In Russian Kurosawa, Olga Solovieva proposes an original reinterpretation of the “centrality of the ‘Russian films’ to the cinema of Akira Kurosawa,” contending that they constitute “an overall subtext” (1) to his ethical and philosophical thought. The book offers a meticulous, fresh analysis of The Idiot, Ikiru, The Lower Depths, and Dersu Uzala, all films based on Russian works, and reveals an important but unexamined undercurrent in Kurosawa’s oeuvre. Previous works on Kurosawa have examined his adaptations of Japanese literature (Rashomon, for example), of American noir, and especially, of William Shakespeare’s plays. By contrast, there has been a dearth of study of Kurosawa’s sustained, deep engagement with Russian literature, despite his well-known fascination with Russian writers, his creation of the 1975 Dersu Usala with Soviet sponsorship, and his selection of four Russian works to adapt to film. In part, this dearth results from the larger neglect that American scholars of Japan have shown toward the crucial role that Russian writers played in the creation of modern Japanese culture and social movements, a neglect addressed by the historian Sho Konishi, whose 2013 Anarchist Modernity: Cooperatism and Japanese-Russian Intellectual Relations in Modern Japan is a strong influence on Solovieva’s own.

The chief strength of this work is that it offers convincing and ingenious readings of Kurosawa “Russian” films as transnational cinema, demonstrating that Kurosawa was not only a careful reader of the source texts but that he translated their literary works into the visual medium of cinema and transposed them to the situation of postwar Japan. In addition to careful readings of the “Russian” works, she reinterprets other major works in Kurosawa’s oeuvre, notably, No Regrets for Our Youth (1946). An early post war film, this work has generally been interpreted as a propaganda work made under US military occupation and supporting American reforms to democratize Japan. Challenging this doxa, Solovieva shows the centrality of Russian populist (Narodnik) values in the film through a meticulous analysis of the heroine Yukie’s piano performance of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition and her decision to share the hardships of Japanese peasants at the end of the film. These crucial details connect Kurosawa to a tradition of social dissent and grassroots democracy that is highly critical of capitalist modernity and prove that the work results from “a cross-fertilization of Japanese and Russian cultures” (29). Similarly, in Ch. 4, focusing on Kurosawa’s adaptation of Maxim Gorˊkii’s Lower Depths (1957), Solovieva argues that Kurosawa’s bold depiction of the destitute and war maimed should be interpreted as a denunciation of the newly reconstructed and prosperous Japan in which major photographers deliberately turned away from photographing such subjects as inappropriate to the times.

In short, Solovieva argues that that Kurosawa’s films gave voice to the pacifistic and democratic aspirations of the Japanese people in the post-war period often through a deep engagement with Russian thought and literature. However, I am less persuaded by her claim that Kurosawa was a representative figure of pacifist “anarchism” associated with Lev Tolstoi. At the micro level, she demonstrates Kurosawa’s deep knowledge of Russian literature by engaging with his filmography, including films not linked to Russian intertexts. At the macro level, I am intrigued but unconvinced that Kurosawa cinema carried on a Japanese-Russian intellectual dialogue critical of western modernity and favoring a society of mutual aid. To prove such a claim, a researcher would need to conduct extensive research in Japanese language sources, but Solovieva, who relies on the extensive scholarship of Japan in English, does not consult any Japanese sources in this book. In her analysis of Ikiru, a novel about a man who is facing an imminent death from cancer that is loosely based on Tolstoi’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich, she interprets the movie as a broader engagement with Tolstoi’s late thought on religion and art, and as highly critical of the embrace of Friedrich Nietzsche by Japanese modernists. To prove this point, she discusses a series of Tolstoi’s essays starting with “Bethink Yourself” (1905), but failed to prove that Kurosawa had read these essays and borrowed his ideas from them rather than alternative sources. Solovieva assumes an intellectual influence but is unable to trace the networks or media through which it manifested itself. At the end of the book, she calls for further research on Kurosawa’s connections to Sergei Eisenstein, Andrei Tarkovskii, and Grigorii Kozintsev, but I would add that further research of Japanese language sources would establish whether her inferences on Kurosawa’s intellectual heritage are based on reality.