Long Take

A multifaceted portrait of the great Japanese director

For years, Akira Kurosawa resisted writing about himself. “It would turn out to be nothing but talk about movies,” he said. “In other words, take myself, subtract movies, and the result is zero.” The memoir he finally started serializing in 1978, Something like an Autobiography, ended with Rashomon, the film that launched him on the world’s stage in 1950. Long Take, first published in Japan shortly after Kurosawa’s death in 1998, at la...