ALL THE EMPEROR'S MEN: Kurosawa's Pearl Harbor, by Hiroshi Tasogawa. Applause, 2012, 337 pp., $29.99 (hardcover)
Routinely acclaimed as a giant of world cinema in his lifetime, Akira Kurosawa has slipped in the global director league rankings since his death in 1998. Young foreign fans now more often come to Japanese cinema via the anime of Hayao Miyazaki than the films of Kurosawa, the best of which, including "Shichinin no Samurai (Seven Samurai)" (1954) and "Rashomon" (1950), were shot in the black-and-white format so many of them find off-putting.
Meanwhile, Western academic critics have long decried the absence of strong, credible women in his films, viewing his preoccupation with male heroism as less than politically correct, if not outright sexist.