In the opening chapter of his book, Prince gives an overview of Kurosawa's career and many general aspects of his films. He discusses the fact that Kurosawa is often said to be the most Western of Japanese filmmakers. This partly stems from Kurosawa's admiration for many important works of Western literature. The other part has to do with his apparent stylistic similarities with Western directors. Most frequently he is compared to John Ford. Like Ford, Kurosawa enjoyed the Western genre and also relied on repeated use of a group of familiar actors. Critics comment that the small town in Yojimbo as well as elements of Kurosawa's action filming could be from Ford Westerns. Kurosawa has a self-acknowledge debt to Ford and the American Western. Yet techniques Kurosawa developed such as the use of slow motion death in turn predated their use in 1960s American films. Prince also suggests that differences in the fundamental social structures of feudal Japan and the American West separated the Japanese samurai film from the Western. Ford's films taught Kurosawa how to develop his own language for expressing his ideas within the samurai-film context. Prince also cites Sergio Leone, John Sturges, Sam Peckinpah, and George Lucas as "obvious examples" of the influence Kurosawa has in turn had on Hollywood and International Westerns. Kurosawa considers himself an entirely Japanese director. Prince continues to raise further questions, such as whether or not the strong individualism in Kurosawa's films is primarily Western or Japanese. Kurosawa considers himself an entirely Japanese director. Ultimately Prince says it is impossible to answer such questions as who has influenced who more.
         This chapter is useful as a summary of the various people who have influenced Kurosawa, and vice versa. The American Western's influence on Yojimbo is readily apparent, along with the noir detective novels of American writer Dashiell Hammett, Red Harvest and The Glass Key. Yet Prince notes that Kurosawa's use of the rogue Sanjuro figure makes sense only in the context of the strict hierarchy of feudal Japan and the popular films set in that period.

To start with, the pictorial and cinematic work in Rashomon explores the confines of a single setting, the grove where the death of the samurai character takes place. Kurosawa works within this physical spatial limitation by expanding the dynamic space for his character's emotions and psychology through cinematography and imagery. For example, Prince suggests that the play on light and shadow creates "a kind of spiritual and emotional labyrinth," hinting at the emotional depth Kurosawa bestows upon his characters. Also, camera movement gives depth to the characters as well by panning, shaking -- mimicking their emotional state. Long tracking shots and "sensuous" camera movements follow the woodcutter as he wanders through the forest, whereas jolting and aggressive shots characterize the film after the woodcutter discovers the dead samurai.

Hence, Kurosawa experiments with the narrative by invoking emotional depth in cinematography. Rashomon is quite similar to silent films, where everything is communicated solely through the characters' movements and filming techniques. Kurosawa does not settle for the dialogue as his sole means of narrative, he employs every constituent aspect of the film to this purpose as well.

The dialogue and the cinematography, both as narrative forms, complement each other and interweave to tell the five different accounts in the film. Clearly, as the accounts are conflicting versions of the same story, the dialogue is unreliable and subjective. But, because the imagery is coordinated through the perspective of the first-person, there are richer emotions projected in the film.

The title of the third chapter in Prince’s book is “Willpower Can Cure,” and its opening paragraphs deal with postwar Japan and its need to cure its ills through sheer willpower (which it did).  The title also has relevance to Ikiru, because it is Watanabe’s willpower that gets the park built and gives meaning to his life (in his own eyes).    Prince begins his analysis of Ikiru talking about the nature of the “heroes of Kurosawa’s films,”  Watanabe included, and how their “lessons in responsible living are filtered through, altered, and sometimes deformed by the social order.”   Prince begins this analysis comparing the heroic character of Ikiru, Watanabe, to characters in other Kurosawa films, but then analyzes the film on its own.  Prince says of Kurosawa, “In Ikiru, he is concerned to contain and to limit the viewer’s empathic response so that it may yield enlightenment rather than catharsis.”   Prince then proves his hypothesis by analyzing various scenes in the film and how Kurosawa’s use of editing creates a narrative style that limits the viewers’ empathy with Watanabe.  Prince explains his theory that “the basic structure of the film” means “Watanabe will be manifest as a textual gap that the narrative tries to fill in and reclaim by inventing hypotheses for his behavior,”  with the term “narrative cavity.”   An example of a narrative cavity is the scene following Watanabe nearly getting hit by a car, where we expect to see Watanabe returning, but instead see his son and wife, which Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto comments on in his book.   Prince tracks the plot sequence of the film and explains various meanings and themes through Kurosawa’s use of camera angles and imagery.  He compares the “office scenes [where] human beings are contained and confined by an overwhelming and alienating environment” to Michelangelo Antonioni’s later films.   Prince frames Ikiru as the culmination of his earlier works, such as Scandal, Drunken Angel, and Stray Dog in its “new and more extensive bounding of the social challenges with which the forms of the earlier films grappled.”