The Japan Times has two articles related to Teruyo Nogami’s Waiting on the Weather — Making Movies with Akira Kurosawa. Firstly, there is a relatively short (but positive) review of the book.
Secondly, and perhaps more interestingly, there is an interview with Teruyo Nogami about the book and Kurosawa in general.
I thought the interview was interesting, albiet a little too short.
I thought so, too, but I think web interviews rarely are much longer. Did she repeat much of what is already in the book, or was it more or less new information also for you?
I will probably pick up the English edition when I visit the UK in a couple of weeks’ time.
It was a mix of old and new information as far as I could tell. Some of the points were outlined in the book, others were new.
I gave my first copy away, my second arrived today. It goes on the shelf with the rest of my Kurosawa books.
I also gave up waiting and finally ordered the book online.
I actually decided to update my English language Kurosawa shelf in one go, and also got Stephen Prince’s “Warrior’s Camera”, Mitsushiro Yoshimoto’s “Kurosawa: Film Studies and Japanese Cinema”, James Goodwin’s “Akira Kurosawa and Intertextual Cinema”, and finally Kurosawa’s own “Something Like an Autobiography”, which I only have in Japanese.
These should arrive in a couple of weeks’ time, and keep me busy for most of the spring.
Wow, I wish I had a few Kurosawa books in Japanese, mainly his autobiography and Nogami book. I can not read the language, but I think it would make for a nice collectible among my Kurosawa posters and movies.
Now that I count them, I seem to have a little over a dozen Kurosawa books in Japanese — I bought them when I was living in the country and when my Japanese skills were on a level where I could talk about everyday matters (and movies, of course), read newspapers, and very slowly decode what was in those Kurosawa books. Unfortunately, after leaving the country, my skills quickly started to deteriorate, and nowadays I can barely read and write simple emails.
There are some very interesting books there, though. A few of them include Kurosawa’s shooting scripts, and most of them come with interviews with both Kurosawa and his gang.
There is also one rather thick Kinejun (the leading Japanese cinema magazine) book on Dersu Uzala alone, and another on Red Beard. I also have both the autobiography as well as the Nogami book in their original language.
Oh yes, and I’ve also got Donald Richie’s “The Films of Akira Kurosawa” in Japanese. The rather curious thing about it is that it is literally a pocket book — it is smaller than a standard CD case, apart from obviously being somewhat thicker! Meanwhile, the English edition is of course unstandardly wide.
If there is one book in that section of my bookshelf that I would really love to be able to read, though, it is Kurosawa’s daughter’s “Papa, Kurosawa”. There must be something very interesting in it. Maybe I’ll one day take the dictionary and start going through the book character by character.