In any case, I’m glad that you found the book worth the purchase, Ugetsu! I am not very interested in photo books myself, so for me the book is, while nice to have, probably something that will from now on sit there in the Kurosawa section of my bookshelf without ever being taken out.

By the way, also I found myself looking for “missing pages”, not only because paragraphs sometimes didn’t seem to really seamlessly flow from one to another, but also because the paper used is of such high quality that its thickness made me think that I had by mistake turned three pages when I had turned just one!

I broadly agree with Vili’s review. The book seems to be primarily aimed at the interested general reader. The selection and reproduction of the many stills, illustrations and reproductions is top class and makes the book worth its stiff price in my opinion – I know I’ll get many hours of pleasure leafing through it. They are very well chosen and there are quite a few I haven’t seen before.

The text is a bit of a mixed bag. I found it disappointing – but not because its bad, but because I get the impression that Peter Cowie has some very interesting things to say, he just doesn’t get around to saying them. While Vili thinks that it is designed for reading at random with the illustrations, I got the impression of a more comprehensive and serious book that had been edited down severely. To an extent, it almost seems like two books – the first half is a well written and lively (if not particularly novel or comprehensive) survey of Kurosawa’s life and works, while the second half reads far more like a deeper and more comprehensive treatise – but one in which most of the text has been removed. In fact, on more than one occasion I found myself flicking through the book after the end of a chapter, convinced that a page somewhere had been lost.

As Vili says, there is little here that would be new to anyone who’s read the main books on Kurosawa. What I did find interesting was Cowies comments on music – I found them very insightful and I’d love to read more of his views about that topic. He also makes a small number of interesting and insightful points – one that struck me as quite interesting is the notion that God is completely rejected in later Kurosawa films, implying that his earlier Buddhist tinged ideas were long in the past. He also implies (something that I’ve often had in the back of my mind), that the weaknesses in his late films may have been due to Kurosawas decision not to use collaborators in his later scripts. He does though, in my opinion incorrectly, ascribe Kurosawas willingness to work with script teams for much of his career to Japanese tradition, rather than a positive choice by AK. Cowie also rather annoyingly insists on drawing comparisons of the samurai films with westerns – I think this is highly misleading as it reinforces the old trope that Kurosawa was making westerns in Japanese costumes, something I don’t think many here would agree with (I certainly don’t). I suspect this may have been written as something of a sop to the books audience.

I also went and updated the Books on Kurosawa page, which was long overdue. I should actually do the same for the DVD page.

I must admit being jealous of the beard, and truthfully if I could pull off such a feat of manliness I would rock the flannel everyday, grudge being back in style or not. Instead, I’m 28, and prepubescent boys have better results then me. So…
a mulatto, an albino
a mosquito, my libido

I read a bit over a third of the book while waiting for dinner to cook, and at least chapters 1 and 2 are quite generic stuff that is well suited for a coffee table book, but which offers hardly anything new to anyone who has read a Kurosawa book or two before. There might of course be more later on. But so far, no real new insights, and plenty of often repeated anecdotes.

The beard, by the way, is brown. I don’t think that Mifune’s beard was really reddish, either in reality, was it? In any case, it’s good to know that lumberjackwear is coming back to style, as I just bought a few of these shirts since they were on sale and I needed shirts.

Now I just need to dig up that Nirvana Unplugged album, and I’m good to go. Or maybe I’ll just stick to my Neil Young collection.

I read that Cowie’s book holds around 150 pages of pictures, but are they only photographs or also drawings

The book is full of very well reproduced stills from the films, a wide variety of photographs (on set, and personal ones of Kurosawa), some very nice examples of Kurosawas drawings and reproductions of Teruyo Nogami’s shooting scripts, as well as some lovely examples of original film posters. There are some nice ’side by side’ illustrations showing Kurosawas paintings and the scene from the film (a pariticularly striking one of the ’seasons’ sequence in Madadayo).

I’m quite impressed by the quality of the book – without having read the text yet (and there are far more illustrations than text), I’m glad I bought it.

I, too, find the Yoshimoto’s cover very good; it’s one of the only three books I have about Kurosawa, bought after Vili’s review and brought with me in Paris drawings exhibition to boast.
Interesting cover for an interesting content.

I read that Cowie’s book holds around 150 pages of pictures, but are they only photographs or also drawings? (Which are part of Kurosawa’s cinema mastering abilities.)