar critique, represented by the novelist and critic Sakaguchi Ango, took the matter of “mistaken ideologies” even further. Sakaguchi seemed intent on bringing a culture on its knees after the war even lower. He reckoned that the culture and the Japanese language had been so debased during the war years that it necessitated a “fall,” away from morals and ideals of every kind. He thought the “absolutist moralism” enforced during wartime—odes to bushido-laced courage on the battlefield or to a widow’s submission to chastity as her fate—was itself deviant to the core. He warned of the national penchant for discipleship: tennosei (emperor worship), but also Confucianism, Leninism, Buddhism, and so on, even as new religions sprung up so rapidly from the postwar desolation that the period became known as “the rush hour of the gods.”
To the contrary, Sakaguchi argued, people are not idealistic, but inherently crude and base. Only the moral posturings, the religious and political costumes, change. Instead of aesthetic or moral uplift, he argued in favor of a precipitous if utterly random descent into vulgarity. The helter-skelter swill of black marketeers held a special appeal for him. The yamiya, he once declared, is where human history begins. To those who expressed fear of the yakuza-controlled black markets, Sakaguchi countered that Japanese wartime leaders were just gangsters who operated on a grander and more devious scale, who used a language of high-minded service to the nation to justify horror and enormous sacrifice. “We must take off all these false national costumes,” he concluded, “and go naked into the streets.”
Sakaguchi was hardly alone in these sentiments. Perhaps the most famous postwar confessional writer, Dazai Osamu, embraced a “beyond good and evil,” carpe diem decadence, as if having survived the war, he were still living under a death sentence. Dazai would in fact make several failed attempts before he finally succeeded in killing himself, taking his lover of that moment with him (a double suicide reminiscent of Heigo’s own). Tamura Taijiro, a lesser artist but one with sure commercial instincts, wrote a popular book called Nikutai no mon (Gate of Flesh; Suzuki Seijun’s film adaptation of it would appear in 1964). Tamura took out his grievances against wartime kokutai, the “nation’s body,” by replacing it brazenly with nikutai, the “flesh body.” In his work, predictably, appetites always wreak havoc with ideals. His street women are not looking for a better life so much as ways to scratch out an existence or to satisfy what appear to be their instinctual needs for sex or pain. They use and are used, often brutally, by men. But because they exist without morals or pretense, Tamura showcases his female hustlers as a somehow more human alternative to the dutiful mothers or meek widows who are morally programmed to yield to their fate.
In Ikiru, we recall the dying bureaucrat trying to live it up at several bars and honky-tonks, at a strip club and a dance hall, as if he were a Tamura or Sakaguchi disciple. He finally finds himself in the back of a taxi with a couple of mascara-heavy pros, having been led along on this nikutai-esque carnal tour by a decadent writer very much cast in the type of a boozing, pill-popping, womanizing Dazai (who calls himself Mephistopheles). The cabaret and bedroom scenes in Drunken Angel, along with the dance-hall scenes in Stray Dog or the “dope-alley” sequence in High and Low, further testify to the nikutai/carnality wave rippling through postwar Japanese art.
Kurosawa would reckon with and acknowledge such ripples, even as he was being pulled by other forces. He surely demonstrated the will to enact a “fall,” though not as an end in itself. He probed a darkness all too visible, given the charred remains of his firebombed city and the disfiguring injuries, the lesions and diseases on bodies all around. Kurosawa looked deeper, though, into another darkness, which had a place in history but an origin in the human heart. It is what the woodcutter sees at the beginning of Rashomon or what the dying old man in Ikiru sees inside himself, more terrifying than the cancer.
With the decadents, Kurosawa shared a horror of the ideals that fueled Japan’s imperialist mission and catastrophic war. But he saw their addiction to the body, as he did the Occupation’s trumpeting of American-style democracy, as both dead ends. Such freedom as American ideals conferred was already a “disaster” for Japanese films, Kurosawa would claim, studios interpreting it as license to wave the right flags or to show flesh more daringly.
“We must counter a despairing brand of nikutai (carnal) story,” Kurosawa would write, “because without hope, people cannot be cured.” The real sickness, evidently, had not been eradicated by defeat in the war, nor would waving a democratic flag bring about a healing. Elsewhere, Kurosawa argues against falling for “a Sakaguchi or Tamura-like, nikutaishugiteki na (fleshistic) character,” because “the spirit requires more.” Over against strip shows as such, Kurosawa outlines another cultural task: “to strip off the mask” a film character wears, using Dostoevsky’s manner of radical interrogation into the human ego, peeling back layer after layer of subterfuge. In other words, Kurosawa worked as if the circumstances of the postwar Japanese, beyond anything called for or adjudicated by the American Occupation, demanded a trial, but one where all were accountable, including himself.
The first work Kurosawa directed after the war was not a film at all, but a long one-act play he co-wrote for the theatre titled Shaberu (Jabberings, 1945). A fishmonger, who staunchly supported the military dictator Tojo Hideki during the war and was a tyrant at home until the surrender, finds himself set upon by his family. They are liberated now to unload their pent-up anger on this petty thug, and his wife leads the verbal onslaught: “You’re an absurd excuse for a husband . . . you’re a war criminal who didn’t have the guts to slit his belly.” She yearns for a life free of him but has no place to go, because the world she knew has disappeared. The title of the play connotes random, everyday talk. More loosely, in the Occupation context, it might be translated “Free Speech.” Kurosawa presses the point that unless such words are linked to reconstructive action, a merely talked-about “free expression” is just another absurdity.
Characters in conflict, more readily laid bare in a play than in a movie, remained for Kurosawa a first priority. And so to make his first postwar film, he elicited the help of Hisaita Eijiro, the famous shingeki playwright, to draft the scenario. No Regrets for Our Youth is indeed a foundation-building work, pivotal for so much that would follow. It is based on no literary original but does address two famous historical incidents and personages: the dismissal from Kyoto University, in 1933, of Takikawa Yukitoki, whose legal views drew the wrath of the Ministry of Education for their “Soviet” influence; and, in 1944, the hanging of Ozaki Hotsumi, a member of the Richard Sorge spy ring, who was a highly influential and widely traveled journalist and head of a Sino-Japanese think tank, even serving as advisor to Prime Minister Konoe Fumimaro before the ring was exposed.
“Let us make a movie,” Kurosawa wrote during the production of No Regrets, “that will reveal what we have lost as filmmakers over all these years . . . we need to work as if we had no regrets for our youth.” The “as if” is crucial here. Because this film, in its repetitions and returns to times of profound betrayal and evasion, underscores nothing but regret. It features as intensive a character study as any Kurosawa would mount, besides his exploration of the dying bureaucrat, Watanabe, in Ikiru. In Yagihara Yukie, played by Hara Setsuko, who occupies most every frame of the film, Kurosawa would give us his first hero.
The myth of the hero lay shattered, of course, itself a casualty of war. Yet Kurosawa’s need for the heroic remained. It would run parallel to his need for strong geometries, used to buttress once monumental but now ruined structures, as we see in the Rashomon gate. Sakaguchi among others thought it necessary to leave the heroic behind, along with the monumental, because of what an idealized aesthetics had done during the war years to induce mass sacrifice on the altar of a myth-fueled, nationalist pride. But Kurosawa decided to stake out his own imaginative ground at the crossroads of myth and history, and was unwilling to reject outright the use of monumental forms or heroic characters, knowing how crucial they would be to inspire and to sustain hope—the courage to outlive the postwar ruins. And so he dared to work on an epic, monumental scale and have his drama turn on the actions of unlikely heroes, whose most basic weapon is often one they share with their director, that is, a dogged capacity for self-questioning.
Although the heroine of No Regrets will become the template for the Kurosawa hero, Yagihara Yukie does not appear on the scene as self-evidently heroic, any more than do most of the Kurosawa heroes to follow. To the contrary, like them, she appears to be a stock character who exists to perform some subsidiary, supporting role: a spoiled young woman, a tubercular gangster, a drunken doctor, a frightened woodcutter, a dying old man, a bored office girl, a farmer at the end of his rope, an aging ronin, a wannabe samurai, a scheming shoe manufacturer, and so on. What Kurosawa’s heroes have in common is a capacity to question their place in life, then to move, to stand up and leave the place where circumstance or fate has put them. They share, too, an inability, at crucial moments, to understand or to articulate what they believe—the Kurosawa hero is strangely tongue-tied, can’t quite say what is on her mind or what he wants. Yet each one possesses a will to take action and to press on. They labor at the task at hand, long and stubbornly enough to make a change and, in so doing, to dramatize the hard work of changing one’s life.
In a word, Kurosawa’s heroes are like Dostoevskyan converts, but not to any orthodoxy. Rather, they act on a belief, activated by a fall or by a self-interrogation, that life has meaning, discoverable amid so much that seems dark or senseless, unjust or absurd. The heroes we especially remember are those who, after converting, make a sacrifice, who work not for themselves alone, but for others, even for those who were once strangers to them.
Daringly, Kurosawa establishes a time frame in No Regrets that overlaps precisely with what he has vilified as Japan’s “lost decade.” Indeed, he seems acutely conscious of laying down explicit temporal markers in this film, and resorts to intertitles—themselves a carryover from the earlier, silent era—to do so.
And the first year we enter, via the first time-setting intertitle used in the first film Kurosawa made in the postwar, is 1933. This is surely not by accident. Because, as we recall, 1933 resonates with events of immense public significance in Japan: the roundup of the intellectuals, followed by their interrogation and forced confessions; the bludgeoning to death in prison of Kobayashi Takiji, the great Marxist writer, as well as the acceleration of war-mongering on the Chinese mainland. But 1933 had another, more personal significance for Kurosawa. It was the year he last saw his brother alive, at a train station in Tokyo. In the middle of July in that same year, he would come face-to-face with his brother’s dead body at a country inn.
Thus 1933 joins 1923, the year of the Great Earthquake, as a loaded number in Kurosawa’s narrative scheme of things. But those markers are also valuable for bracketing the decade immediately prior to the one that was “lost” and to which Kurosawa would repeatedly return. Whatever its underlying instabilities, taking into account even the calamity of the Great Earthquake of 1923, the decade of the 1920s stormed ahead with culturally avant-garde and politically radical explorations of new models and frames to rebuild Japanese culture and society. No wonder, in the spring and summer of 1945, when Tokyo burned to the ground a second time and the country was on its knees after an unconditional surrender—a defeat as total and encompassing as the ambitions of its empire building had been—that Kurosawa would flash back to that earlier moment when his city was gone but reconstructive energies remained.
The 1920s in Japan appear, in retrospect, to have been a tumultuous but also a luminous moment in cultural time, full of daring intellectual and artistic experiments. It would be the last such moment of relative freedom and hopefulness before fear gained the upper hand and a virulent nationalism ushered in the darkness. Kurosawa’s brother, too, notwithstanding a nihilistic or depressive streak that coursed through his short life, was alive and well and a recognized contributor to the diverse, roiling, unpredictable sociocultural mix of those days. When Kurosawa claims, even near the end of his life, how before every film he makes, he imagines it first as a silent film, he is paying respect not just to an art form but to an era that represented for him a precious repository—of experimentation, urgency, solidarity, and indeed hope.
No Regrets for Our Youth, according to the first intertitle—1933—begins in what is already a darker time, although for inspiration as well as for the style with which he made it, Kurosawa repeatedly returned to that earlier, more experimental era of the 1920s and to the legacy of silent film. The opening shot sequence is sun drenched, the camera eye skimming across the gleam of a flowing river; then a steeply angled panning shot takes us up through the trees and dense foliage to a hilltop—one of the first “accelerations” in this film of multiple starts and stops, capturing these Kyoto University students on their blissful outing. Their obvious leader is the only woman in their midst—the daughter of a beloved and politically courageous law professor. At the top, the carefree banter continues, until Yukie skips off alone to the mountain’s edge and hears gunshots, and her vision “falls.”
In the first great downward vertical pan in Kurosawa’s career, the camera follows Yukie’s gaze. From a close-up on her face, stricken by what she sees below, our vision also “falls” as the camera shot descends, down across her body to her feet and into the brush beneath them. Only then does it stop and pause alongside a frightened boy in his soldier’s uniform on practice maneuvers, cowering now after the crack of blank ammunition.
Beyond its multiple time lines, No Regrets is stylistically split. Realism as a mode gives way early on. The banner passes to certain theatrical spectacles, such as the riots at the university. To shoot the face-off between the striking students and the mounted police, Kurosawa has recourse to the sweeping, dialectical editing that marks Eisenstein’s own Strike or especially the Odessa Steps sequence from his Battleship Potemkin. Later, after her lover’s death, when Yukie carries her murdered husband’s ashes back home for burial, her figure will be magnified through a sequence of looming close-ups and dissolves, in a manner reminiscent of Dovzhenko’s Earth.
Indeed, the film’s melodrama, in all of its temporal parts, shows traces of the silent era and especially of Russia for both literary and cinematic inspiration. Yukie is a flighty girl when we first meet her, oblivious to the world outside her sheltered “greenhouse” and contemptuous of the radicals who plan to strike or go underground. Time passes, and her father is dismissed from the university, and the real student radical, Nogi, whom she had once mocked, is now in Tokyo, running a think tank on Sino-Japanese relations. She is older now, no less impulsive but ready to reveal and commit herself, as she never had before. Knowing there is risk, she goes to Nogi nevertheless. But it is a foredoomed love, given the times.
Nogi will be arrested at a café, perhaps like the one Kurosawa sought to enter on his own “underground” assignment. But before his case goes to trial, Nogi is found dead in his prison cell (reminiscent of known political assassinations, like those of Kobayashi Takiji and Osugi Sakae). Yukie, too, had been taken into custody, and in a particularly sadistic interrogation scene, her lover’s certain execution is foretold. As she is being led back to her basement cell, Kurosawa frames Yukie at the top of a flight of stairs. She is being led back to her cell, her face a mask of fear and exhaustion. Then Kurosawa cuts and captures his heroine as she begins to lose consciousness, swoons, and falls.
Cast down in this way, Yukie will rise up. Her father secures her release from prison, but it is Yukie who will throw open one after another closed door thereafter, even leaving her family home behind. Keeping faith with Nogi and also with her own spontaneous, willful self, she commits herself to taking Nogi’s ashes back to the country and to his farmer-parents who live there, in ignominy, because their son has been branded a spy.
At an earlier point in the film, when Yukie was preparing to leave home for Tokyo, desperate to do something even then with what she sensed was a fast-disappearing, wasted youth, her father had offered her counsel. Indeed, he talks to her as if he had just read Crime and Punishment, especially the scene after Raskolnikov has been sentenced to seven years in Siberia, and Sonia reminds him of the raising of Lazarus. Dostoevsky adds the line that Yukie’s father now repeats to his daughter almost verbatim, changing little more than the pronouns: “He did not know that the new life would not be given to him for nothing, that he would have to pay dearly for it, that it would cost him great striving, great suffering.”
Many critics saw Hara Setsuko’s acting in No Regrets for Our Youth as flawed or hysterical. For some, the silent-film-style melodrama was evidently too intense. Even more troubling was the heroic, not sacrificial, stature of the character Yukie. Kurosawa was swift in rebuttal. We have become too attached to “self-sacrificing” women characters, he wrote, “when in fact they are just subordinating themselves to some dominant male.” He uses 1933 as a benchmark for when the Japanese people “lost their freedom” to depict women who were anything but meek and lowly. He issues a call for another kind of Japanese movie “that will not just sketch lonely women, but will portray women who are naked before the world;” where too, “a woman can establish her own individuality.” This he knew would require profound change, being predicated on nothing less than “the discovery of a new moral code.” He bluntly answered a repeated question: “Do I have trouble dealing with women characters? If I do, it’s because I won’t portray women who are as sweet and victimized as those you typically find in Japanese films.”
Such charges had been made earlier in the century, against the shingeki actress Matsui Sumako, whose fierce portrayals of Nora from Ibsen’s The Doll House heralded the emergence of embodied females on the stage (in traditional Japanese theatre, men had acted in women’s roles, an expectation that changed shortly after Kurosawa was born). In a curious way, Hara Setsuko’s “overacting” connected her to Matsui Sumako, the first Japanese female actress to be so charged, and the two of them to an old man—the hero of Kurosawa’s Ikiru—who will die yet be resurrected.
We recall that twice in Ikiru, first in a honky-tonk staring with tearful, “gumdrop eyes” straight at the camera, and later in a tight shot of the old man near the end on a swing in the snow, a look of joyful contentment on his face, our hero Watanabe sings the same “Taisho oldie” he had requested at that bar. It is titled “Gondora no uta” (Song of the Gondolier), a popular song composed in 1915, the same year Akutagawa published Rashomon. In fact, it was written to be performed in a Turgenev play, On the Eve, directed by Shimamura Hogetsu and whose female lead was Matsui Sumako, who sang “Gondora no uta” in the original production (unless it has been taken down, you can still hear a recording of Sumako singing it on YouTube). Shimamura Hogetsu was also Sumako’s lover. Shortly after he died of the same pandemic flu that likely took Kurosawa’s own beloved sister, Matsui Sumako would hang herself, at the age of thirty-three. Her rural background and rough upbringing always seemed exposed on stage, even if she were playing a Norwegian housewife dancing the tarantella. Matsui Sumako was thus perhaps the first modern Japanese actress to be seen as not quite onna rashii (ladylike) in a conventional Japanese way.
Responding precisely to that charge made against Hara Setsuko in No Regret for Our Youth, Kurosawa was defiant: “Why should a woman be ‘like’ anything other than who she really is in her own right?” The fact that “Gondora no uta” would be adapted in Ikiru, with its direct appeal to the young—to act, to fall in love, before it is too late—had a special urgency throughout the long, bleak season of Japan’s postwar period. It was the heroine of Kurosawa’s No Regret for Our Youth, however, who first enacted these lyrics and had the courage to look back over the waste or the errors of her past, before she could fall into a fuller embrace of life.
No Regrets for Our Youth held the promise of a trial, although Nogi, the spy, is murdered before he can make his case. Yukie will be freed from prison, though only after several scenes of brutal interrogation. Kurosawa’s postwar work in black-and-white, in period or contemporary dress, will prove remarkably consistent in featuring those who are or appear to be solo criminals, for or against the state, or part of one or another criminal network, including white collar corruption (most explicitly in The Bad Sleep Well). Some are found guilty, like the gun thief and murderer in Stray Dog and the kidnapper who left a trail of dead bodies in High and Low. But whether rightly or falsely accused of the crimes we think we see, these characters, along with their pursuers, may be accountable for still others or are on screen to enact another drama altogether.
Rashomon, too, is a crime story. There will be charges, investigations, and the testimony of eyewitnesses at a trial. The clues may not add up, the witnesses will contradict one another, but at the end of the day there is always a dead body on the forest floor. There is unrefuted testimony, too, that the woman was violated (only how she acted after the bandit’s initial assault will become a matter of dispute). Four principal witnesses appear in the courtyard. There will be five visits to the crime scene. The woodcutter takes us there twice.
But the film does not fulfill what crime stories typically deliver: the identity of the criminal. We would do better to call Rashomon a story about detection on a crime scene of considerable scale. There is the possibility, too, that the criminals are many, also that the crimes themselves are other than, or lie deeper than, the ones we are presented on the screen.
Kurosawa turned frequently to crime stories, the most obvious ones evident in his police procedurals, featuring detectives hunting an elusive and strangely charismatic criminal in the big city—Tokyo in Stray Dog, Yokohama in High and Low. Both show strong traces of film noir and its European Expressionist antecedents: Jules Dassin’s The Naked City, G. W. Pabst’s Joyless Street, Josef von Sternberg’s Underworld, or Fritz Lang’s Dr. Mabuse (which has a scene of a briefcase of financial documents thrown from the window of a fast-moving train, like a similar bravura scene in High and Low).
Besides what Kurosawa took from Dostoevsky, whose own novels about crime and gruesomeness reveal his indebtedness to the gothic horror of Monk Lewis, Kurosawa was an inveterate reader of popular detective fiction, too, ranging from Georges Simenon to Dashiell Hammett and Ed McBain. He considered the genre to be a first-rate primer for aspiring screenwriters, being character and event driven, with crisp dialogue and a minimum of extraneous, merely scenic details.
In Japan, the year after the Great Earthquake, there appeared the first in the Akechi Kogoro series of detective stories written by Edogawa Rampo, a contemporary of Akutagawa’s, whose pulp fiction shows distinct traces of modernist ambition and allegorical range. The book is titled The Murder on Hill D. The detective here bears resemblance to Sherlock Holmes, popular in Japan since translations of Conan Doyle began to appear in the 1890s. The high-art literary surface in modern Japan may seem covered with crafted tales of self-exploration. But below it lies a vortex of less realistic, if no less artful, fiction: melodramas about devouring greed or star-crossed, dangerous love, such as Ozaki Koyo’s Golden Demon or Arishima Takeo’s A Certain Woman. Crime fiction fed into that substream.
In The Murder on Hill D, Detective Akechi listens to testimony given by many witnesses to the crime, but they contradict one another—the very problem Kurosawa takes up in Rashomon. For recourse, he will consult Hugo Münsterberg’s Psychology and Crime (1908). The detective recounts how Münsterberg had staged a murder in front of a roomful of witnesses, all of whom were “rational scientists” like himself. In the staging, the murderer leaves behind a hat as the clue. Later, when the witnesses are asked to identify or describe the clue, just one in ten can do so accurately (recall that in Rashomon, the first clue the woodcutter stumbles upon, bringing him to a momentary halt, is a woman’s hat).
With Münsterberg, Detective Akechi concludes not just that eyewitnesses can be unreliable but that their testimony will always be so, because memory intervenes. From the psychologist, the detective has learned that memory is subject to a storm of feelings and associations, intensely personal, for every witness. The investigator, then, cannot skim the surface and expect agreement on the apparent “facts” of the case. He needs to look elsewhere, dig deeper, and deploy a better method: “to penetrate psychologically the deepest part of a person’s soul.”
Ironically, such a method was for other reasons earlier advocated by reformers of the novel in mid-Meiji Japan, who pushed for a modern realism based on the thoughts and inner feelings of an individual, even if many such novels used this method to remain apart from the world, clinging to the interiority of their “second floor rooms,” above the fray. Perhaps it took the medium of film and a filmmaker of Kurosawa’s ranging literary interests, coupled to what he took from D. W. Griffith and Fritz Lang and other silent film allegorists, to instead pursue a more melodramatic angle. There was, too, the abiding example of Dostoevsky, a writer who might begin with a tabloid crime, but whose investigations into the criminal human heart and mind compress themselves into a morality play, staged not just inside a rooming house but at a public crossroads or in an underground, where good and evil, or something lying in the shadows between them, are locked in allegorical strife.
Takemitsu Toru, the avant-garde composer who scored two later Kurosawa films (Dodeskaden and Ran), was also one of the more prescient commentators on the director’s early black-and-white work. He singles out their “fascination with the criminal, reminiscent of Fritz Lang’s M.” He notes that Kurosawa’s criminals possess a “charisma rarely found in Japanese film” and was intrigued, too, that Kurosawa’s early work often features characters “who occupy more than one world.” Takemitsu would cite as a prime example of the latter the miko (shaman) in Rashomon, herself derived from Noh theatre conventions, featuring the appearance of ghosts who travel, via song and dance, through time.
The miko is a performance artist of sorts, and her most telling attribute is her voice. In Rashomon, as we know, she becomes the voice of the dead man. Michel Chion observes that the dead who speak in films do so as if they enjoyed special access to the spirit world and an almost omniscient grasp of the human one. The miko in Rashomon will indeed summon the dead man back to life, if only to reenact his death, speaking the words that were in the samurai’s mind and heart as he was preparing to die.
We should note here the crucial role that voice plays in both of Kurosawa’s police procedurals, as if Kurosawa thought of crime as lying in some close proximity to his brother, the benshi. In Stray Dog, long before we ever see him, we hear the criminal’s voice. The detectives, rummaging through their suspect’s belongings, spot a note he once scratched out about a vicious cat-killing and about the torment he has felt since returning from the war. As the detectives hold up the note for us to see, which they silently read, there is a voiceover, which we recognize to be the suspected criminal’s voice.
Again, in the film’s final chase scene, the criminal will be isolated and captured by the young detective, but only after a struggle that leaves these two characters, so similar in their war backgrounds and even now in their look and dress, sprawled out on the ground. This showdown takes place in a city outskirt, close to a train station, but it looks like a forest, even a jungle, perhaps like the one both of them slogged through as soldiers years before. There are flies buzzing around the foliage and the sound of schoolchildren singing a familiar ditty in the background. Then, shockingly, the criminal lets out an anguished howl—a sound in excess of what the scene requires.
We see on screen one criminal, caught in a chase at the end of this noir film. But this howl at the end of Stray Dog helps us identify yet another criminal, maybe Kurosawa himself, who by this outcry brands himself an outlaw to conventions of cinematic realism. Here and elsewhere, Kurosawa proved willing to run an experimental risk with images and also with sound—a voice beyond reason—to get at something he knew from his experience to be true, for example, that even a brother can be a stranger and a tormenting mystery, in life and in death.
Similarly, the dramatic action of High and Low, a film haunted by the fallibility of vision, begins not with any image we see but with a voice calling up from below. Both the shoe manufacturer and his wife, and later the police brought in to solve the case, cling to the phone receiver as if it were to a lifeline, hanging on each word uttered by the taunting, sarcastic, obviously educated voice of the kidnapper (he is a doctor who is slumming it, in ways analogous to Heigo’s own perverse choice to live in a run-down Kagurazaka tenement). The calls he initiates and the demands he makes will dictate our travels through the city. With his voice alone, the kidnapper controls the narrative, through to the very last scene.
There, a plate of glass separates the now captured, tried, and condemned criminal, and the man he had asked to see before his execution—not a clergyman, but the one who lived high on the hill, whom he plotted to bring down into the dark alleys of his own life. No matter who is talking, we see the two of them, separated but reflected through the glass, superimposed in intimate, visual relationship. As in Stray Dog, there is a final, anguished howl from the “negative” one, before a steel curtain comes down like a guillotine, or like one last, hard-edged wipe. It will seal off our vision. All we can see now, in the middle of that now blackened plate glass, is the circular audio hole, which had carried the criminal’s last, desperate cry.
In such ways do Kurosawa’s investigations into crime and explorations of the criminal break away from a straight genre line or any attempt to reliably answer questions about “what happened.” No doubt Rashomon is Kurosawa’s most sustained experiment to test the boundaries of telling such a story, about crimes committed in the past and about the criminals who committed them, but in a way that stays true to the zigzagging nature of his memory, whereby the public and the personal intersect or are fatefully intertwined.
Criminality, an interrogation, and at times an actual trial are foregrounded features of Kurosawa’s postwar work. No doubt Seven Samurai goes furthest to scale the crime to the dimensions of war. Ikiru goes deepest into a character’s self-examination into how he became a dead man walking. The crimes in Rashomon, as we know, will take us to a “courtyard,” albeit one whose allegorical, not realistic, trappings invite us to broadly interpret who might be on trial and what might be the crime.
Like many at the time, Kurosawa knew that a public trial, however protracted (the Tokyo Trials lasted almost three times as long as did those at Nuremberg), would leave much uninvestigated and many unnamed. We note that besides the “famous bandit” Tajomaru, no other character in Rashomon has a name. But all of them will eventually confess to one crime or another. We never see firsthand, but only through remembered or verbally repeated sequences, the crimes that will become the basis for the courtyard trial.
Perhaps just because Tajomaru has a “name” and is known by past acts of criminality, we assume from the start that he is the criminal. Still, Rashomon seems to take a bizarre, almost choreographed pleasure in muddying the path that might otherwise lead us to a single criminal. The serial testimony in Rashomon, like the Bolero backbeat, is alluring in its mesmeric repetitions. By it we are led back into the forest, proceeding at first as “innocents,” like the woodcutter as he ambles until he stumbles onto a dead body. Kurosawa thus leads us away from the gate and into what at first seems to be an enchanted space—the forest scenes are among the most extravagantly beautiful scenes Kurosawa ever directed and edited—that turns out to be the very site of the crime.
By the time he made Rashomon, Kurosawa was fully geared to film a trial unlike any recently seen in the real world of postwar, Occupation-ruled Japan. The courtyard scenes are notorious for never showing us the face of the judge. This “absent presence” begs to be read as a symbol, maybe of the very kind Kurosawa accused critics of perversely reading into the film. Could the invisible judge be symbolic of the American Occupation, through whose censorship apparatus Kurosawa had to pass to make many of his earlier postwar films? Although the censorship office had been substantially scaled back by 1950, the Americans did still nominally sit in judgment not just over the film industry, but over all of Japan. Rashomon was thus scripted, produced, and screened at home, even winning its acclaim abroad, before the Occupation had come to an end. Then, too, the American authorities had been trading in symbolic gestures all along. The atmosphere of the Tokyo Trials has indeed been likened to “a large-scale American theatrical production.”
But this strangely absent judge is counterbalanced from the outset by a very present captured criminal. Kurosawa moves quickly to identify our suspect, in the way Dostoevsky does in Crime and Punishment. The notorious bandit Tajomaru is the first principal witness, answering “questions” from this judge we never hear or see. Like Raskolnikov, the bandit seems eager to confess and be found out, as if he had committed the crime for punishment. Moreover, he “plays” throughout the testimony—kicking, scratching, scowling, hissing—as if he were also performing the role of a Shakespearean fool in an elaborate farce. As noted, Kurosawa never gives us a reverse cut, and so we can’t gauge the magistrate’s reaction. Like General MacArthur or a James Joycean god paring his fingernails above the tawdriness of merely mortal affairs, the judge may be a bit like us, the audience: an unseen, unheard, yet judgmental presence.
Because of this setup, we may not quite believe that a trial is taking place, at least not the one we see before us. The villain, played by the “named” bandit, may start to look like an actor auditioning for his part (Kurosawa once cited Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author as an early avant-garde inspiration for Rashomon). All of the testimony is over the top, “theatrical,” delivered in a courtyard that looks more like an outdoor Noh theatre stage than anything quite judicial. It seems almost as if not Tajomaru, the famous bandit, but Mifune Toshiro, the famous actor, is sitting there, in makeup and period attire, tied up like a cliché villain, giving us a campy reading for the part “Tajomaru.”
But perhaps we are all actors in this trial, the first relevant group being postwar Japanese, then the Italians who saw it in Venice, until now when it can be anyone anywhere who has access to digital media. Like the unseen, unheard judge/magistrate, we retain our anonymity. We keep our distance, remain nameless, sitting in the darkness, just one of the crowd. Yet we presume to look down on and judge the criminal or the serial witnesses, each of whom are subject to interrogation, if not punishment.
Roles are questioned or reversed during the testimony, as they are in Kurosawa’s police procedurals. Tajomaru can be tough and blustering but also comically endearing and poetic—he gazes up spontaneously at a puff of cloud in the sky. The woman is a tearful, pitiable creature as she begins her testimony, though by the end she strikes a come-hither, languorous pose, like a supremely confident Oriental courtesan of the silent era. All of this playacting at the trial should make us wonder who they are or what their real role might be. Whatever they say they did in the forest becomes a test of our credulity and our witness.
They are being interrogated, but so are we. We listen to their conflicting testimony in the courtyard and observe what they do in the forest. But how closely do we listen? What do we really see? We hear about crimes of word and deed that happened in the past. But how secure are we in rendering judgments over such crimes committed by “them?” After all, our first reaction on encounter with Rashomon may be to shake our heads in confusion and conclude that “Everything’s relative. We’ll never get to the truth.” Or, cynically, we may remark that “everyone lies to look good.” Or else we may theorize, academically, that the dead body and the baby are themselves just fictions, there for our weightless analysis or mere entertainment.
By these maneuvers, we blunt the impact of Rashomon. With every measured opinion we parcel out, we lower the stakes. In place of shock or outrage, we settle for or even celebrate a merely “relative” uneasiness about our quandary.
In such ways do we sidestep the more direct challenge Kurosawa embedded in his iconic film, because Rashomon gives voice to something Kurosawa learned from his experience of life in the first half of the twentieth century and made a founding principle of his art—namely, that however torn and scattered the world around us, whatever confusions or ambiguities exist inside our minds, we desire what is true and good in any life or art we deeply value. But we are troubled and weak, and take a less strenuous path. We succumb to doubt about “what really happened” back then, until we realize that the doubt has spread and that we have no moral judgments left to make, nothing more to hope for, given all the “complications,” the excess of random reported “facts” about matters happening now, in the city or the country before our eyes, much less those erupting in some far-off war or disaster zone.
Because it is easier that way. It allows us to live with our own silence, and our evasions.
We are on trial. The crisis is not just historical, but existential. As Kurosawa knew, the Japanese postwar period is Dostoevskyan.