How Akira Kurosawa conquered the west — and gave back

In Seven Samurai, the 1954 film that keeps Akira Kurosawa’s name forever burnished, there is a wonderful extended shot in which the ages come together. It’s so subtly magical that you hardly notice it on first viewing: its spell just sparkles near-subliminally across the rest of the film.

The dashing, roguish action-samurai, played by the director’s favourite star Toshiro Mifune, is in the woodland training the villagers to defend their bandit-threatened village. Soon two presences impinge. The backs of the heads of a group of children, awed and giggling, rise up in the foreground. And the two senior members of the samurai saviour-gang pass behind Mifune, wryly observing the almost-greenhorn train the actual greenhorns.

It’s a comic-strip composition. Big, exaggerated detail in the front. Action and story development in the centre. And to the rear, on slightly higher ground for better visibility, something like a think bubble: the wisdom of the past passing behind the present and the future.

Kurosawa really was, in all senses, a graphic storyteller. His best films are vivid, racy, pictorial. They are graphic novels on screen. They are easy-access yarns yanked along by the power of “What next?” and by the impact of images that are dazzling, sometimes even hilarious, in their compositional bravado.

Easy access? An army of fans may rise up, like the kids in the shot, to babble in protest. What about 1952’s Ikiru (Living), the nuanced, darkly poignant tale of a dying local government clerk, recently remade as a Bill Nighy starrer with a script by Kazuo Ishiguro? What about those knotty noirs like Drunken Angel (1948) and High and Low (1963)? What about Rashomon, the intricately plotted film whose breakout triumph at the 1951 Venice Film Festival — Golden Lion, glowing critiques — opened the gates for a whole cultural diaspora?

The west was stampeded not just by Kurosawa but by the long-hidden prize herds of Japanese cinema: Mizoguchi, Ozu, Naruse. Now Ozu’s Tokyo Story (1953) sits at number four in Sight & Sound magazine’s latest all-time list chosen by critics. And though Mizoguchi’s Ugetsu Monogatari (1953), once a top-tenner, has slipped to 90, Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai is at 20, his Rashomon at 41.

Without that Rashomon firestorm at Venice, we might have none of this, just as without Mendelssohn’s evangelism we might have no JS Bach.

Rashomon, though, to return to our contention that Kurosawa’s cinema may be best at its most vividly elemental, is disputed by some as the master’s masterwork. For critic David Thomson in his influential Biographical Dictionary of Cinema, the script’s main conundrum — what can we make of a rape story recounted with totally different versions of truth by four characters? — is too trite for the film’s elaborate flauntings of complexity. Don’t we know that different folk have different strokes, some of them self-serving, when it comes to the perception of reality? Haven’t we all seen Citizen Kane? Indeed haven’t we all read Agatha Christie?

But Rashomon is fabulously styled and staged — of course. The genius of Kurosawa is his soaring geometries and vaulting dynamism as an imagist. There is literally never a dull shot. And he found in Toshiro Mifune, star of Rashomon and 15 other films in the Kurosawa canon, an antic presence with acting strokes to match. Mifune’s performance is as vivid as a Japanese ideogram. (Note for Kurosawa biographical completists: he studied calligraphy and kendo swordplay as a child.)

If you want to imagine this screen story without Kurosawa’s stylings or Mifune’s panache, try Hollywood’s Rashomon adaptation The Outrage (1964): a lumbering alfresco whodunnit, even with a cast led by Paul Newman, Edward G Robinson and Laurence Harvey, hot from The Manchurian Candidate.

Indeed it’s a telling kaleidoscopic experiment to view Kurosawa’s best-known work through its western versions. Seven Samurai became The Magnificent Seven (1960). Gain: headlong action brio and a cast of overnight Hollywood stars-to-be (McQueen, Bronson et al). Loss: length, character complexity and the loving build-up of an epic momentum.

The Hidden Fortress (1958), Kurosawa’s playful tale of heroes, bandits and a captive princess, became ­­George Lucas’s first Star Wars movie in 1977. Gain and loss: see above. Yojimbo (1961), a magnificent eastern western in which Mifune’s ragged ronin (masterless samurai) runs sagaciously amok in a frontier-style town, was remade in 1964 as A Fistful of Dollars. Gain: Sergio Leone’s po-mo portentousness lending the story a witty grandiosity and gallows irony. Loss: the inspired seamlessness that makes Kurosawa’s switchback plot of cross and double-cross seem a thing of unity, logic, beauty.

One other detail in Yojimbo should be mentioned in such east-west research. In the opening scene, the hero Sanjuro (Mifune) wanders across a grassy plain and picks up a sword — or an imaginary sword. He hurls it skyward. Seconds later it plunks to earth as a bony stick. Sword and sorcery. Surely it’s possible that Stanley Kubrick, who loved Kurosawa, saw that scene and reverse-imagined it a few years later in 2001: A Space Odyssey as a bone hurled skyward becomes a waltzing spaceship?

Most recently, Ikiru has been reincarnated in the west by Living, a touching British tribute from one Japanese-born artist, writer-screenwriter Kazuo Ishiguro, to another, set in almost the same year as Ikiru’s release. London in the repressed but Technicolor 1950s; a County Hall bureaucrat (marvellous Bill Nighy) living out the remains of his days; emotions at once stifled and intensified by the laser-dot moment of a looming death. For me this may be the best transplanted Kurosawa film of all.

To put it in a nutshell or in a netsuke, you can’t appraise Kurosawa without considering his relationship with western cinema and culture. He adapted Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot and Gorky’s The Lower Depths and, in Throne of Blood (1957), thrillingly reimagined Macbeth. He made crime dramas from Dashiell Hammett and Ed McBain.

Even his Indian summer as a film-maker was gifted by the west. Ten years after his most famous and infamous attempt at a Hollywood co-production — the dire Pacific war epic Tora! Tora! Tora! (1970) — he received backing from ­­George Lucas to make a Japanese screen drama wholly on his terms. Result: Kagemusha (1980), three hours of jaw-dropping period spectacle combined with chamber conspiracy drama. Follow that? He did with Ran (1985), ­­­a fiercely beautiful tilt at King Lear.

He also made Dreams (1990), ­a haunting episodic film with one section featuring Martin Scorsese as Van Gogh. “Stop the world, I want to get on,” every westerner seemed to say when the late-Kurosawa carousel whirled most brightly.

Internationalism, though, was a factor throughout his life. He started making films during the second world war, criticised by domestic censors for every western motif or inflection. During the American occupation, US-controlled censors condemned every hint of Japanese nationalism or nostalgia. Kurosawa himself loved Japanese traditional art and theatre (Noh is pervasive, especially in Throne of Blood), but he also loved John Ford and Shakespeare and American pulp fiction. What’s a man to do?

What he is always to do: what he would, should and can. If everything and everyone influenced Kurosawa, he found means of repayment by influencing everything and everyone back. Even Japan has come to the table after interludes of renunciation, especially in the forefather-overthrowing 1960s. (Director Nagisa Oshima was a special foe.)

Today, find and watch Takashi Miike’s 13 Assassins, made in 2010. It’s yet another homage to Seven Samurai and probably the best, revivifying the brilliant primitivism of the original. That 1954 film now has an almost Homeric stature, and so for many does its director. “I don’t think any Japanese film-maker can escape the influence of Kurosawa,” Miike has said. And perhaps, in a new age of recognition, no escape attempt is any longer wished or needed.

A two-month Kurosawa season begins at BFI Southbank, London on January 1, bfi.org.uk. ‘Rashomon’ returns to UK cinemas on January 6