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Screenwriter · Composer · 1914–1955

Fumio Hayasaka

11: briefs
13:00: average
143 min: in total

On film.briefs11

I Live in Fear

Akira Kurosawa · 1955

Akira Kurosawa’s 1955 drama follows Kiichi Nakajima (Toshirō Mifune), an ageing foundry owner convinced that nuclear war is inevitable, and his desperate, legally contested plan to move his family to Brazil. Framed by a family arbitration and ending in psychiatric confinement, the film avoids sensationalism, using restrained performances, precise black-and-white cinematography by Asakazu Nakai, and Masaru Sato’s austere score to examine fear, competence, and the social cost of foresight in postwar Japan.

Ikiru

Akira Kurosawa · 1952

Ikiru (1952), directed by Akira Kurosawa, follows Kanji Watanabe, a Tokyo civil servant diagnosed with terminal cancer, as he seeks purpose in his final months. Rejecting hedonism and spiritual cliché, he devotes himself to realising a children’s playground stalled by bureaucratic inertia. Anchored by Takashi Shimura’s restrained performance and Asakazu Nakai’s unadorned cinematography, the film builds meaning through repetition, silence, and the quiet dignity of incremental action. Its structure—split by Watanabe’s death—shifts focus from his life to the puzzle of his final intent, resolved only in the tangible outcome of his labour.

Sansho the Bailiff

Kenji Mizoguchi · 1954

Kenji Mizoguchi’s 1954 jidai-geki follows two siblings sold into slavery after their father’s exile. Anchored by Kazuo Miyagawa’s deep-focus long takes and Fumio Hayasaka’s sparse score, it traces Zushiō’s moral fracture and slow reassembly around his father’s injunction: 'Without mercy, man is like a beast.' Its power resides in physical precision — a statuette’s grooves, a lake’s surface, a mother’s blind fingers — not exposition or catharsis.

Scandal

Akira Kurosawa · 1950

A painter and a singer sue a tabloid for fabricating their romance, but the case becomes secondary to their lawyer’s moral collapse under financial pressure. Set in postwar Tokyo, Scandal pivots from social critique to intimate tragedy, anchored by Takashi Shimura’s performance as a man whose conscience frays in silence. Kurosawa’s direction is plain and precise; Fumio Hayasaka’s score uses irony to deepen unease. The film’s power lies not in its courtroom climax, but in the weight of unspoken guilt, a sick child’s breath, and torn posters fading on a city wall.

The Crucified Lovers

Kenji Mizoguchi · 1954

Kenji Mizoguchi’s 1954 drama adapts Chikamatsu’s 1715 play into a precise, unsentimental study of love and law in feudal Kyoto. Mohei, an apprentice scroll-maker, and Osan, his employer’s wife, flee after a forgery and alleged adultery, pursued not by passion but by property, debt and collective punishment. Shot by Kazuo Miyagawa in long, unbroken takes, the film treats morality as infrastructure — not belief, but rent, reputation and ritual.

The Idiot

Akira Kurosawa · 1951

Akira Kurosawa’s 1951 The Idiot transposes Dostoevsky’s novel to post-war Hokkaido, following Kameda — a gentle, epileptic man returning home — as he becomes entangled with Taeko, a woman discarded by her wealthy patron, and Akama, a volatile heir. Shot in stark black-and-white and severely cut by Shochiku from its original 265-minute form, the film relies on restraint: minimal music, extended silences, performances built on micro-gestures. Its moral force lies in what it refuses — explanation, catharsis, resolution — making it a demanding but deeply resonant portrait of integrity in a compromised world.

Ugetsu

Kenji Mizoguchi · 1953

Kenji Mizoguchi’s 1953 Ugetsu adapts two Edo-period ghost tales into a quiet, devastating portrait of war’s domestic toll. Set in 16th-century Japan, it follows a potter who abandons his wife for wealth and prestige, only to be ensnared by a spirit, while his brother-in-law pursues samurai status at his wife’s expense. Shot by Kazuo Miyagawa in low light and fluid crane movements, with a sparse, harp-accented score by Fumio Hayasaka, the film treats the supernatural not as spectacle but as consequence — a formal and thematic extension of loss. It won the Silver Lion at Venice and remains a benchmark of Japanese arthouse cinema.

Drunken Angel

Akira Kurosawa · 1948

Drunken Angel (1948), Akira Kurosawa’s first major work, follows an alcoholic doctor and a tubercular yakuza enforcer locked in a tense, unsentimental relationship amid the black-market ruins of postwar Osaka. Shot in stark black-and-white by Takeo Itō, scored with ironic waltzes by Fumio Hayasaka, and anchored by Takashi Shimura and Toshirō Mifune’s tightly coiled performances, the film locates moral urgency not in grand gestures but in recurring details — a sump, a cough, a trembling hand. It is a foundational work of Japanese cinema: unsparing, unadorned, and deeply concerned with what happens when systems fail and only broken people remain to tend the wounds.

Stray Dog

Akira Kurosawa · 1949

A young Tokyo detective loses his service pistol in a crowded trolley in the summer of 1949. With the help of a veteran colleague, he traces it through the city’s black markets, yakuza networks, and dance halls — not to deliver vengeance, but to understand how postwar desperation reshapes morality, authority, and the very idea of justice.

Rashomon

Akira Kurosawa · 1950

Akira Kurosawa's 1950 film gathers a woodcutter, a priest and a passer-by under the ruined Rashomon gate during a rainstorm as the first two recount a trial testimony about a samurai's death in a forest, told in turn by a captured bandit, the samurai's wife, the dead man himself through a medium, and finally the woodcutter who found the body. Shot by Kazuo Miyagawa, who pointed a camera directly into sunlight through forest canopy for the first time in Japanese studio film, and made for around $140,000, it won the Golden Lion at Venice and an honorary Academy Award, introducing much of the West to Japanese cinema in the process.

Seven Samurai

Akira Kurosawa · 1954

Akira Kurosawa's 1954 film follows a poor farming village that recruits seven masterless samurai, offering only food and shelter, to defend it against a bandit gang planning to return once the barley ripens. Shot by Asakazu Nakai across a punishing production that ran well over schedule, scored by Fumio Hayasaka and led by Toshiro Mifune and Takashi Shimura, the film ran to 207 minutes and cost 210 million yen, a large outlay for the period, before shaping the template that countless action and heist films have followed since.