Acclaimed historian Harry Harootunian calls attention to the boundaries, real and theoretical, that compartmentalize the world around us. In one of the first works to explore on equal footing European and Japanese conceptions of modernity -- as imagined in the writings of Georg Simmel and Walter Ben[...]

The films of Akira Kurosawa have had an immense effect on the way the Japanese have viewed themselves as a nation and on the way the West has viewed Japan. In this comprehensive and theoretically informed study of the influential director's cinema, Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto definitively analyses Kurosawa'[...]