SOURCE: "Akira Kurasawa, Director of Rashomon and Seven Samurai, Dies at 88," in New York Times, September 7, 1998, p. A1.

[In the following obituary, Lyman summarizes Kurosawa's life and career.]

Akira Kurosawa, who personified Japanese movies to most of the world and who grew into one of the handful of truly important directors that the cinema has produced, died yesterday at his home in Tokyo. He was 88.

The cause was a stroke, his family said.

Mr. Kurosawa, the son of a military institute's athletic instructor, stumbled into filmmaking after failing as a painter and became one of the colossal figures in film history—an autocratic perfectionist with a painter's eye for composition, a dancer's sense of movement and a humanist's quiet sensibility. Dozens of directors spanning two generations have acknowledged his enduring influence.

When Mr. Kurosawa's Rashomon reached Western audiences in 1951, little was known outside Japan about the country's cinema...