Compound Cinematics: Akira Kurosawa and I by Shinobu Hashimoto (review)

“A work’s quality is the author’s personality, and liking it or not a matter of taste”

(27)

When Shinobu Hashimoto (b. 1918) shared this wisdom, he was in his late eighties and reflecting on a long and successful career in the Japanese film industry. The results of his reflection, Compound Cinematics: Akira Kurosawa and I, detail the collaborative screenplay-writing he did with Team Kurosawa, including Rashomon (1950), Ikiru (1952) and Seven Samurai (1954). Originally published in 2006 in Japan, it is an insightful foray into both Hashimoto and Kurosawa’s screenwriting philosophies and how the two men were initially attracted to each other and eventually drifted apart. It is also an honest portrait of an exciting period in Japanese cinema: Hashimoto reflects on Kurosawa screenplays with praising and critical lenses. As an example of the latter, he claims that a change from the ‘writer leading off approach’, in which one screenwriter researched and wrote the first scene before handing it off to a second writer (usually Kurosawa) who then handed it to a third (Hideo Oguni, for instance) for edits and critiques, a method Kurosawa felt prevented him from cutting corners while Hashimoto believed it contributed to the successes of Ikiru and Seven Samurai, would ultimately alter the quality of Kurosawa’s work. To prove his point, Hashimoto weighs different screenwriting methods, making Compound Cinematics not only an important film history document, but also a learning tool for seasoned and aspiring screenwriters.

Chapter One sets the scene for Hashimoto meeting Kurosawa by focusing on his introduction to screenplay-writing: while convalescing during the war, he wrote a script and sent it to Mansaku Itami (1900–1946), Japan’s leading scenario-writer. This landed him a three-year apprenticeship, which gave him the distinction of being Itami’s only student. After the death of his master, whose parting lesson was to do an adaptation, Hashimoto turned to an Akutagawa short story, which would become the ‘backbone’ for an absurdist jidaigeki, or period drama. This screenplay would lead him to his first meeting with Kurosawa, who had wanted to make a jidaigeki after the lifting of their ban by the U.S. Occupation. But Kurosawa found the script too short, and Hashimoto, intimidated by the older and taller director, offered to include another Akutagawa story – Rashomon - an idea he would immediately consider too rash. Nevertheless, he persevered; but the completed screenplay was an ‘abomination’ in Hashimoto’s view because of a ‘rookie error’(55) in his treatment of the protagonist. Kurosawa then wanted to work with him at polishing it, but a herniated disc would prevent him from assisting. Kurosawa finished it alone, though he gave Hashimoto co-writing credits.

Screenplay work for Ikiru, the second of the three films discussed in Chapter Two, would be Hashimoto’s full introduction to Team Kurosawa’s ‘three-way manuscript’ method, in which Kurosawa, Hashimoto and Hideo Oguni sequestered themselves at an onsen, a traditional Japanese hot spring and spa. Passing the days writing “as if punching a time clock” (80), they employed the ‘writer leading off approach’. As lead-writer, Hashimoto now had an insider’s perspective on Kurosawa’s approach to draft work, which he described as “beyond […] meticulous” (86), and Kurosawa compared to a marathon. To finish a 300-word screenplay, for instance, team members would ‘can’ (kanzume, 134) themselves for three weeks at an onsen, a pace of work linked to the importance Kurosawa attached to a scenario as a film’s clear blueprint. At its heart, however, a typical Team Kurosawa screenplay was structured rather traditionally, with boxes for introduction, development, climax, and conclusion, the indispensable scenario assemblage known as kishotenketsu.

After Ikiru, Kurosawa’s initial idea was a realistic jidaigeki in which the samurai protagonist commits suicide following a trivial mistake. Lead writer Hashimoto was immediately tasked with historical research focusing on a typical day in the life of a samurai. This proved problematic as there were few primary sources dealing...