Akira Kurosawa’s Dreams visualizes his recurring dreams, exploring nature, war, and mortality through eight vignettes.
Akira Kurosawa’s Dreams [Yume (夢)] is a fitting film for 21st Century audiences to be introduced to one of the greatest directors of the 20th Century. Kurosawa’s directorial career spans from 1943 to 1993, with five years of work as Assistant Director leading up to it. Yume, his third-to-final film, comes after 27 feature films, including, just prior to it, his greatest masterwork, Ran (which essentially translates as“chaos”), an adaptation of King Lear. He will direct just two more films after Yume. This timing is important, as Yume is the sole film in which Kurosawa focuses on himself, and it comes after a lifetime of craftsmanship [sic], and thereby, it gives a deep view into his values and voice.
Kurosawa, as an artist, was vocally interested in ceaseless, albeit seasonal, growth, feeling that once a person believed themselves complete, they were done with life. This idea, he paired with his interest in speaking through his films to the younger generation, both men and women, which could be seen in the directness of his—even, at times, fourth-wall breaking—appeals to the audience and in the vital space which he created for the, often, younger actors, where they were given license to bring forth their depths. Kyoko Kagawa, who starred in two of his films, said that working with Kurosawa and his ensemble was the sole place she felt fulfilled as an actor.
Coming from a traditional samurai household, and inspired by his mother and sister—and, in particular, the latter’s love of poetry—while being immersed in global literature, theater, and film via his father’s and brother’s influences, Kurosawa brought a unique vision to the world, one that stood firm in the rich traditions of Japanese culture and in the cultural wealth of the West.
Yume serves as a marvelous autobiography, full of wondrous things: luminous fields of flowers, enchanting entities, and heartfelt relationships, among the mix. The film arises from the mind of an 80-year-old artist, one who could still ‘write’ with cinematographic freshness. Todd Haynes’ avant-garde biography of Bob Dylan, I’m Not There—which never once mentions the Nobel-Prize-winning songwriter by name, which instead has multiple actors, including an, as ever, show-stealing Cate Blanchet, play different ‘spiritual essences’ of Dylan—could be seen as a comparable, refracted look at the many-faced-jewel of an artist; however, with Yume, Kurosawa is looking at, and sharing himself: he is spiritually naked for his audience, those of us in the proceeding generations.
As a reflection of that multifaceted gem, the film is split into various, chronologically ordered chapters—each based on an actual, recurring dream of Kurosawa’s—creating a journey, that somehow retains an essential non-linearness. Knowing he was nearing the end of his life, Kurosawa—who died in 1998, creating no new works in his final six years—was willing to embrace some sense of being ‘finished’, enough to paint his own portrait, creating this resonant, abstract film, that suggests a brightness beyond even passing.
Meditating on death moves as a keen current, flowing through much of—perhaps all of—Kurosawa’s work, from his first feature, Sanshiro Sugata, to the world-wide phenomenon, Rashomon, and right up to and through Ran and Yume. Practices devoted to such facing of death—of impermanence—were well woven into Japanese culture, and especially woven into samurai culture, arising out of a Buddhist ethos on how to view life, inspiring a recognition of the preciousness of the present moment, of the fact that the peach blossoms will be here for a time and then gone until the next cycle.
With all of this, Yume is an often sweet, and occasionally whimsical piece, punctuated by the horror of war—mirroring the punctuation of WWII in 20th century Japanese life—and by the fallout of that. Each of the eight chapters begins with the written phrase “こんな夢を見みた,” “such a dream, [I] saw.” From this, English speakers can draw a sense of the evocative way in which what we would call “having a dream” is imagined in Japanese. How well that plays into the nature of cinema and its shared relationship with dreams. Both use language that transcends symbols, creating “an artistic image [that]is not to be deciphered, [being] an equivalent of the world around us,” to borrow a phrasing from Russian auteur, Andrei Tarkovsky.
Throughout Yume, Kurosawa can also be seen to relate to a sense of “life is but a dream,” as the English children’s song puts it. Life has magic. Spirits inhabit the dreams of Yume; the protagonist, Akira—which means “bright”—meets kitsune (fox spirits), the spirits of departed, beloved trees, the embodiment of a storm, and spirits of the dead, famous, and forgotten.
As such, there is a strong sense of spiritual reckoning and redemption in this story. Akira must atone for some transgression made in his youth—perhaps even in a past life—and through his life choices, between the chapters of the dreams, comes through his trials of purgation, and perhaps the weighing of the levity of his heart against a feather.
The first chapter begins with a maybe-six-year-old version of Akira, who is admonished by his mother—played by an actor who was, it is reported, directed to imitate Kurosawa’s mother’s mannerisms—not to go wandering in the weather of mixed sunshine and rain, as the kitsune hold their weddings in this kind of weather and are zealous guards of their privacy.
Naturally, the curious young boy wanders into the woods—and what woods they are; Kurosawa has ever had a facility for filming nature, and especially woods, with a sumptuousness that evokes the ordinary-magic of such spaces. The rain—a notorious challenge to film well—and sun, radiant through the immense, ruddy columns of cedar, set a perfect stage for the kitsune. Looking something like Western notions of fae, albeit with vulpine features and all genders sporting mustaches, the kitsune, marrying en masse it seems, parade through the forest with a vigilant formality. Every few synchronized steps, they stop and quickly scan the environment. With the barest modicum of concealment, young Akira is spotted and flees.
Returning home, his mother refuses him entry, saying, “You went and did something you shouldn’t have.I can’t let you in, now.” An angered kitsune has left Akira a dagger with which to commits seppuku, a ritual suicide. His mother commands him to run and ask the kitsunes’ forgiveness, which they are rare to give, or die. And thus, the young boy wanders into the world, seeking an absolution. We leave this dream as he walks through a rainbow gateway.
In Yume, women form the essential community Akira is part of, and feminine power is ever evident, even when made known through absence. Akira’s mother sets the spiritual moral-standard to which he must rise; later, it is the feminine spirits that advocate for him in his grief or that work to dissuade him from a martial path. It is Akira who must learn to find his right-action and right-livelihood from their example.
Going from the spiritual relationship with his mother as guardian and arbiter of his honor, in our next chapter, we find the boy, Akira, some years older. While dressed for a holiday, bringing food to his sister and her friends, he admires the ornate dolls that line the walls; yet, one seems to be missing. When he then notices an unfamiliar girl in a pink kimono in an adjacent room, he enquires of his sister, who is she? His sister thinks he may be feverish, as, unseen by anyone else, the girl has disappeared.
Spotting the girl outside, Akira sets out after her, despite his sister shouting—in reflection of the previous dream—“Where are you going; you’re not allowed out.” He follows the bright-coloured girl to a grassy hillside, where a coterie of well-dressed spirits—which look like the ornate dolls come to life—move to block his way. The leaders, a man and woman, inform him they will never return to his house, because Akira’s family have cut down the peach trees that once held the hillside. The spirits assert that the holiday being celebrated is meant to celebrate the peaches and their blossoms.
Akira weeps, free with his genuine emotion. He cries because he loved the trees, and they are gone. This true love and willingness to bear his sorrow allows the audience insight into Akira’s, and thus Kurosawa’s, true heart.
As the chapter closes, Akira sees the girl once more and she becomes one small, remaining peach tree, about the boy’s size, in full blossom. We freeze frame on the boy’s face and fade to black, in what could very well be a reflection of the end to Francois Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (Le Quatre Cents Coups), knowing Kurosawa’s love for great European art.
It is interesting to note: in cinema theory, freeze frames like this are often read as an act of death, or death suspended, such as in the ending of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid or the more recent Korean film, The King and the Clown [Wang-ui Namja (왕의남자)]. Hereon, the child version of Akira will be left behind. What is the death of childhood in the story of a life?
As Yume changes through the seasons of a life, ceremonies become a resounding pattern throughout—beginning with the kitsune wedding, then the celebration of the peaches—forming a thread of care and reverence for life, its most important moments, which leavens the film and shares a genuine joie de vivre.
As a counter-woven thread, spirits return in every piece, whether as embodiments of elemental powers, asyurei—“faint spirits” which have unsettled business or emotions—as ogerish monsters, or as inspirational figures, which the film’s artist—whether Akira, the subject, or Kurosawa, the sensei, the Master, telling the story—grapples with, sometimes literally, as he treks towards the summation of this life.
What we find at the end of his journey is surprising. What happens is unremarkable, yet is awesome inits embodiment of a fulsome Spring upon the Earth and within the artist. It returns us to the vernal season in which we met Akira, suggesting something has been restored, something that can perhaps be experienced because we have been through Summer, Fall, and Winter. Rebirth, as an essential in inevitability.
When you watch Yume, especially should you have yet to see any other of Akira Kurosawa’s works, perhaps then go watch the other films, in no hurry to arrive anywhere, until you come back, once more, to Yume, to Dreams. That journey, played out in a non-linear unfurling and returning, full circle, to the end, will give you a special insight into art and into an artist. Insight that can be as deep as Kurosawa’s love for humanity, that which permeates each shimmering, stitched-together, silver-halide frame of his films.▮