Muraki Yoshiro

[Aaron Gerow]

The Asahi reports that Muraki Yoshiro, Kurosawa Akira's primary art  
director, died of heart failure on October 26. He was 85 years old. He  
entered the art department at Toho in 1946 and first worked as an  
assistant on Drunken Angel in 1948. From Record of a Living Being  
(1955) on, he was the art director on all of Kurosawa's films except  
Dersu Uzala. He also worked with Moritani Shiro, Ichikawa Kon, and  
Koizumi Takashi, as well on such hit Toho films as the "Shacho" and  
the "Nippon ichi" series. He was nominated for an Academy Award four  
times for Yojimbo (for costume design), Tora Tora Tora, Kagemusha, and  
Ran, and received the Order of the Purple Ribbon (Shiju Hosho) in 1994.

There hasn't been a lot of research in English about art direction and  
production design in Japanese cinema, but Muraki is one figure, along  
with Kimura Takeo, Ikawa Norimichi, Nishioka Yoshinobu, Naito Akira,  
Nakamura Kimihiko and Sakaguchi Takeharu, about whom there are books  
in Japanese.

Yale, for instance, has these books:

Muraki Yoshirō no eiga bijutsu: kikigaki Kurosawa eiga no dezain /  
Tanno Tatsuya hen.
Tōkyō no wasuremono: Kurosawa eiga no bijutsu kantoku ga egaita  
Shōwa / Muraki Yoshirō, Muraki Shinobu [cho] ; Hamano Yasuki hen.

They are worth checking out.

Aaron Gerow
KineJapan owner

Associate Professor
Film Studies Program/East Asian Languages and Literatures
Yale University

For list commands, send "information kinejapan" to
listserver at lists.acs.ohio-state.edu
Kinema Club: http://pears.lib.ohio-state.edu/Markus/Welcome.html