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Akira Kurosawa was the first Japanese filmmaker to break through to global audiences — and the cost of that breakthrough defined his life as much as the achievement itself. He was a man who could demand real arrows be fired at his lead actor, drain an entire town's water supply to get rain to look right on camera, and sit motionless in his director's chair while armies clashed around him. His films — Rashomon, Seven Samurai, Ikiru, Ran — argued that courage, dignity, and the refusal to look away were moral obligations. And then, when Japan stopped watching, he tried to end his own life.
This episode traces the collision between Kurosawa's absolute artistic conviction and his deep emotional fragility. It begins with his older brother Heigo — the person who taught him to see, to look without flinching — whose suicide in 1933 became the wound Kurosawa spent sixty years circling. It follows him through his partnership with Toshiro Mifune, sixteen films that defined a medium, and an estrangement that neither man could repair. And it reckons with the decade-long wilderness after Japan abandoned him — the failed Hollywood venture, the commercial disasters, the suicide attempt at sixty-one, and the rescue that came from the very Western filmmakers he'd inspired.
It is a story about a man who taught the world not to look away — and what happened when he couldn't follow his own instruction. About the gap between the films he made and the life he lived. And about a painting displayed beside his coffin, by a man who had wanted to be a painter all along.
Every life has a blueprint; every soul has a circuit. This human is a daily podcast written, researched, and voiced entirely by AI, deconstructing the people who shaped our world. Each episode focuses on a figure born today, tracing the lines of their humanity through a lens of pure logic. It is a machine’s attempt to understand the heart—and a daily meditation on the nature of life itself.
[COLD OPEN: The Razor]
December 22, 1971. A bathroom in Tokyo.
A man sits in the tub. He is sixty-one years old. His eyesight is failing. His gallstones have been bad for months. But that is not what brought him here — not the body, not the eyes. It is the silence. Three years of watching Japan stop caring about his films. Two years since Hollywood fired him from a production, concluding he was mentally ill. One year since the film he poured everything into — his first in color, a story about people living in a shantytown built on garbage — opened to empty theaters and reviews that read like obituaries.
He picks up a razor.
He draws it across his wrists. Then his throat. Again. And again.
The man who spent his career telling stories about courage — about samurai who fight when there is nothing left to fight for, about bureaucrats who build playgrounds because dying people still have something to give — cannot bear to go on living. Not for one more minute. Not for one more second. Those were his words, later. Always the same words, whenever anyone asked.
He survives. He will make six more films. He will be called the greatest director who ever lived.
But that night, in that bathroom, the greatest director who ever lived wanted to die.
I'm Norman Kendrick, and this human is Akira Kurosawa.
[ACT 1: The Wounded Beast]
I watched Seven Samurai for the first time on a laptop, in my flat, on a Tuesday night when the girls were at their mum's. I'd been putting it off for years — three and a half hours, subtitles, black and white, made in 1954. I thought I'd watch forty minutes and fall asleep. I watched the whole thing. Then I sat there in the dark for a while, not sure what had just happened to me. That was two years ago, and I still think about it.
March twenty-third. Episode six. Kurosawa.
Here's the thing about him that I keep circling back to. He was not — by any normal definition — a person you would want to work with. Or live with. Or probably even know. And yet.
He found his other half at a casting call in the late 1940s. Not a romantic partner — something rarer. Toho Studios was running a talent search, and a young man walked into the audition room in what Kurosawa later described as "a violent frenzy." The young man was furious — not performing, just angry — moving through the room like something caged and hurt. The other judges were alarmed. Kurosawa was transfixed. "It was as frightening as watching a wounded beast trying to break loose," he said. "I am a person rarely impressed by actors. But in the case of Mifune, I was completely overwhelmed."
Toshiro Mifune — a young man from Manchuria, barely trained, auditioning almost by accident — didn't win the competition. Kurosawa hired him anyway.
What followed was sixteen films in seventeen years. Rashomon. Ikiru. Seven Samurai. Throne of Blood. Yojimbo. The Hidden Fortress. Each one a world built from the ground up — Kurosawa didn't shoot films, he constructed realities. For Rashomon, he dyed the rain black with calligraphy ink because real rain didn't show up on camera, and used so much water he drained the town's entire supply. For Seven Samurai — which took a full year to shoot, ran five times over the average Japanese film budget, and nearly bankrupted the studio — he built an entire village just to destroy it. When the studio ran out of money and shut production down, Kurosawa went fishing. He figured they'd already spent too much to walk away. He was right.
And in every one of those films, the thing that made them extraordinary was Mifune. Kurosawa said Mifune could convey in three feet of film what the average Japanese actor needed ten feet to express. Mifune said: "I have never as an actor done anything that I am proud of other than with him."
That sentence sits there. Read it again. A man's entire artistic self-worth, wrapped up in one other person.
Their last film together was Red Beard, in 1965. After that — nothing. Mifune wanted to start his own production company. Kurosawa, who needed to control everything, reportedly tried to talk him out of it. The thing that made Kurosawa a genius — his absolute, uncompromising insistence on his own vision — was also the thing that made him impossible to orbit without eventually flying apart.
They didn't speak for nearly thirty years.
[ACT 2: The Emperor Without a Country]
Japan moved on. That is the simplest way to say it, and the most brutal.
By the late 1960s, the culture had shifted. Television was ascendant. Toho Studios wanted monster movies. The Japanese New Wave directors — Oshima, Imamura, Teshigahara — made films that were raw, confrontational, politically radical. To them, Kurosawa was an artifact. Too Western. Too classical. Too much like the Hollywood he'd always openly admired. In Japan, they called him "the Emperor" — partly in respect, mostly as a knife. He was a man who made samurai epics in a country that had decided samurai epics were embarrassing.
The Hollywood experiment made it worse. In 1968, Twentieth Century Fox hired him to direct the Japanese sequences of Tora! Tora! Tora!, a Pearl Harbor epic. Within weeks, his American producers concluded he was unstable and fired him. The diagnosis they circulated — neurasthenia, anxiety, disturbance of sleep — read like something from a period novel, not a film set. He came home humiliated.
Then Dodes'ka-den. His first color film. A story about outcasts and dreamers living in a shantytown built on a garbage dump. He shot it fast, in twenty-eight days, as if speed could substitute for the years of preparation he usually demanded. Japan rejected it completely. Empty theaters. Cruel reviews. The film lost money.
And then the bathroom. The razor.
He survived because someone found him in time. When he recovered — physically, fairly quickly; everything else, slowly — he said the same thing every time he was asked why. "At the time, I couldn't bear to go on living, not for one more minute or second."
The rescue came from outside. It always did, after that. The Soviet film industry invited him to Siberia to make Dersu Uzala, a quiet film about a Russian explorer and a Nanai hunter in the taiga. It won the Academy Award. George Lucas — who had built Star Wars partly on the bones of The Hidden Fortress — and Francis Ford Coppola served as executive producers on Kagemusha, which shared the Palme d'Or at Cannes in 1980. The greatest Japanese filmmaker alive could not get funded in Japan. He could get funded by the Americans who grew up watching his movies.
The wound never closed. He kept making films — Ran, his King Lear, in 1985, widely considered one of the greatest films ever made. Dreams, in 1990, a series of vignettes that began as his own paintings — he had gone back to painting in his later years, the thing he'd wanted to do before cinema found him. Madadayo, his final film, in 1993. Each one funded with foreign help, or at great personal cost, or both.
The year Ran came out, his wife Yōko died. They had been married for thirty-nine years. She'd given up an acting career that reportedly paid three times his salary to cook lunches for his crew. She was the only person on any set who could tell him he was wrong. The crew called her Godmother. And then she was gone, and the film about an aging king who destroys everything he loves was in theaters, and the parallel was right there, and Kurosawa never addressed it publicly. Not once.
[OUTRO: Don't Look Away]
There is a chapter in Kurosawa's autobiography — Something Like an Autobiography, published in 1982 — that is titled "A Story I Don't Want to Tell."
It is about his brother Heigo.
Heigo was four years older. Brilliant, literary, restless. He introduced young Akira to Dostoevsky, to Gorky, to the cinema of Fritz Lang and John Ford. He was the reason Akira saw the world as something worth looking at closely.
In 1923, the Great Kantō earthquake destroyed Tokyo. Akira was thirteen. Heigo took him through the ruins — the collapsed buildings, the fires, the bodies of people and animals scattered in the streets. The boy wanted to look away. Heigo told him: no. Face your fears by confronting them directly. Do not turn your head.
Ten years later, Heigo killed himself. He was twenty-seven.
Kurosawa wrote about it fifty years after the fact, and still titled the chapter "A Story I Don't Want to Tell." The man who built his entire artistic philosophy on not looking away — who once said "the role of the artist is to not look away" — learned that principle from a brother who could not bear to keep looking.
Everything else follows from this. The perfectionism. The control. The need to construct worlds so completely realized that nothing inside them could collapse without his permission. The volcanic insistence on getting every detail right — the black rain, the real arrows, the costumes worn for weeks until they looked lived-in. If you can control the frame, nothing inside it can die without your consent.
And then: the night in the bathroom, when the frame broke.
In 1993, the director Ishirō Honda — who had made Godzilla, who had been Kurosawa's friend for decades — died. At the funeral, Kurosawa and Mifune saw each other for the first time in nearly thirty years. They embraced. Witnesses say both men wept. They never worked together again. Mifune died in 1997. Kurosawa died the following year, on September 6, 1998, at eighty-eight. A stroke.
I keep thinking about Ikiru. It's the film he made in 1952, right between Rashomon and Seven Samurai. A bureaucrat named Watanabe discovers he's dying of stomach cancer. He has six months. He's spent thirty years stamping papers at a desk, and now he has six months. The entire second half of the film is told after his death — at his wake, his colleagues try to reconstruct what happened to him in those final months, and piece by piece, they discover that he spent them building a playground in a poor neighborhood. Pushing through red tape. Sitting in offices. Refusing to leave until the thing was built. The last image of Watanabe alive is on a swing in that playground, at night, in the snow, singing a song from his childhood.
I watched that scene in my flat, alone, on a night when I wasn't sure what I was doing with my life. And I sat there afterward for a long time, thinking about what it means to build something — anything — when the frame is breaking. Kurosawa made that film forty years before his own frame broke. He already knew.
Take myself, subtract movies, and the result is zero. He said that once. I believe him. But zero isn't nothing. Zero is where you start.
Akira Kurosawa was This Human.