Reading List

Authors Like Akira Kurosawa

Akira Kurosawa was born in Tokyo on 23 March 1910 and meant to be a painter; he exhibited his work but could not make a living from it, and went into film instead. His first film as a director, Sanshiro Sugata, came out in 1943, and on 10 September 1951 Rashomon won the Golden Lion at Venice — the moment at which his memoir, Something Like an Autobiography (1981 in Japanese, translated by Audie E. Bock), deliberately stops. What came after is the work most people know: Ikiru, Seven Samurai, Throne of Blood, Yojimbo, High and Low, Ran. Readers come to Kurosawa for big moral stories told with total clarity — a man with months to live, a town held to ransom by gangs, a king destroyed by his children — and for his humanism, which never looks away from cruelty but always looks for the person who will act decently anyway. Remarkably many of those stories started on a page. The writers below are the ones he filmed, borrowed from or loved most, and one novelist who has since given a Kurosawa film back to the page.

By Lisanne Swart · 10 authors · The books behind the films · Japanese fiction · Crime and the classics · Updated October 2026

Quick answer

If you love Akira Kurosawa, start with Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, whose two stories became Rashomon. Then read Fyodor Dostoevsky, his favourite writer, and Leo Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilyich, the seed of Ikiru. For the crime films, Ed McBain's King's Ransom is the novel behind High and Low. And for a Kurosawa story told again in English, Kazuo Ishiguro.

10 authors like Akira Kurosawa

01
The stories behind Rashomon · Closest match

Ryūnosuke Akutagawa

Japanese · b. 1892 · Short-story writer

Akutagawa was born in Tokyo in 1892 and is often called the father of the Japanese short story. “Rashōmon” (1915), “The Nose” (1916), “Hell Screen” (1918) and “In a Grove” (1922) reworked old Japanese tales with a modern, sceptical eye. He died by suicide in 1927, aged 35; in 1935 his friend Kan Kikuchi founded the Akutagawa Prize in his name. Kurosawa's Rashomon (1950) takes its plot from “In a Grove” and its title and frame from “Rashōmon”.

The obvious first stop, and a richer one than the film suggests. “In a Grove” is only a few pages long, a set of contradictory testimonies about one killing with no verdict at the end, and Kurosawa's film keeps that refusal to settle the truth. Akutagawa is colder and more ironic than Kurosawa, who added the frame at the ruined gate and the abandoned baby to give the story a sliver of hope; reading the source shows exactly what he brought to it.

— Lisanne
02
Macbeth and Lear, in feudal Japan

William Shakespeare

English · b. 1564 · Playwright

Shakespeare's tragedies are the source of two of Kurosawa's greatest films. Throne of Blood (1957) moves Macbeth to a fog-bound castle in medieval Japan, with Toshiro Mifune as the warlord, and Ran (1985) is partly based on King Lear, with the daughters turned into three sons.

Kurosawa read Shakespeare as a writer about power: ambition, loyalty and the chaos that follows when a ruler loses his grip. His versions throw away almost all of the verse and keep the architecture, which is why they are often called the best Shakespeare films ever made. Read Macbeth before Throne of Blood and King Lear before Ran, and the plays and films illuminate each other.

— Lisanne
03
His favourite writer

Fyodor Dostoevsky

Russian · b. 1821 · Novelist

Dostoevsky's novels put murderers, holy fools, nihilists and believers in the same rooms and let them argue to the end. Kurosawa called him his favourite author and the writer who wrote most honestly about human existence, and filmed The Idiot in 1951, moving it to snowbound Hokkaido; the studio cut his planned 265-minute version to about 166 minutes. Red Beard (1965) also borrows from Dostoevsky's Humiliated and Insulted.

The deepest influence on Kurosawa's moral imagination. Prince Myshkin, the good man who cannot survive in a cruel world, stands behind the doctor in Red Beard and the bureaucrat in Ikiru, and Dostoevsky's habit of pushing every emotion to its extreme is Kurosawa's too. If you want to understand why his films feel so morally urgent, this is where it starts.

— Lisanne

Every book by Fyodor Dostoevsky →

04
The seed of Ikiru

Leo Tolstoy

Russian · b. 1828 · Novelist

Tolstoy wrote War and Peace and Anna Karenina, and later turned to short, stark moral fiction. The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1886) follows a successful Russian judge who falls ill and realises, as he dies, that his correct and comfortable life has been empty. Kurosawa's Ikiru (1952), about a Tokyo civil servant with stomach cancer, is based on it.

The shortest route to the heart of Kurosawa's humanism. Tolstoy's novella asks what makes a life worth having lived, and Ikiru takes the same question and gives it a practical answer: a small playground built against the indifference of an entire bureaucracy. Read it in one sitting, then watch the film, and you will see how much Kurosawa kept and how much more hope he allowed.

— Lisanne

Every book by Leo Tolstoy →

05
The model for Stray Dog

Georges Simenon

Belgian · b. 1903 · Novelist

Simenon wrote 75 novels and 28 short stories about Inspector Jules Maigret between 1930 and 1972, beginning with Pietr the Latvian, alongside dozens of darker standalone novels. Kurosawa's police film Stray Dog (1949) grew out of an unpublished novel he wrote himself in the style of Simenon.

Kurosawa took from Simenon the idea of the crime story as a portrait of a city and of the people pushed to the edge of it. Stray Dog follows a young detective through postwar Tokyo in a heatwave the way Maigret moves through Paris: patiently, with as much sympathy for the criminal as for the victim. The Maigrets are short and can be read in any order.

— Lisanne
Every book by Georges Simenon →
06
The hard-boiled cousin of Yojimbo

Dashiell Hammett

American · b. 1894 · Novelist

Hammett, a former Pinkerton detective, created the hard-boiled crime novel. In Red Harvest (1929) the nameless Continental Op arrives in a corrupt mining town called Poisonville and cleans it up by playing its gangs against each other. Critics have long read Kurosawa's Yojimbo (1961) as a version of that plot; Donald Richie considered the similarities coincidental, and Kurosawa reportedly pointed to The Glass Key instead. Hammett is not credited on the film.

Whatever the exact debt, Red Harvest is the book for anyone who loved Yojimbo and Sanjuro: a cynical, self-interested hero, a town rotten from top to bottom, and violence described in flat, quick sentences. Kurosawa's ronin is funnier and more humane than the Op, but they are clearly the same kind of man.

— Lisanne
07
The novel behind High and Low

Ed McBain

American · b. 1926 · Crime novelist

Ed McBain was the pen name of Evan Hunter, born Salvatore Lombino in New York in 1926, who also wrote The Blackboard Jungle (1954) and the screenplay for Hitchcock's The Birds. As McBain he wrote more than fifty crime novels, nearly all police procedurals set in the 87th Precinct of a fictional city based on New York. Kurosawa's High and Low (1963) is based on King's Ransom, in which kidnappers take the wrong child.

The most direct adaptation in Kurosawa's crime work, and the one that shows his method most clearly. McBain supplies a tight, procedural plot; Kurosawa keeps the moral dilemma at its centre — will a rich man pay a ransom for his chauffeur's son? — and builds a whole picture of a divided city around it. McBain is fast and readable, and the 87th Precinct books are where the modern police procedural begins.

— Lisanne
08
The Japanese novelist he filmed most

Shūgorō Yamamoto

Japanese · b. 1903 · Novelist

Yamamoto, the pen name of Satomu Shimizu, wrote popular historical fiction about ordinary people in Edo-period Japan; he was nominated for the Naoki Prize for Lives of Great Japanese Women and refused it. Kurosawa adapted him three times: Sanjuro (1962) from the story “Peaceful Days”, Red Beard (1965) from Tales of Dr. Redbeard, and Dodes'ka-den (1970) from A City Without Seasons. Only a small part of his work is translated, including The Flower Mat (2006).

The writer whose sensibility is closest to Kurosawa's late humanism: stories about the poor, the sick and the overlooked, told with compassion and without sentimentality. Red Beard, about a proud young doctor learning his trade in a clinic for the poor, is the purest example of what they share. He is hard to find in English, which makes him the discovery on this list.

— Lisanne
09
The explorer behind Dersu Uzala

Vladimir Arsenyev

Russian · b. 1872 · Explorer

Arsenyev was a Russian army officer and explorer who mapped the Sikhote-Alin mountains of the Russian Far East on expeditions between 1906 and 1913. His books Across the Ussuri Kray (1921) and Dersu Uzala (1923) describe those journeys and his friendship with Dersu, a Nanai hunter who guided him. Kurosawa's film of Dersu Uzala, made in the Soviet Union, won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.

An unexpected book here, and a good one: travel writing that turns into a story about friendship across two worlds, and about a man of the forest who cannot survive in the city. It is the gentlest of Kurosawa's sources, and the one that best shows his love of landscape and of a decent, practical man doing his work.

— Lisanne
10
Ikiru, rewritten in English

Kazuo Ishiguro

British · b. 1954 · Novelist · Nobel 2017

Ishiguro was born in Nagasaki in 1954 and moved to England with his family in 1960; he writes in English. The Remains of the Day won the Booker Prize in 1989, and he won the Nobel Prize in 2017. He wrote the screenplay for Living (2022), Oliver Hermanus's remake of Ikiru set in London in 1953, with Bill Nighy as a council bureaucrat; it was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay.

The living writer most directly connected to Kurosawa, and a natural match: Ishiguro's restrained narrators who realise too late what their lives have been are close relatives of Ikiru's Watanabe. The Remains of the Day is the novel to read after the film — another man who has spent his life on duty and is only now asking what it was for.

— Lisanne

Every book by Kazuo Ishiguro →

Where to start if you loved Akira Kurosawa

If you want Rashomon on the page, read Ryūnosuke Akutagawa.

“In a Grove” and “Rashōmon”: two short stories, one afternoon.

If you want the question behind Ikiru, read Leo Tolstoy.

The Death of Ivan Ilyich, then Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day.

If you want High and Low as a thriller, read Ed McBain.

King's Ransom: the kidnapping plot Kurosawa built on.

If you want the writer he loved most, read Fyodor Dostoevsky.

The Idiot, the novel he filmed in 1951.

Frequently asked questions about authors like Akira Kurosawa

Who should I read if I love Akira Kurosawa?

Start with the writers he filmed. Ryūnosuke Akutagawa's stories “In a Grove” and “Rashōmon” became Rashomon; Leo Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilyich is the basis of Ikiru; Shakespeare's Macbeth and King Lear became Throne of Blood and Ran. Fyodor Dostoevsky was his favourite writer. For the crime films, read Ed McBain and Dashiell Hammett, and for a modern writer close to his spirit, Kazuo Ishiguro.

What books are like Rashomon?

Akutagawa's “In a Grove” (1922) is the source: a killing told by several witnesses whose accounts cannot all be true. The same device — now called the Rashomon effect — drives novels told from conflicting points of view, and Akutagawa's other stories, such as “Hell Screen” (1918), share its dark, ironic view of human motives.

Did Akira Kurosawa write books?

Yes, one in particular: Something Like an Autobiography, published in Japanese in 1981 and in English, translated by Audie E. Bock, in 1982. It covers his life from childhood to the Golden Lion for Rashomon in 1951, including his years as a would-be painter and his apprenticeship as an assistant director. He also wrote or co-wrote the screenplays for almost all his films.

Which Akira Kurosawa films are based on books?

Rashomon (1950) is from Akutagawa; The Idiot (1951) from Dostoevsky; Ikiru (1952) from Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilyich; Throne of Blood (1957) from Macbeth; The Lower Depths (1957) from Maxim Gorky's play; Sanjuro (1962), Red Beard (1965) and Dodes'ka-den (1970) from Shūgorō Yamamoto; High and Low (1963) from Ed McBain's King's Ransom; Dersu Uzala (1975) from Vladimir Arsenyev; and Ran (1985) partly from King Lear.

Is Yojimbo based on Red Harvest?

Not officially. Yojimbo (1961) has no credited source, but its story — a stranger who frees a town by setting two gangs against each other — closely resembles Dashiell Hammett's Red Harvest (1929). Donald Richie thought the similarities were coincidental, and Kurosawa reportedly named Hammett's The Glass Key as an influence instead. Sergio Leone's A Fistful of Dollars (1964) copied Yojimbo so closely that Kurosawa sued; the case was settled out of court.

What is the film Living based on?

Living (2022) is a remake of Kurosawa's Ikiru (1952), moved to London in 1953. Kazuo Ishiguro wrote the screenplay and was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay; Bill Nighy was nominated for Best Actor. Both films go back to Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilyich.

Footnotes

  1. Akira Kurosawa — Wikipedia
  2. Something Like an Autobiography — Wikipedia
  3. Rashomon — Wikipedia
  4. The Idiot (1951 film) — Wikipedia
  5. The Strange Cinematic Afterlife of Red Harvest — CrimeReads
  6. Shūgorō Yamamoto — Wikipedia
  7. Vladimir Arsenyev — Wikipedia
  8. Living (2022 film) — Wikipedia

List last reviewed 15 October 2026.

Written by Lisanne Swart, who has curated reading lists and author guides at lisanneswart.com since 2021. Every comparison here is a judgement about method and subject, not an algorithmic match. See more on her personal bookshelf.

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