Anderer views the newspapers’ contradictory accounts of that tragedy as a template for “Rashomon.” More important, he sees the older brother looming over Kurosawa throughout his career, imbuing him with a love of 1920s silent, experimental cinema and a passion for Russian literature, especially Dostoyevsky. So taken is the author with this brother motif that he locates Kurosawa’s “core” narrative as “variations on a story about one brother’s rise and fall, and another brother’s efforts to recall their life together in its vitality, complexity and memory-shaping force.” This seems a bit far-fetched, but Anderer presses on, squeezing the brother into the tail of sentence after sentence: “Kurosawa knew, of course, that a shadow character was more than just a filmic cliché, that such a character could be someone you knew intimately, someone you feared or relied on, as you would a brother.” He also hits the shadow/light metaphor pretty hard.

The book’s strength lies in its grasp of Japan’s cultural history: the dominant literary figures; the political currents that drew the young Kurosawa into the proletarian art movement; the country’s rightward shift in a militaristic direction; and the war years, when Kurosawa began directing under heavy censorship, keeping his head down, followed by the American occupation and a chance to make more expressive films. Throughout, Anderer engages in animated dialogue with Kurosawa’s own written account, “Something Like an Autobiography,” at least as much as with the films themselves.

Curiously, given the book’s title, there is not that much formal analysis of “Rashomon.” There is scant discussion of the acting: The seductive star Machiko Kyo is mentioned only once in passing, and the superb Masayuki Mori, who plays the samurai, is singled out not for his performance but for his writer-father, who committed double suicide. The great cinematographer Kazuo Miyagawa, so crucial to the film’s appeal, is complimented without exploring how his work for Kurosawa contrasted with that done elsewhere. More significant, there is little attempt to place “Rashomon” in the larger context of Japanese cinematic practice. Part of what made Kurosawa’s technique stand out — and be accused by Japanese critics as too “Western” in spirit — was his extreme close-ups and the way he moved the camera. Kenji Mizoguchi and Yasujiro Ozu both disdained close-ups, and Mizoguchi used elaborate, choreographed camera movements but in long shot, affording a more detached perspective. Kurosawa has the bandit rush through the forest, keeping the mobile camera close, for a blurred, visceral effect. “Visceral” is Anderer’s word for what Kurosawa was going after. No wonder the New Hollywood princes — Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas and Steven Spielberg — embraced Kurosawa as their master: He was employing a propulsive rhythm and impulse to entertain more in keeping with Hollywood films, far removed from the contemplative, transcendental style that had been the hallmark of Japanese cinema.

Anderer argues that Kurosawa required “a more melodramatically charged, allegorical framework for his postwar film project, which was to shock what had become a cultural dead zone back to life.” And he quotes Kurosawa’s rather self-serving 1945 statement that Japanese films “ ‘have lost their youth, vigor and high aspiration.’ Movies . . . look like the work of tired, old men, ‘who make petty judgments, have dried-up feelings, and whose hearts are clogged.’ He adds, ‘If we say films made by such people are mature, we should throw such “maturity” to the dogs.’ ” So much for the sublime pre- and postwar efforts of Ozu, Mizoguchi, Mikio Naruse and Keisuke Kinoshita.

Anderer sees Kurosawa as retrieving Japan’s honor after its shameful war defeat, by winning the Golden Lion for “Rashomon” and going on to make “Seven Samurai” and “Ikiru.” In my opinion he overrates “Rashomon.” The fact that it is “iconic” does not necessarily make it a masterpiece — certainly not one of comparable depth to, say, Mizoguchi’s “Ugetsu” or Ozu’s “Late Spring.” Visually dazzling, yes, but the hammy and naïve aspects remain irksome. Toshiro Mifune’s monkey-scratching bandit, charming at first, becomes one-note; the drifter’s cynical laughter is excessive; and the woodcutter’s rescue of the baby at the end, a crudely sentimental device. Kurosawa’s Big Thoughts, like What is truth? and Is man inherently evil?, seem trite. The problem is not that these questions are undeserving of consideration, but that Kurosawa poses them in a didactic, simplistic, self-congratulatory manner.