О киносериале «Трудно быть мужчиной», его герое и некоторых особенностях японской культурной традиции (новая редакция)

This article is an attempt to analyze the content of the longest Japanese movie series “It’s Tough Being a Man”. The fifty-episode film, spanning over 50 years, was directed by the distinguished Japanese filmmaker Yoji Yamada, who also wrote the screenplay for the series. The article examines the circumstances of the film creation, its compositional, genre, and conceptual features, as well as its connection to Japan’s social history and the development of Japanese cinema. Characteristics of the main characters of the film are provided, the reasons for the popularity of the movie series are explored, along with its cinematic language and style, and its relationship with American cinema and Japanese artistic tradition. The image of Kuruma Torajiro (the main character of the film) is compared with the image of Superman in American movies, as well as with the images of the Russian fool (including fairy-tale characters), and with the character of Prince Myshkin from Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novel “The Idiot”. The author of this article concludes that Yoji Yamada’s work has become a significant cultural event of Japan in the last third of the 20th century and is still of great importance.