From page to screen: The books that inspired Akira Kurosawa
There’s no rule to say every aspiring filmmaker has to attend film school to immerse themselves in their chosen craft, with Akira Kurosawa one of the most prominent examples of a future icon of the medium who didn’t pursue cinema as a form of higher education.
Instead, after finishing high school, he studied calligraphy, took lessons in swordsmanship, and went to art school to fulfil his aspirations of becoming an artist and painter. When he moved in with his brother Heigo – himself a silent film narrator – while still in his teens, the young Kurosawa became increasingly obsessed with not only the increasing advent of movies but live theatre, performance art and the circus.
It was that crash course in countless different forms of entertainment that helped mould him into the director he would become, with literature another key part of his upbringing in the arts. It was Heigo who first introduced his younger sibling to the works of Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Maksim Gorky, developing a passion for multiple different disciplines, art forms, and means of experiencing art that proved formative.
Most famously, Kurosawa adapted Dostoyevsky’s 1869 novel The Idiot into his 1951 feature of the same name, but his original 265-minute and extremely faithful adaptation of the time has been lost, with the studio-mandated and shortened 166-minute edition the one that endures today.
Whereas many of Dostoevsky’s works were reflective of the country of his birth during the period they were written, the same can be said of Kurosawa’s filmography. The latter made his directorial debut two years before the end of World War II with Sanshiro Sugata, and many of the societal reflections, themes of alienation and isolation, and the unbreakable spirit of the downtrodden are present and accounted for throughout his back catalogue, evocative of how Japan was faced with seismic cultural and economic shifts in the wake of the conflict.
Seven Samurai, arguably his magnum opus, finds everyday farmers being protected at all costs by a force representing humanitarianism in its purest form. The titular septet are skilled warriors, but they don’t view the rural communities as being beneath them, but rather an overlooked and integral cog in a machine that keeps an entire nation turning, with redemption a key recurring motif in the works of both Dostoyevsky and Kurosawa.
Similarly, Gorky’s 1902 play The Lower Depths was adapted by Kurosawa and released in 1957, following a similar thematic path by trading in how the more unsavoury aspects of the human experience can often be born from circumstances of cruelty and poverty, a feeling that was running rampant in post-war Japan as the country struggled through an extended period of uncertainty. Survival is a struggle, it always has been, and Kurosawa was indebted to his influences to make it a key part of his filmography.
Of course, it goes without saying William Shakespeare’s fingerprints were all over Kurosawa’s creative thinking after Throne of Blood reinvented Macbeth, Ran took its cues from King Lear, and The Bad Sleep Well made no bones about being indebted to Hamlet, while the revolutionary narrative of Rashomon was derived from two tales penned by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, dubbed ‘the father of the Japanese short story’.
Outside of the more obvious cues, Kurosawa claimed to have read Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace upwards of 30 times and referred to Natsume Soseki’s Sanshiro and medieval fable The Tale of Heike as being among his other favoured literary works, even if he didn’t get around to repurposing them for the screen. Still, the biggest touchstones were apparent throughout his career, and it can all be traced back to his earliest years.
