BRIAN PARKER

Nature and Society in Akira Kurosawa'sThrone of Blood

I have never read a review of a film of mine which did not read false meaningsinto it. (Kurosawa)

I CONTEXTS

It is important for Western audiences to establish a proper context for thefilms of Akira Kurosawa. He has often been called the 'most Western' ofJapanese film directors (and is certainly the best known of them in Europeand America), but though he freely admits influence from Westerndirectors and painters and has based several of his films on major Westerntexts, he insists that his borrowings have always been adapted to the modesand aesthetics of traditional Japanese thought: so much so, in fact, he says,that 'I feel that among Japanese directors today I must be the mostJapanese' (Yakir, 57). And in none of his work is recognition of a specificcultural context more important than in his two samurai adaptations ofShakespearean tragedy: Kumonoso-jo, his 1957 black-and-white version ofMacbeth, obscurely titled Throne of Blood in English though The Castle ofthe Spider's Web' (or 'Cobweb Castle') is its more literal and pertinenttranslation; and Ran - meaning 'Chaos' - his 1983 adaptation of King Learin cinemascope and colour.'

Both these films are set in a sixteenth-century period of Japanese historycalled gekoko-jo (literally, 'overthrow by underlings') when centralgovernment had broken down and the country was torn by strugglesbetween the samurai of rival warlords {daimyos), a period not unUke that ofEngland's War of the Roses. The two adaptations thus belong to a subgenreof Japanese historical film known as chambara or ken-giki (sword theatre): aform usually exploited merely for costume melodrama which Kurosawa isone of the few directors to explore seriously.^ He is remarkable among hiscolleagues not only for the pains he takes to establish authenticity in theminutest detail of his sixteenth-century mises-en-scene, but also for the

1 There are differences between the final, subtitled film versions of both Throne of Blood andRan and their screenplays as published in translation; unless otherwise noted, the citationsare from the film versions. Donald Richie wrote the subtitles for Throne of Blood, Anne Brauthose for Ran.

2 See Silver, esp 43-45, Desser, and Prince 1991.

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME 66, NUMBER 3, SUMMER I997

NATURE AND SOCIETY 509

rigour with which he interrogates the paradoxes of bushido (literally, 'wayof the warrior'), the ethical code that dictates samurai behaviour and is stillan important factor in contemporary Japanese life. With a family of samuraidescent, a father who was an instructor in a military academy, and anadmired older brother who committed suicide (which Kurosawa also at-tempted in 1970), Kurosawa's attitude to bushido seems always to have beenambivalent. Some aspects of it - its regimentation and brutality - he hasalways disapproved of; others (for example, its emphasis on loyalty andduty) he admires; and this ambivalence of attitude was subject to particu-larly severe strains in the middle of the 1950s.

Japanese education has traditionally had a Confucian moral concemwith family obedience and duty to the Emperor, but in the years leading upto and during the Second World War (when Shakespeare's plays werebanned from Japan), traditional samurai ideals of plain living, skill atmartial arts (Kurosawa himself is an expert at 'Kendo' swordsmanship),and obedience to authority were exploited as tools of an aggressivemilitarism. Kurosawa calls this period 'the Dark Ages,' and in his earlyfilms after the war he reacted against it by a humanist emphasis onindividual responsibility and concem for the marginalized unfortunates ofJapan's very hierarchical society. A typical example of this phase of hiswork is Ikiru (1952), in which a meek old clerk, discovering he has cancer,uses his final energies to steer plans for a children's playground throughthe venality and sloth of a bureaucracy to which he has been unquestion-ingly subservient for forty years.

Such an emphasis can be seen as a reflection of the existentialism whichdominated European thought immediately after the Second World War, butit also taps traditional Japanese respect for hoganbiki - sympathy for a loserwho nevertheless retains spiritual integrity.' The same victory-in-defeatalso concludes the most famous of Kurosawa's samurai films. The SevenSamurai (1954), in which the 'magnificent seven' (as a Westem adaptationnamed them) rescue a peasant village from bandits but recognize sadly atthe end that the community they have saved no longer has a place for them:by acting nobly, they have made themselves redundant.

The Seven Samurai marks, in fact, a swing in Kurosawa's attitude back tosympathy with the positive aspects of bushido, for which there seems tohave been two causes. The first of these was growing resentment at theAmerican army of occupation's attempt to eradicate all aspects of Japanesemilitary tradition; the second, a revulsion from the ruthless postwarcapitalism which Kurosawa saw transforming traditional Japanese societyfor the worse.'' Relations with the USA, which had been strained by the

3 See Morris, passim.4 Kurosawa criticizes the corruption of this society in his very free version of Hamlet, The Bad

Sleep Well (i960), which is set among the ruthless businessmen {zaibatsu) of postwar lapan.Cf Perret, 6.

510 BRIAN PARKER

1950-53 war in Korea, deteriorated further because of American testing ofatomic bombs in the Pacific Ocean from 1946 to 1958, with the test on Bikiniatoll in 1954 providing a point of especial provocation because fall-out fromthe explosion killed several Japanese fishermen, causing panic aboutpossible contamination of the fish supply that has always been a staple ofJapanese diet. Record of a Living Being (1955), the Kurosawa film immediate-ly before Throne of Blood, has a protagonist who responds to the Bikini testby trying to persuade his family to emigrate from Japan, only to have themcynically commit him to a lunatic asylum in order to seize his businessassets. The experience of political impotence and frustration' portrayed sostrongly in this film seems to have had the effect of diverting Kurosawafrom consideration of immediate social problems to a deeper, more meta-physical concem with the roots of human - and specifically Japanese - self-destructiveness. And Throne of Blood, with its focus on the collapse ofsamurai ethics, was the vehicle for this shift of focus.

As a code of conduct, bushido has inherent contradictions because itcombines elements from irreconcilable philosophies. It combines Shintoreverence for martial prowess and Confucian insistence on obedience toauthority, on the one hand, with influences from Chinese Taoism and ZenBuddhism, on the other, which emphasize instead the individual's personalresponsibility for his actions while at the same time devaluing all earthlyphenomena in favour of a belief in the spiritual oneness of all things afterdeath. Awareness of such a unity behind the transience of earthly experi-ence creates a bitter-sweet emotion that the Japanese call mono no aware, aparadoxical feeling, not unlike Virgil's 'lacrimae rerum,' of sad thankful-ness before the evanescent loveliness of ordinary life. The calm acceptanceof this complex mood is the goal of most classical Japanese art.*

However, such a combination also produces paradoxes that have beencalled 'highly dramatic and even schizophrenic' (Silver, 22). At an ethicallevel there exists recurrent tension between giri - absolute loyalty to one'sfamily and overlord, with its emphasis on the duty to revenge and praiseof ritual suicide {seppuko) - and ninjo, one's own moral intuitions of rightconduct, as taught by traditional Buddhism. More metaphysically, there aretensions within the Buddhist tradition between self-sacrificing, salvationaryAmida Buddhism (represented by Sue in Ran) and the total world renuncia-tion of mystical Zen; and, most fundamentally of all, there is a paradoxwithin Zen teaching itself, where the demand for responsible moral choiceclashes logically with the perception of all life as samsara - an insubstantialexperience of delusion and pain that can merely be exacerbated by the

5 Cf CoUick: Throne of Blood 'represents an impasse in the liberal view of politics in Japanduring the late 1950's' (181).

6 A condensed introduction to this complex of ideas can be found in Prince 1988,4-17. Seealso Suzuki, 89-136, and relevant entries in the Kodansha Encyclopedia of Japan.

NATURE AND SOCIETY 5 I I

exercise of human will, producing tragic cycles of repetition known askarma: fate as negative recurrence. Stephen Prince has called this latterparadox 'one of the main dialectics informing Kurosawa's works' (1991,124), and it is crucial for our understanding of both his samurai interpreta-tions of Shakespeare.

Besides these socio-political and philosophical contexts, we must alsotake into account Kurosawa's stylistic and semiotic borrowings fromtraditional Japanese painting, theatre, and music, and his respect for theaesthetic principles that underlie them. In painting, for instance, the styleof his samurai fihns is much influenced by picture scrolls of the Heian andKamakura periods, in which the unrolling of monstrously detailed battlescenes is contrasted with depictions of the delicate, rectilinear architectureand formal rituals of Japanese domestic life.̂ Kurosawa, who began hiscareer as an artist, has made a special study of these scrolls, and a modempractitioner of the style, Kohei Esaki, was enlisted as artistic advisor forThrone of Blood - though the style is perhaps even more central to Ran.^ Theblack-and-white photography of Throne of Blood reflects more strikingly theinfluence of suiboko-ga, the Japanese art of ink brush-painting, representedby the starkness of the film's dark mountains, trees, armour, and heavyfortress architecture and the black, volcanic soil of the lava slopes of MountFuji where most of it was shot. Characteristically, suiboko-ga leaves largeareas of its pictures blank, stimulating a sense of mystery and distanceduniversality, and such aporia are represented in the film by the blanketinggrey fogs and swirls of sulphur fumes and obscuring rain that block outparts of many of the frames.

Important though such pictorial influences are, however, the mainformal influence on Kurosawa's style for these two Shakespeareanadaptations is the traditional masked dance-drama of the Noh, which wasa product of the same gekoko-jd period. Kurosawa is drawn to Noh because,he says, 'it is the real heart, the core of all Japanese drama. Its degree ofcompression is extreme, and it is full of symbols, full of subtlety.'' He isinfluenced in both films, though particularly in Throne of Blood, by theshuramono subgenre of Noh, in which ghosts of famous warriors re-enactpast violence in the hope of eventual redemption; and there are alsotouches in both films of other Noh subcategories which deal with desperatewomen, madness, and demonic possession. In both, too, the facial make-upof the dramatis personae is based on specific Noh masks, which has the effectof depersonalizing and universalizing character;'" costume, posture, andgestures constantly reflect Noh stylization; traditional referents - like the

7 SeeZambrino.8 See Parker 1986.9 Quoted in Richie and Mellen, 117.

10 For illustrations and description, see Komparu, 224ff, esp 236-9.

512 BRIAN PARKER

crows in Throne of Blood or the stone fox head presented to Lady Kaede inRan - are used as a form of symbolic shorthand; and there are evenreminiscences of specific Noh plays, especially in the presentation of theForest Demon in Throne of Blood and the blind boy, Tsurumaru, in Ran. Thedisembodied shrill of the nohkan (Noh flute), invoking 'a world infinitelydistant from ours, filled with suffering we cannot comprehend' (Keene, 20),and accompanied by the thud and rap of two contrasting drums, is alsocrucial in both films, representing, for example, the surge of feeling of Asaji,the Lady Macbeth figure in Throne of Blood, as she waits for her husband tomurder their overlord offstage, or the conscience of Hidetora (the Learcharacter in Ran), as the stripling he has blinded uses his flute to expressdespair and grief. Such music is not merely emotional background, more-over, but adds an independent semiotic to the action, helping to producethe distance between character and audience that is essential if the action'suniversality is to be grasped." This distancing has led some Shakespeareancritics, accustomed to a closer sympathy with tragic protagonists, to censureboth Kurosawa adaptations as 'lunar,' 'ice cold,' and even 'emotionallyunsatisfactory; but in Noh one is not supposed to identify too personallywith the characters. To do so would be to surrender to samsara and losespiritual transcendence.

Finally, as regards context, these influences have fostered certaincinematic techniques that have become virtual Kurosawa trademarks. Asin Noh, scenes of tensely stylized stillness alternate with bursts of violence;and, in accordance with the Zen principle of mushin-no-shu (unselfcon-sciousness), there is little introspection or analytic dialogue, with action andvisual imagery carrying more significance than words - another greatdifference from Shakespeare that has bothered critics unfamiliar with Nohsemiotics, though it has been praised enthusiastically by such Shake-spearean film-makers as Peter Brook, Grigori Kozintsev, and Peter Hall.Kurosawa's early work is notable for its skill at fluid tracking shots, wherethe cameras keep pace with rapidly moving characters (as in the sceneswhere the Macbeth and Banquo figures, Washizu and Miki, gallop madlythrough the forest at the beginning of Throne of Blood), though by the timeof Ran this technique is used more sparingly. By shooting from differentangles with three cameras simultaneously (and even five for the great battlescenes in Ran), Kurosawa is able to create a dynamic montage of violentaction, with occasional sequences in slow motion - or even momentary'freezes' - pointed by an abrupt cessation of sound to emphasize aparticular image (and to add a dreamlike quality to it): as when themysterious arrow that kills Washizu pierces his larynx, all sound ceases,and for an instant his warrior's scowl, based on the haita mask of Noh,

11 Keene, 33; for a comparison with Brecht's Verfremdungseffekt, see Mellen, 16-19.

NATURE AND SOCIETY 513

changes to the yase-ototo mask's recognition of death." And increasingly,Kurosawa has combined long takes and stationary cameras with telephotolenses so as to foreshorten and flatten perspective to the two-dimensional,surface orientation traditional in Japanese art. As a result, characters seemclosely related to background, and visual imagery detached from normalperspective - according to Kurosawa himself - acquires 'a weight, apressure [that is] almost hallucinatory, making the rhythms of the move-ments emerge."^ An excellent example of such two-dimensional flatteningis provided by the shots of the ranks of 'forest' advancing on Washizu'sstronghold at the end of Throne of Blood, which the telephoto lensestransform to the semblance of a relentlessly cascading waterfall. And inThrone of Blood (though not in Ran) the distancing effect of such 'metacine-matic' devices is enhanced by sometimes changing scenes with an obvioushorizontal 'wipe,' in place of the less stylized 'dissolve' favoured byWestern directors.

All these factors, but particularly the paradoxes of Zen and semioticstylizations of Noh, need to be kept in mind if the significance of Kurosa-wa's relation between Nature and Society in the two samurai adaptationsis to be interpreted aright. Despite more striking resemblances than theirShakespeare originals - castles, mountains, cloud vistas, galloping horses,scurrying samurai in insect-like armour backed by fluttering pennants, andcool geometrical interiors of ritualized behaviour - the implications ofThrone of Blood and Ran are ultimately very different. Whereas the vision ofKing Lear is bleaker and more problematic than the Christian context ofredemption established for Macbeth, Ran - although it too has beencondemned in recent criticism for 'pessimism' and 'fierce bitterness' (Prince1991,149,284) - is actually much less negative and more open than Throneof Blood. But this can only be grasped if the films are placed in a properBuddhist perspective.

II THRONE OF BLOOD

The impression of Nature offered in Throne of Blood seems almost complete-ly negative, and is closely linked to the protagonist's state of mind. The filmis shot in bleak surroundings and stormy weather; and, exploiting thedream structure oi shuramono Noh, the story of Washizu's fall is presentedas a recapitulation, set within the framework of a prologue and epilogueoccurring many centuries later. Such a structure inevitably establishes astrong sense of negative Fate, with Nature seeming to determine humandestruction.

12 This 'freeze' effect is like held poses called kimaru in Japanese dance. For the yase-ototosuggestion, see Goodwin, 189.

13 Quoted in Shirae, Shibata, and Yamada, 76.

514 BRIAN PARKER

After titles shot against a 'web' of intertwining branches, the film openswith thick mists parting to reveal a stony mountain landscape, darkened byfog and rain and beset by howling winds, with the camera panning into adeclivity with curiously regular sides"* to focus on a fenced-off post onwhich is written 'Here stood the Castle of the Spider's Web.' Underneaththese shots comes the s/iura-like chant of a male chorus:

Behold within this place, now desolate, stoodOnce a mighty fortress, lived a proud warriorMurdered by ambition, his spirit walking still.Vain pride, then as now, will lead ambition to kill.

The same emphasis on human delusion is chanted again at the end, and italso occurs twice within the story proper. At the beginning of the formalbanquet where Washizu will see Miki's ghost, an old general begins adance to a guttural Noh recital of the disasters that punished an ambitiouswarrior of the past, only to be interrupted - Claudius-like - by the guilt-stricken Washizu; and the same insistence on the vanity of all humanendeavour is also the burden of Kurosawa's replacement for Shakespeare'sthree witches, the old spinning-woman who is really a Shinto demon, theforest's spirit-of-place.

After this prologue, the mists close, and when they reopen we aretransported back into the sixteenth century, with a castle in what Kurosawacalls the 'Black Style' now filling the declivity. The action proper beginswith messengers alerting its daimyo, the Duncan-figure Kuniharu, of thedefeat of a rebellion by one of his generals, Fujimaki (Cawdor),and therepulse of an invasion by the daimyo of the neighbouring province. LordInui. There follows a deservedly famous sequence in which the heroes ofthese wars, Washizu and Miki, summoned to receive promotion, get lost inthe mazelike paths and bewildering half-lights of a forest that has beenadapted - as is several times emphasized - into a outer defence-work forthe daimyo's castle:

When I went into the way castles were constructed in those days [explainsKurosawa], some of them made use of the wood which was grown as if it hadbeen a maze. Therefore, the wood was named 'the wood of spiders' hair,'meaning the wood that catches up the invaders as if in a spider's web. The titleThe Castle ofthe Spider's Web (Kumonosu-Dju [sic]) came to be in this way.''

14 The published script calls, however, for 'crumbling stone walls,' 'water of a moat withgreen scum, glimmering dimly,' and 'a sobbing old pine tree [that] rustles against a stonewall,' like the pine that forms the background of all Noh stages; see Niki, 155.

15 Quoted in Manvell, 104.

NATURE AND SOCIETY 515

Developing 'Fair is foul and foul is fair' (i.i.io) in the song of Shakes-peare's witches and Macbeth's 'So foul and fair a day I have not seen'(i.iii.38), weather and lighting in this forest are a disconcerting mixture offog, rain, flashes of lightning, and gleams of sunshine, with thunderalternating with what sounds like distant laughter. An interesting gloss onthe traditional menace of such contradictions can be found in the firstepisode of Kurosawa's more recent film Dreams (1990), entitled 'Sunshineand Rain.' This recounts a Shinto story told to Kurosawa by his motherabout evil fortune coming to a boy who stumbles on a wedding of foxes ina wood where sunshine mingles with rain - foxes being frequent Shintoavatars for malevolent spirits (as can be seen in the stone fox headpresented to the evil Lady Kaede in Ran).

Initially confident, Washizu and Miki become disoriented and finallylose all self-control. Washizu fires an arrow at the lightning,'* to be metwith a mocking laugh that provokes the warriors to charge even deeperinto the trees with weapons at the ready. This futile attack is fihnedbrilliantly by a camera tracking beside their galloping horses behindscreens of brush and branches, reinforcing the cobweb metaphor of the title(and incidentally relating the audience with the forest, not the warriors).Then, unexpectedly, at the heart of the storm and forest, they enter a calmand sunlit clearing. In its centre is a frail thatched hut of poles, whoseinhabitant - obscured initially by a tree trunk that for the first timedecisively separates the two warriors - is chanting in a low, sepulchrallytoneless voice about the vanity of human pride:

Men are vain and death is longAnd pride dies first within the grave ...Life must end in fear.Only evil may maintainAn afterlife for those who will.Who love this world, who have no son.To whom ambition calls.Even so, this false fame calls.Death will reign, man lives in vain.

This is the Spirit of the Forest, an asexual old woman seated spinning - likeFortune with her wheel or the Creek fate Clotho in Western tradition - aweb of human destiny that seems to be equated with the labyrinthine pathsof the forest.

16 There is a Buddhist ceremony where priests fire arrows against evil spirits (cf TitusAndronicus). This arrow may relate to the arrow that finally transfixes Washizu's throat,which comes from a different direction from the other arrows.

5 l 6 BRIAN PARKER

Noh influence is particularly strong in this scene. Kurosawa says it wasbased on a specific Noh play: 'In the case of the witch in the wood, Iplanned to replace it with the equivalent to the hag which appears in theNoh play named Kurozuka'^^ - in which travelling monks encounter ademon in the guise of an old woman, spinning in a frail thatched hut; and,though Kurosawa does not mention it, there may also be traces of anotherNoh script, Tsuchigomo (The Spider'), in which a warrior has to defeat ademon spider disguised as a priest, in a set that literally represents thespider's web.'* Kurosawa also says that he 'showed each of the players aphotograph of the mask of the Noh which came closest to their respectiverole,"' which in the demon's case was a mask called Yamanba ('themountain witch'). The face of the actress is thus made up to resemble theunrealistic white immobility of this mask; and her white robe and posture(sitting with one knee raised and eyes lowered), her slow hieratic gesturesturning the spinning wheel, and her curiously atonal voice are all typicalof Noh. The flimsy hut of poles is a well-known Noh locale, familiar fromseveral other famous plays besides Kurozuka,"^ and its fragility contrastsironically not only with the surrounding forest but also with the massivetimbers from which the castles are constructed. Significantly, the spinningwheel has two spools, a larger one from which the demon spins onto asmaller, accelerating as she forecasts Washizu's brief career and slowing toforecast that of Miki, whose descendants will prolong it. These doublespools seem to relate the karma of mankind as a whole, as lamented by thechorus, to the more limited but matching fates of the two warriors. Afterher prophecies, the demon vanishes, merging into the white mists as laterWashizu's wife will apparently merge with darkness. The hut too vanishes,and the warriors find themselves among mounds of skeletons in antiquearmour, samurai like themselves who perished long ago.

Fleeing this vision, they get lost again, in another celebrated filmsequence. This time they are not misled by labyrinthine paths but bewil-dered in dense fog, a more subjective image of their own confusion.Kurosawa uses a static camera to record them crossing the same location nofewer than twelve times, in varying combinations of distance and directionand with gradually diminishing speed, until suddenly the mist clears again,as it did after the opening chorus, to reveal once more the Forest Castle inthe distance. Sigruficantly, this vision now separates the nervously jocularcomrades to either side of the screen, a division that the tree before thedemon's hut began.

17 Quoted in Manvell, 103; the title means 'Black Mound.'18 See Keene, 90, for an illustration.19 Quoted Manvell, 103.20 For example, in the Noh play Semiramu, which is a source for the Tsunimaru episodes in

Ran; for a picture, see Keene, 89.

NATURE AND SOCIETY 517

The brilliance with which this sequence conveys mental confusion hasoften been remarked on;"" and later, when Washizu alone visits the demona second time, in search of reassurance against news of unexpected tempestand an imminent attack, the forest's expressionist significance becomesmore marked. Vistas are even more distorted and weather more grotesque-ly incongruous: lightning comes from several directions simultaneously;the demon now runs behind the brush parallel to Washizu's gallop, like thecamera in the earlier tracking sequence; she no longer sits, but aggressivelystands to address him; and having given him the misleading assurance thathe will be safe until the forest moves on the castle," it is she who openlylaughs at him, no longer a disembodied voice among the trees. She conjuresup, not symbolic figures and future kings as in Macbeth, but ghosts ofwarriors from the forest chamel heaps, to recapitulate their ancientsavagery in antique dress and armour. They accost Washizu from everydirection, forcing him to rein his horse into tight circles to confront them -a pattern that is used often in the film to signify entrapment, repeating thestructure of the whole - while, reversing his first, more innocent reaction,he now vows to raise a mound of bones like those he fled from earlier.

Like the witches in Macbeth, the demon and the forest are being usedhere partly as symbols for Washizu's state of mind, but clearly they are alsomore significant than this, metonymic rather than metaphoric, because theyalso exist independently. Like Shakespeare's hags, they raise the possibility(and problem) of a predetermined fate. Critics of the movie invariablyinterpret the forest and the castles as rival, antagonistic signifiers, whetherthese are seen as Nature's amoral energy subverting human efforts toestablish civilized order - as in Jack Jorgens's interpretation (1977,153-^0,1983) - or, conversely, as natural vitality overwhelming the exploitativehierarchy of a feudal aristocracy, as Elihu Pearlman has argued subse-quently. Such opposition is certainly a major part of the film's effect, butbeneath the differences between Nature and Society lie similarities that arefinally more important. In both Kurosawa movies, but especially Throne ofBlood, they are perceived ultimately as collaborating.

Within the castles, for example, the presentation of the Forest Demon isparalleled by sequences in which the Lady Macbeth figure, Asaji, domi-nates. These too are dense with remiruscences of Noh. Like the demon, theactress playing Asaji wears the white, immobile make-up of a specific Nohmask, in this case the shakumi mask of a beauty no longer young and about

21 Cf McDonald: 'As Washizu and Miki finally emerge from the murky forest, we feel as ifwe have stepped into and out of the depths of the protagonist's mind' (159). This is alsoBlumenthal's view in his pioneering study 'Macbeth into Throne of Blood,' 191.

22 Lynda Boose made the interesting suggestion (in discussion with the author) thatWashizu's fatal complacency is Kurosawa's criticism of Japanese reliance in the SecondWorld War on the impregnability of their island, protected by the kamikaze (sacred winds)which became the destructive blast of atomic bombs.

3 l 8 BRIAN PARKER

to go mad: The actress who wears this mask, when she gets angry, changesher mask for one the eyes of which are golden-coloured, this maskrepresents that state of an unearthly feeling of tension and Lady [Asaji]assumes the same state.'̂ ^ Asaji's white robe, low voice, seated positionwith one knee raised and eyes averted, her positioning in the cinema frame,and the contrast between her tense stillness and Washizu's facial grimacesand restless pacing are all reminiscent of the demon scene; while hergliding walk, the muted clack of her tabi (sandals) and sussuration of hersilk kimono over the wooden floors, like the rustling of the demon'sspinning wheel, are all familiar minimalist effects of Noh.

The action of Shakespeare's play is considerably pared down byKurosawa in order to emphasize that Asaji's evil is much more unqualifiedand active than Lady Macbeth's. Though she echoes the source's incitementof Washizu's ambition and scorn for his timidity, Asaji's crucial argumentis one that does not appear in Macbeth but fits instead the central samuraiconcem with political loyalty and betrayal. She plays upon Washizu'sparanoia by arguing that Miki is sure to betray him to their daimyo, andeasily quashes his own feeble appeals to giri by reminding him thatKuniharu, unlike the saintly Duncan, himself came to power by murderingthe previous overlord. It is Asaji who then leads Washizu by the hand tothe tatami (mat) from which Kuniharu has recently held court andpersuades him to sit hubristically upon it, and Asaji who, leaving himsquatting in a glaring stupor, goes to drug Kuniharu's guards, then returnsto check that they are unconscious, seeming in one striking sequence tovanish into, then rematerialize from, the darkness itself; as the Forest Spirithad earlier disappeared into fog ('Come thick night, / And pall thee in thedunnest smoke of hell' i.v.51-52). It is Asaji, not a visionary dagger, whoforces a spear into Washizu's nerveless hands and compels him from theroom to commit the murder. And after he returns, sinking back into hisstupor, it is she who wrenches the spear from his bloody hands and plantsit on a drunken guard; she who carefully washes her hands in an exquisitebasin (made specially for the film); and even she who flings open the doorsto raise the alarm personally. There is no fainting, real or feigned, withAsaji: she lacks both Lady Macbeth's compunction and her ragged nerves.Later it is also Asaji who suggests the ruse of Kuniharu's funeral cortege togain entrance to the Forest Castle left under Miki's guard; and in the ghostscene she is even more contemptuously forceful in controlling Washizu'spanic and later in reminding him to inquire whether Miki's murderer has

23 Kurosawa, in Manvell, 103; this second mask is usually called deigan. Isuzu Yamada, whoplayed Asaji, was not only a nearly perfect example of classical Japanese ideals of femininebeauty but also appreciably older than Toshiro Mifune, playing Washizu - withimplications both for her dominance and her childlessness.

NATURE AND SOCIETY 519

also killed the son. Whenever she absents herself, Washizu loses control,murdering first one of the guards, then his hired assassin.

The numinous centre of their castle, equivalent to the demon's hut (orLady Kaede's 'gold room' in Ran), is the 'forbidden room' into whichWashizu and Asaji have to move to accommodate Lord Kuniharu's visit.Washizu's defeated predecessor, Fujimaki, committed seppuko in this roomrather than face punishment for treachery, and the rectangular patterningof its floor and walls is marred by a monstrous, shapeless stain of bloodacross the three planes of one corner. Both Washizu and Asaji showthemselves aware of this ('It will have blood, they say: blood will haveblood,' iii.iv. 123), though they interpose a flimsy screen of arrows betweenthe stain and the tatami where they kneel. This replicates the contrastbetween the frail poles of the demon's hut and the circumambient menaceof the forest with its mounds of skulls. While Kuniharu is being killed(offscreen), Asaji occupies this room alone, her habitual icy composurebroken by furtive glances at the stain, until, unable to bear the tensionfurther, to a sudden shriek of nohkan and rapping drums she rises for aspasmodic dance in front of the stain - half ecstasy, half terror - as if actingout the violence, like Lady Macbeth's retrospective sleep-walking: a scenethat is pure Noh.

Far from being spared knowledge of Miki's murder, as in Shakespeare,in Throne of Blood it is Asaji herself who urges it. Washizu is ready toconfirm Miki's offer of support by naming the latter's son his heir, but Asajiinsists again that Miki will betray them; and when this no longer convincesher husband, she forces Washizu's hand by claiming to be pregnant herself.Most critics take this assertion at face value, and even praise it as Kurosa-wa's happy invention to explain Asaji's madness;^ but her claim is clearlyopportunistic, one more manipulation of Washizu. When subsequently itis announced that she has 'miscarried,' the furtive old woman who bringsthe news consistently blocks Washizu's attempts to visit his wife. Instead,he has to retreat to the audience chamber where, gazing at his daimyo'sregalia, he sums up Macbeth's famous aria of despair ('all our yesterdayshave lighted fools / The way to dusty death,' v.v.22-23) with one great,self-condemning cry of 'Fool!' Moreover, in Asaji's final scene, whenWashizu discovers her dry-washing her hands behind a screen improvisedfrom her own dishevelled kimono - continuing even when he removes thebowl and for the first time speaks her name - she neither has words ofremorse nor makes any reference to a child. And this is the last we see ofher. There is no announcement of her death, still less any suggestion of

24 The only exception is Goodwin (181), who comes independently to the same conclusionas myself. Hapgood suggests a possible historical precedent, however, in the unexpectedpregnancy of the shogun Yoshimasa's wife (236).

5 2 0 BRIAN PARKER

suicide. In bushido, after all, suicide is honourable, and the omission of it inAsaji's case is surely meant to contrast with the elaborate mourning for theseppuko of Lord Kuniharu's widow, which Kurosawa has inserted into thestory earlier. The only oblique reminiscence of Asaji at the end is that herdisingenuous warning that 'Arrows will seek your life not only from thefront but from the rear' proves ironically prophetic of Washizu's actualdeath (see note 16).

The scene in which Washizu learns of his Wife's madness also has aninteresting symbolic dimension. The squealing, panicky waiting womenwho bump into him (so different from the discreet servant who announcedthe 'miscarriage') relate to the immediately preceding sequence in whichhis audience chamber was invaded by flocks of screeching, fluttering birds,who even perched on his head and shoulders, clinging (as arrows will dolater) to his wooden armour. Besides fleeing from the besiegers' lopping ofbranches, foreshadowing the castle's eventual invasion, and exposing thealready strained morale of its defenders, these birds also relate to earlierbirds of ill-omen associated with Asaji. Lady Macbeth's The raven himselfis hoarse / That croaks the fatal entrance of Duncan / Under my battle-ments' (i.v.39-41) is actualized in the croak of a crow when Washizu'sservants first see the bloodstain in the 'forbidden room'; this is heard againas Washizu is persuaded to murder Kuniharu, with Asaji opportunisticallyinterpreting it. That means the castle is yours'; and it occurs for a third timeas Washizu goes to perform the murder, when there is a brief shot of araucous night bird crossing the sickle moon that is Kuniharu's insignia.Crows are traditional symbols of death in Japanese culture, and may alsohave a further special significance for Kurosawa. The eighth vignette inDreams is called 'Crows' and is about the suicide of Vincent Van Gogh,Kurosawa's favourite artist, after completing his ominous final painting of'Crows Flying over a Corn Field.'

In contrast to the sinister significance of birds, uncontaminated giri isidentified with horses. When Asaji first persuades Washizu to kill hisdaimyo (in the 'North Castle' that, ironically, was awarded him forloyalty),the submission of his giri to her browbeating is emblematized byoverexposed shots through open shuji (sliding screens) to either side of him.In the courtyard beyond, a horse that previously we have seen walkingpeacefully with its groom (in a scene where Washizu's retainers praise thepastoral tranquillity of their new abode) now frantically resists attempts todiscipline it within the tight circuit of a training rope. A similar sceneoccurs later in the same courtyard (which by now has passed to Miki) whenMiki's horse resists saddling for the ride on which its master is to bemurdered, thus reinforcing the warnings of Miki's son; and it is the samehorse's return without a rider that economically signals that the murder hasbeen done (Shakespeare's assassination scene having been cut). Thisreinterprets the madness of Duncan's horses mentioned in Macbeth

NATURE AND SOCIETY 52I

(ii.iv. 14-20), and agaii\ the symbolism has resonances in Kurosawa's otherwork. His first success was a film actually called Horse (1941), whichincludes the prototype of the sequence in which Washizu and Miki keeppassing the same location in a fog, as a mare searches frantically backwardsand forwards for her foal; and it is the dead chieftain's horse alone who isable to recognize the 'shadow warrior' as an impostor in Kagemusha (1980),Kurosawa's samurai film preceding Ran, with devastating results.

Finally, though at first sight the spareness and neat geometry of beams,railings, shoji, and tatami in the castles (with even fog clouds formalized intoa decorative pattem on the walls of the Forest Castle's audience chamber)seem the antithesis of the formless intertwinings of the forest, it soonbecomes evident that the castles too are labyrinthine: not only in suddenunexpected openings of shoji and a complex of railed passageways thatresemble the entrance and exit ramp of the Noh stage (the hashigakari), butalso in the visual patterning of their timbers and especially the railings oftheir balconies, which form another network, like the forest branches,through which the cameras increasingly seem to spy on Washizu. Thiscomes to a climax in the last scenes, in which, Noh-like, all action concen-trates on the accelerated 'dance' of Washizu's final destruction.

This death scene has been criticized as too prolonged and exaggerated,as Washizu dashes up, then down the staircase between his watch-towerand the courtyard, in dense clouds of arrows which leave his bodygrotesquely porcupined with shafts. However, his impulse to mount, thencompulsion downward are a last reprise of the tragic de casibus (likeHidetora's magnificent descent from the burning keep to confront massedenemies in Ran)f^ the angled railings between which he is shot and thetangled mats of arrows that he constantly has to break through recall boththe web of the forest branches and the arrow screen of the 'forbiddenroom'; and the way he keeps being backed literally into corners isreminiscent of the bloodstained corner where Fujimaki killed himself. Thenumber of arrows is not unrealistic, moreover, if we assume most of therebellious troops in the courtyard are now shooting at him - a final terribleemphasis on the leitmotif oi treachery-itself-betrayed - and also take accountof the fact that samurai armour was wooden, so that arrows could stick intoit without necessarily piercing the body (there are similar images in Ranand in the misha-e scrolls). And when, bristling with shafts, he diesstumbling towards his rebellious troops retreating into the fog before him- in a shot that replicates the murdered assassin stumbling towardsWashizu himself, as he backed towards the fog pattern on the walls ofForest Castle - his image from behind resembles that of the many-legged

25 In Hisae Niki's translation of the script, Washizu is shot in the head by one of his generalsand falls headlong from the watchtower, without confronting his enemies (205).

5 2 2 BRIAN PARKER

(and self-destructive) scorpion that has been impressed upon us as hispersonal insignia.^*

Ill CONCLUSION

And so we come to the conclusion. Washizu's body is covered by swirlingmist; there is a brief, foreshortened glimpse of the 'forest' advancingwavelike on the castle; then the fog closes in like a 'dissolve' and clears forthe last time to return us finally to the opening framework of barrenmountain, solitary memorial, and choric chant about the pointlesspersistence of ambition:

Still his spirit walks, his fame is known,For what once was so now is still true.Murderous ambition will pursueBeyond the grave to give its due.̂ ''

This is certainly more pessimistic than Macbeth. Washizu dies ignobly atthe hands of his followers, not bravely in single combat with the Macdufffigure (Noriyasu); there is no equivalent of the scene where Malcolmproves his worthiness to be the next king; and though there is a briefglimpse of Noriyasu with the surviving sons of the two heroes, it has beenestablished that the troops they lead belong to the invading daimyo, Inui,who is a far cry from the saintly Edward the Confessor in Macbeth, resemb-ling rather the invader Ayabe who continues civil war in Ran. At the endof Throne of Blood the political succession is left wholly at risk, without anysense of re-established order to offset Washizu's death and the chorus'slament.

The original wording of that threnody (see note 27) equates Nature withthe attacking force, and there are two details of the film (not in thepublished text, and unnoted by previous critics) that relate to this andqualify the mainly negative impression of Nature in the film. In hiscomment about historical models for the forest labyrinth (quoted earlier, p514), Kurosawa emphasizes that such mazes were man-made defenceworks. References within the film confirm this, and Noriyasu is easily ableto evade the labyrinth by instructing his soldiers to ignore the paths and

26 Miki's rabbit insignia, on the other hand, suits both the pacific and prolific aspects of hischaracter.

27 This chant in Hisae Niki's translation goes (206):The attacking forces were none other than the rustling reeds in the breeze.The war cries were none other than a breeze in the pine tree.[A sobbing pine tree rustles against a stone wall.]The ruins show the fate of demonic men with treacherous desire.Life is the same now as in ancient times.

NATURE AND SOCIETY 523

march straight through the trees. The deadly and misleading aspect of theforest, then, is not Nature's but something that has been made by man. Andthis process is shown continuing at the end. In the final glimpse of theattacking besiegers we are shown not only lopped-off branches, as inShakespeare, but whole uprooted trees transported on carts; and the terrainof the prologue and epilogue is no longer wooded at all, but barren, stony,totally devoid of vegetation, as if 'the catastrophes precipitated byWashizu's action make desolate the whole world' (Prince 1991,147). Naturehas been rendered destructive because of its perversion by man.

This agrees not only with the traditional Japanese reverence for Nature- and Kurosawa's own especial sensitivity to natural beauty"^ - but also tohis presentation of Nature in other films, particularly the unexpectedlylovely scenery of Ran.^^ His attitude is spelled out, almost too clearly, inanother film, Dersu Uzala (1975), in which a Russian engineer learns respectfor Nature from a primitive Siberian hunter but is helpless to prevent thehunter's death and even the obliteration of his grave by technological'progress.' Similarly, in 'Peach Orchard,' the second episode oi Dreams, tiersof dolls in antique samurai costume tell the young boy who representsKurosawa himself that he will never be able to return home because hismaterialistic relatives have cut down the family peach orchard, except forone small tree that bears a single flower.

These films are easily interpreted as Kurosawa's rejection of the ruthlessindustrialization of postwar Japan, but there is another deeper influenceinvolved. If his critique of samurai bushido stems from his resistance toJapan's own militarism, his shifting attitude to Nature is influenced, just asstrongly, by the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and thecontinuing threat of accidental nuclear disaster. He has two films specifi-cally about the American bombings: as was mentioned earlier. Record of aLiving Being (1955) was made as a protest against the poisoning of Japanesefishermen by the Bikini explosion in the previous year, and the refusal ofa Japan intent on rapid industrialization to recognize its ecological danger;and, more recently. Rhapsody in August (1991) is about the difficulty thatJapanese even today have in confronting the experience (and thereforeleaming the lessons) of the bomb that destroyed Nagasaki. In Dreams thereare also two sequences about accidental nuclear disaster: IVIount Fuji inRed' simulates the holocaust that might be caused by the explosion of anuclear power plant; and in The Weeping Demon,' the sole survivor ofsuch a disaster is conducted through a nightmare landscape of mutationsby a demon who complains that Nature has vanished from the earthbecause humanity has poisoned the environment. This 'Weeping Demon'

28 See Kurosawa, 46.29 This is discussed in my 1991 article, which compares Ran to the King Lear films of Peter

Brook and Grigori Kozintsev; cf Bannon, 5-11.

524 BRIAN PARKER

is a kindred spirit to the laughing, punitive demon in Throne of Blood, butrelates also to the 'Weeping Buddha' on the saintly Sue's scroll in Ran.

The last episode of Dreams, 'The Village of Waterfalls,' shows a beautifulbucolic village of children, presided over by a wise old man who warnsagainst destroying the paradise of Nature. In the press kit for the film,Kurosawa notes. The theme here is nostalgia - nostalgia towards the lossof Nature and with it, the loss of the heart of humankind'; and during thecourse of the joyful funeral with which the episode concludes, the wise oldman explains that 'Living in harmony with nature makes a friend even ofdeath.' This is pure mono no aware, and the same mood is caught in thebeautiful panoramic sunset with which Ran on one plane concludes, whilethe cortege of Hidetora and his son, passing in deep shadow in theforeground, represents on another plane the tragic karma experienced inThrone of Blood; and between the two experiences, alone in the middledistance, hesitating on the brink of his family's ruined castle, is theenigmatic figure of blind Tsurumaru, who Kurosawa has said is representa-tive of modem man: The solitary blind person represents for me theessence of humanity today... [But] my film is not... despairing... it is moreof a warning: "Concentrate your efforts on becoming happier, and not onheading for even greater unhappiness." '^° The karmic aspect of Nature inThrone of Blood is thus incorporated into a larger, much more complexcomment in Ran.^' Within the system of Buddhist thought, Kurosawa'spresentations of Nature in his samurai adaptations of Shakespeare can berecognized not as the contradictions they seem at first to be when inter-preted out of cultural and historical context, but as complementary visions.

WORKS CITED

Bannoii, Christopher J. 'Man and Nature in Ran and King Lear.' New Orleans Review18:14 (1991), 5-11

Blumenthal, J. 'Macbeth into Throne of Blood.' Sight and Sound 34:4 (1965), 190-95CoUick, John. Shakespeare, Cinema and Society. Matichester and New York: Man-

chester University Press 1989Desser, David. The Samurai Films ofAkira Kurosawa. Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press

1983Goodwin, James. Akira Kurosawa and Intertextual Cinema. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins

University Press 1994

30 Quoted in Tessier, 69.31 The final silhouette of Tsurumaru leaning on his staff is repeated by tviro more distant

silhouettes, in an image reminiscent of Golgotha's three crosses. They remind me of theparallel sacrifices of Sue and Subaru.

NATURE AND SOCIETY 525

Hapgood, Robert. 'Kurosawa's Shakespeare Films.' Shakespeare and the MovingImage: The Plays on Film and Television. Ed Anthony Davies and Stanley Wells.Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press 1994

Jorgens, Jack J. Shakespeare on Film. Bloomington: Indiana University Press 1977- 'Kurosawa's Throne of Blood: Washizu and Miki Meet the Forest Spirit.' Literature

and Film Quarterly 11:3 (1983), 167-73Kodansha Encyclopedia of Japan. Tokyo and New York: Kodansha 1983Keene, Donald. No, the Classical Theatre of Japan. Tokyo: Kodansha International 1966Komparu, Kunio. The Noh Theatre: Principles and Perspectives. Trans Jane Corddry.

New York: Weatherhill/Tankasha 1983Kurosawa, Akira. Something Like an Autobiography. Trans Audie E. Bock. New York:

Vintage 1983Manvell, Roger. Shakespeare and the Film. London: Dent 1971McDonald, Keiko. Cinema East: A Critical Study of Major Japanese Films. Rutherford,

NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press 1973Mellen, Joan. The Epic Cinema of Kurosawa.' Take One 3:4 (1972), 16-19Morris, Ivan. The Nobility of Failure: Tragic Heroes in the History of Japan. New York:

Holt, Rinehart and Winston 1975Niki, Hisae. Shakespeare Translation in Japanese Culture. Tokyo: Kenseisha 1984Parker, Brian. 'Ran and the Tragedy of History.' University of Toronto Quarterly 55

(1986), 412-23- The Use of Mise-en-Scene in Three Films of King Lear.' Shakespeare Quarterly 42:1

(1991), 75-90Pearlman, Elihu. 'Macbeth on Film: Politics.' Shakespeare Survey 39 (1987), 67-74Perret, Marion D. 'Kurosawa's Hamlet: Samurai in Business Dress.' Shakespeare on

Film Newsletter 6 (December 1990)Prince, Stephen. 'Zen and Selfhood: Pattems of Eastern Thought in Kurosawa's

Films.' Post Script 7:2 (1988), 4-17- The Warrior's Camera: The Cinema of Akira Kurosawa. Princeton, NJ: Princeton

University Press 1991Richie, Donald, and Joan Mellen. The Films ofAkira Kurosawa. Rev ed Berkeley:

University of California Press 1984Shirae, Yoshio, Hayao Shibata, and Koichi Yamada. 'L'Empereur.' Cahiers du Cinema

183 (1966), 35-43,74-9Silver, Alain. The Samurai Film. Woodstock, NY: Overlook Press 1983Suzuki, Daisetz T. Zen and Japanese Culture. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University

Press 1973Tessier, Max. 'Propos d'Akira Kurosawa.' La Revue du Cinema 408 (September 1985),

67-70Yakir, Dan. The Warrior Returns.' Film Comment 16 (November-December 1980),

54-57Zambrino, Ana Laura. Throne of Blood: Kurosawa's Macbeth.' Literature and Film

Quarterly 2 (1974), 262-74