Tint Noh of

"I cry my cry in silence"'Alfred Tennyson

In Chris Marker's poetic commentary loA.K.. his documentary on the making of Akira Kurosawa'sRan (1985), Hidetora Ichimonji. the film's tragic protagonist, looms evocatively as. "King Lear[and] yet [... ] not King Lear, more like Lear's echo reverberating across those castle walls built byKurosawa on Mount Fuji.'" TTiat Marker refrains from sounding the Shakespearean depths ofKurosawa's echoing of King Lear in no way minimizes the literal veracity of his statement. For onecrucial aspect of Ran as film adaptation is that Kurosawa impregnates its image/sound interactionwith Noh's resonant stillness that parallels in its paradoxism what J;m Kott calls King Lear\oxymoronic landscape where "sounds are present by their very absence: the silence is filled wiUithem" {116). Just as Noh thrives on an interplay of sound and what Tom Takemitsu. KuRisawa'sfilm composer, labels "that point of intense silence preceding it, called ma" (.51), so does Ran imbueits visual action with an analogous sound/silence dialectic. Kurosawa re-imagines King Lear'soxymoronic edge by having sight and/or sound suspended or silenced through a Noh-inspiredmedley of "audible non-images" and "non-audib!e images" in his filmic diegesis, Kurosawa distiUsKott's aural awareness of King Lear\ absent presences to a Noh-like resounding silence. But thisstatement can be viewed in truer perspective if we analyze how Kurosawa develops Hidetora intoa Noh Lear widi a heart beating like that of a Shakespeareanaural phantom.

Consider, for instance, the initial boar hunt sequence whereKurosawa leaves Hidetora suspended between drawing his arrowand actually shooting it, thereby transforming the antjw'sunleashing into a non-event which never niatedaUzes in visualtemis. What attests to the arrow's unseen flight, and its unerringtrajectory to the heart, is what Kurosawa connotes by the

85

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sudden shriek of a Nohkan, or Noh flute. By combining the Nohkan's bishigi. or high pitches,which Richard Emmert rightly describes as "eerie and otherworldly" (29), with the ma'sembodiment in the cessation of every sound effect except the horse's clopping, Kurosawaimplicitly suggests thai Hidetora has galloped into a nether realm whose unfathomable silenceparadoxically deepens with its plangent shrieking. What Takemitsu's Nohkan score screams outis Uie piercing of Hidetora's heart. Hidetora shares, it seems, Lear's uncanny gift of hearing theunhearable. Echoing, in fact, the Shakespearean lament of reluctant births haunting Lear—"When we are bom we cry that we are come / To this great stage of fools" (4.6.178-79)'—theNohkan's scream heralds Hidetora's own coming hither, but as the beast that Gloucester sees inGoneril, "stick[ingl boarish fangs in [Lear'sl anointed flesh" (3.7.57). Kathy M. Howlett'simage of Hidetora "thrashing) wildly [through] the flapping canvas" (121) reinforces theHidetora/boar identification that he himself justifiably suggests, knowing that he has magnifiedLear's failings to such a ruthless extent that he becomes more sinning than sinned against.Significantly, unlike Lear who ironiciilly transfixes his own hean by batiishing Cordelia from itwhile warning Kent that "jt)he bow is bent and drawn: make from the shaft" (l . l . 144), Hidetoraembarks on the same suicidal path before actually disinheriting Saburo. What David Jortnerintuits about Hidetora's final image as hunting archer, that it appropriates "the viewpoint of tlieboar in his final moments" (82), once again implies that the hunt is nothing less than a headlongplunge into a self-annihilated self. Kurosawa takes what Julie Kane tenns "the austere Japaneseaesthetic ideal of wabf (146) to its minimal limit by U-ansfomiing the hunting Hidetora into thehunted boar at the very moment he draws his Uagic bow. Hence Ihe timely irruption of theNohkan hinting by its shriek that Hidetora, even before banishing Saburo, is essentially aShakespearean beast, and one of those who, in Albany's words, "must prey on itself, / Likemonsters of the deep" (4.2.50-51).

That the Nohkan shriek wails Hidetora's paradoxicaJ fate as a self-hunted beast of prey isfurther reaffirmed by its second irruption at Hidetora's shooting of Taro's retainer—an eventthat Kenneth S. Rothwell rightly specifies as Kurosawa's "magnified displacement" (199) of

Kent's tripping of Oswald, Goneril's servant (1.4.84).Admittedly, Hidetora's arrow attack is this time instigatedby his attempt to save his fool Kyoami's life: but it unleashesthe arrow apocalypse augured by the boar hunt's plaintivehishigi underscoring what Samuel Crowl describes as "theblood red title: RAN" (109), with its Japanese connotationsof an impending cataclysm. Nowhere is diis arrow unleashingmore subtly conveyed however than in the sequence whereHidetora first takes to the wilderness after having beenbanished from the first two castles he has abdicated in favorof his elder sons Taro andJiro, a reversal of Lear'sdaughters Goaeril and

Regan. Significantly, the ma's silent descent upon Hidetora asexiled Lear is paradoxically accentuated by what J. LawrenceGuntner calls "a sound effect more effective than a musicalscore" (131). Inspired by Gloucester's dark vision of divinityswatting humanity—"As flies to wanton boys are we to thegods, / They kill us for their sport" (4.1.38-39)—Kurosawamakes Takemitsu modulate the unheard droning ofShakespeare's human flies whom the gods sadistically silenceinto an unseen chorus of shrilling cicadas. Stu Kobak'sdescription is deadly accurately: "The sound is hke wave upon wave of arrows slicing throughthe air. quivering into the great Lonj."^ Jiro's "bitter arrow"' evidently recoils upon Hidetora'sconscience unlea.shing an arrow-haunted nightmare that imbues with an illuminating vibration"the maddening tumult" (419) Brian Parker hears in tlie cicadas' chirping. Takemitsu's penchantfor "electnmic metamorphoses" (46). to use Peter Bart's phrase, tliat intermesh musical and

The Noh Transcription of Shakespeare's Sounds in Kurosawa's Ran/%1

sound effects is stunningly displayed in the cicada incident. Kurosawa deepens here the similareffect of employing an equally unseen avian chorus whose "bird-calls" Peter Conrad rightlyinterprets as "mockfingl" (150) Hidetora's irresponsible abdication based on a fallacious "arrow"argument. Admittedly, like Edgar's aviary of "crows and choughs" silently winging through hismind (4.6.13), Kurosawa's birds strike the right ominous note for not only do arrows break evenin threes, as Saburo proves conclusively, but they also tragically shatter lives by breakingarchers' hearts. Still, the shrieking cicadas loom tbematically larger than the mocking birds injf?a«'s aural diegesis of absent presences. It is, in fact, the cicada symphony, pitched to the edgeof aural instability like the Nohkan's hishigi, which alerts us to Hidetora's heightened hearing, afaculty that Lear, in his mad wisdom, recommends to blind Gloucester: "A man may see howthis world goes with no eyes. Look with thine ears" (4.6.146-47). By looking with his ears,Hidetora sees into the cicadas' shrillness, and hears his insect requiem. As Basho elegiacaJlyobserves: "Dying cricket— / how full of life, his song."*

Thus Kurosawa's invisible cicadas, whose piercing notes evoke the Nokhan's hishigi, offerHidetora the Zen insight of King Lear. Echoing Shakespeare, in fact, Takemitsu recalls HisamatsuShin'ichi, the distinguished Zen scholar, telling John Cage: "We can hear with our eyes and lookwith our ears."' Similarly Hidetora must learn aural perception. For this reason, Kurosawadecides not to employ any diegetic or source sound during the first three quarters of what isarguably Ran\ fmest sequence—the decimation by Taro's and Jiro's forces of Hidetora's retainersat Saboro's former castle where they have taken refuge. Significantly, Kurosawa initiates theThird Castle conflict by filtering its hellish evocation of the Kamakura misha-e scroll of "TheBurning of the Sanjo Palace" through a Shakespearean silencing of Hidetora's arrow nightmare.That Kurosawa distills, again with wabi intensity. King Lear's central storm scenes into a battle

that involves what John Collick calls "storms of arrows" (183) is however only half tlieEqually crucial is Richard Lacayo's observation that these are "arrows (that] fly through [an]eerie stillness" (68). The effect is extremely unsettling, for deadlier than auows whizzingthrough cicada chirping, are arrows discharging silence. Revealingly. it is when Hidetora's arrowaffliction propels him to the very limit of auditory suspension^—which Michel Chion terms"null extension" (132)—that he suddenly plunges into ma's abyss where not only arrows buteven firing muskets and charging stallions emit a resounding silence.

Hidetora's plight parallels in this respect what Edgar endures in King Lear, and specifically hisaural ordeal at Dover Cliff, where he likewise plummets into the sound of silence. Descending intothe Shakespearean ma's equally oxymoronic Hades, Edgar too aurally visualizes the unhearable. forboth "Ulhe murmuring surge" (4.6.20) and "the shrill-gorg'd lark" (4.6.58) invisibly sound in theear of his eye. Far from stumbling Gloucester-like with his eyes wide shut, Edgar perceives anechoing hollowness within. "Edgar I nothing am" he declares (2.2.192), as his silent self resonates

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its emptiness. That Hidetora, unlike blindGloucester who never realiy leaps over DoverCliff, harmlessly jumps off the Azusa ridgereinforces the suggestion that he sounds theempty depths of Edgar's insight of silence atthe Third Castle. Equally applicable to Ranthen is what Kott says of King Lear: "Theabyss, into which one can jump, iseverywhere" (117). For Hidetora, just likeEdgar, is an abyss unto himself, and hishollowness aptly reverberates through thesilent battle that his division of kingdomultimately instigates. But it is also as theembodiment of this tragic resounding silence

that Hidetora comes clo.sest to incarnating Lear's nothingness. Significantly, ihe Fool, sharingEdgar's insight, constantly harps on Lear's suicidal jump into the vacuum of his heart: "Thouhas pared thy wit o' both sides and left nothing i' the middle" (1.4.177-79). Or again: "I am afool, thou art nothing" (1.4.184-85). What Hidetora of the Third Castle, hollowed out ofShakespearean reverberating silence, tragically analogizes is the Fool's Lear, "an O without afigure" (1.4.183-84). whose nothingness Kurosawa transforms into the zero-degree essence ofSoundScape phantomness.

Hence the thematic aptness of underscoring the ambient soundtrack's echoing hollowness bymeans of Takemilsu's .symphonic elegy—a Mahleresquc dirge whose mournful strings, like thecicadas' hLshigi-\ike shrilling, sound like Death's silence to Hidetora's visual ears. WhetherHidetora looks with his ears then, or hears with his eyes, what pierces his heart is the silence ofa funeral march. Significantly. Takemitsu's lament for this Lord of Nothingness is. in DonaldRichie's phrase, "at its grandest and its slowest" (218) while the Tliird Castle carnage is mostlethally silent. At such oxymoronic moments Ran celebrates Kurosawa's profound understandingof Robert Bresson's insightful statement: "The soundtrack invented silence" (21). The ThirdCastle accrues in fact a Noh-like dimension where tna'a eerie silence thickens through Takemitsu'shoof-echoing timpani rhythm. Kurosawa thus transcribes the boar hunt's royal horseman boltingfrom Lear's unleashing of his equine apocalypse—"Darkness and devils! / Saddle my horses"(1.4.243-44)—into an adagio of percussive hoof beats. If the Fool's Lear is just a "shadow" ofhimself (1.4.222). then Hidetora is an echoof this Shakespearean .shade. Significantly,since the Ichimongi banner, witli its solardisc and crescent moon as emblems, locatesthe clan's destiny in the heavens. Kurosawamolds Hidetora's tragedy out of celestialportents pregnant v iih immateriality. HenceKurosawa's reiterated motif of expansiveskies teeming with silently accumulatingthunderclouds which he evidently reworksfrom Lear's suppressed invocation ofJupiter, "the thunder-bearer" (2.2.46) whoseunheard thunderbolts resound in Lear'simplied ihreat to Goneril. As these silent thunderclouds punctuate Hidetora's dissolution of hisUnno realm, they seem to function like the forest mist in Kumommi-jo, Kurosawa's filmversion of Macbeth, for they likewise hint by their immaterial materiality at his insubstantialdeification. Intrinsically a thundercloud spirit, Hidetora inhales Edgar's "unsubstantial air"(4.1.7) to swell into the "!ight-as-air Leviathan" (64) Theodore Weiss sees in Lear. Kurosawapivots Ran on Northrop Frye's definition of King Lear as an "essential paradox [where| allthings are full of emptiness" (265).

The Noh Transcription of Shakespeare's Sounds in Kurosawa's Ran/S9

Thematically hollowness is of the essence, for Ran echoes throughout with Shakespeareansilent sounds. Thus, though the cloud formations darken into an eclipse during the Third Castleconflict, they typically thunder in discordant silence. The effect is more menacingly oneric thanthat of Goneril's vision of England as a "noiseless land" (4.2.57) resounding with flutteringforeign ensigns, for it equally evokes Edmund's England plagued by ominous "eclipses (that]portend [...] divisions" (1.2.136-37). Admittedly, at no time does Hidetora chant his version of"Fa, sol, la, mi" (1.2.137) through whose dissonant sound Edmund invokes the diabolus inmusica. No less than Edmund, however, Hidetora tragically blows out the Fool's "candle"(1.4.208), thereby plunging his Edo kingdom into a Shakespearean eclipse. Indeed, thoughHidetora's nightmare at the Third Castle concludes with flaming arrows crackling his "wheel offire" (4.7.47) back to audibility, his touching departure sounds as hollowly dark as the devil'stritone reverberating in Edmund's heart. For what accompanies Hidetora beyond the pale is theNohkan's anguished wail. It is the same hishigi scream through which Hidetora deepens ma'ssilence invading him when he angrily orders the closing of Jiro's booming portals. The Nohkantruly voices Hidetora's silent sobbing that Lear too harbors by yielding his broken heart to ma'ssilence.

[...] You think I'll weep, '•No, I'll not weep. (...]I have full cause of weeping, bul this heartShalt break into a hundred thousand flawsOr e'er I'll weep. (2.2.471-75)

Hidetora is clearly a Shakespearean silent weeper whose goring of his boar heart is what theNohkan poignantly transcribes.

Paradoxically, however, it is also through such Nohkan weeping that Hidetora becomes ahuman being. Consider, for example, Hidetora's "grassland" hallucination that Kurosawa eerilypitches on the hishigi.. thereby imbuing the field's tall grasses, which Hidetora transforms intophantoms of his past victims, with lamenting shrieking. But Hidetora too wails through thehishigi, for his "Forgive me" discloses his empathy with these mugen Noh ghosts whomKurosawa dematerializes into Nohkan moans. Hidetora becomes the denizen of a Noh phantomland—thus his fleeing from the green field of his boarish self into Lear's regenerat«l spherewhere silent "tears / Do scald like molten lead" (4.7.53). Hidetora's metamorphosis culminateshowever in his hovel meeting with a living Noh-inspired revenant: Tsurumaru, the fiute player,whom Hidetora had once blinded, and whose welcoming gesture is to transfix Hidetora's heartwith his Nohkan's shrilling shaft. In Kott'.s words, "the fiute wails [...], moans, rises in moreand more penetrating tones, as if it were tearing not only at the ears but at the heart as well"(146). Reworking Zeami's Semimaru.* a Noh play about a blind wanderer wbose "tears obscurethe sounds'"* of his biwa or lute playing, Kurosawa makes Tsurumaru play the music of tears wenever hear him shed. In his Gloucester-like blindness, Tsurumaru also contends with the silentsong of Edgar/Poor Tom's self-tormenting "nightingale" (3.6.30)—for Tsunimarxi's wailingwoodwind emulates his unheard scream that he has never ceased playing since Hidetora blindedhim. "[Mjinded like the weather [blowing] most unquietly" outside his hovel (3.1.2), Tsurumaruchimes in with Lear lamenting to Kent;

[...] this tempest in my mind 'Doth from my senses take alt feeling else.Save what beats there [-..] (3-4.12-14)

Tsurumaru's are in fact Nohkan tempest tears that the Japanese Lear also silently shares. LikeBrowning's Pied Piper, and indeed like Hardy's Fiddler of the Reels, Tsurumaru pierces peoplemusically, though his effect on Hidetora simultaneously parallels that of Cordelia's musical pleafor her father's sanity:

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O you kind gods!Cure this great breach in his abused nature;Th' untuned and jarring senses. O. wind up. (4.7.14-16)

Cordelia is Edward's musical antithesis for. as Kent rightly discerns, she is anything but"empty-hearted" and so "reverbs no hollowness" (l.l.l.'54-55). But just as Cordelia healsEdmund's musical malignity, so does Tsurumaru paradoxically humanize Hidetora by musicallypropelling him over the psychic edge where he truly finds his moral self. That Tsurumaru'sNohkan shriek also transcribes Hidetora's silent weeping for his mournful victim is underscoredby his horrified reaction. Hidetora actually breaks through Tsurumaru's flimsy hut where, as R.B. Parker remarks, "the wait literally collapses under the weight of Hidetora's guilt" (89). It isas clear an indication as any that Hidetora, by looking once again with his ears, finally attainsGloucester's gift of seeing others "feelingly" (4,6.145). Just like Lear, who fmds the sight ofinsight by asking "Where are (liar's] eyes?" (1.4.218), Hidetora realizes that tlie silent self is"the cause of thunder" (3.4,151). Hence Hidetora's anguished cry at Saburo's death, a shriek oflament that totally shatters his stifling ma, just as Lear's refusal to cry bursts into "Howl, howl,howl, howl!" (5.3.255) when Cordelia dies. Hidetora's heart, just like Lear's, utterly breakswhen it grieves for another's death. It is Lear's transcendence of his "Hysterica passio" existence(2.2.247) that Hidetora ultimately attains, tor he likewise tunes his unhinged l>eing by filling theShakespearean t)culiir "water-pots" (4.6.192) with the wisdom of his weeping.

Ran revealingly concludes with the musical absent presence haunting its hunting prelude—the wailing notes of Tsurumaru's lost flute whoseunsuccessful retrieval leads to his sister Su^'s

KM i ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ H murder at the hands of the vixen Lady Kaede.

B " ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ l Sharing T. McAlindon's vision of Shakespeare'sK ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ H play as "a tragedy of the pierced, gored and• ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ 1 broken heart" (193). Kurosawa stunningly

recreates King Lear by tran.scribing the silentrhythm of its "cadent tears" (1.4.277) iqtopiercing Nohkan wails. Consequently, theshrieking wail that opens Ran inevitably bringsit to an end, but with a crucial difference. Truly,the fiute is irretrievably lost, but Tsurumaniwails on, literally to the very edge of life's

precipice. By evoking the Shakespearean stoic attitude of Browning's Childe Roland, with hisself-aiFirming hom echoing Edgar's heroic ballad (3.4.178-80), Kurosjiwa transmutes Rwi's climacticmoment into what may be termed 'Tsurumaru to the dark abyss came." Tsurumaru's spirit, likeRoland's, is musically indestructible. So is Hidetora's spirit whose going hence the ghostly Nohkanwailingly celebrates. Ran shares King Lear's cathartic effect, for it likewise suggests the purgingpain of Dylan Thomas's paradoxical line: "Light breaks where no stin sliines."'" The feeling is notunlike Gloucester's antithetical death as Edgar recreates it for Edmund's sake:

|...) But his tlawcd heart.Alack, loo weak ihe conflict to support.'Twixt two extremes of passion, joy and grief,Burst smilingly. (5.3.195-98)

As Edgar profoundly intuits: 'The lamentable change is from the best. / The worst returnsto laughter" (4.1.5-6). Hence Kurosawa's mono no aware ending, with its enchanting depictionof what Conrad aptly calls a "haemorrhage" sunset (152). Like one of Shakespeare's "Bareruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang,"" what Hidetora leaves in his transient trail isthe sad beauty of his wail. The greatest revelation in both King Lear and Ran is that somethingwill come of nothing. For Hidetora's tale, just like Lear's, is of an archer who loses an arrow and

The Noh Transcription of Shakespeare's Sounds in Kurosawa's Ran/9\

finds his heart by bending and drawing a bow. By reimagining King Lear as Ran, Kurosawaunleashes what Keats would call the arrow of soul-making.

Saviour CataniaUniversity of Malta

NOTES

' Quoted from "Guinevere." See Ricks's edition 535.

^ Quoted from Marker's commentary to A.K. available on the Studio Canal DVD edition of Ran(Z138393),

' All quoiations from King Lear (in parentheses) refer to Foakes's Arden 3 edition.

* See Slu Kobak's online article. "The Epic Images of Kurosawa," available at: <http://www.fiImsondisc.com/Features/kurosawa/epicimagesofkurosawa.htm>.

' All quotations from Ran come from the English subtides of the Studio Canal DVD editioQ.

•• See Sbyk 74.

' Quoted by Takemilsu in his Confronting Silence 30.

" For an insightful analysis of Noh's influence on Kurosawa see McDonald 125-44.

* Quoted from tbe Keene translation of Zeami's "Semimani" 62.

"> Quoted from "Light breaks." See Tbomas 29.

" Quoted from Sonnet 73. "That time of year." See Duncan-Jones's Arden edition 257.

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