BRIAN PARKER

Nature and Society in Akira Kurosawa's Throne of Blood

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

It is important for Western audiences to establish a proper context for the films of Akira Kurosawa. He has often been called the 'most Western' of Japanese film directors (and is certainly the best known of them in Europe and America), but though he freely admits influence from Western directors and painters and has based several of his films on major Western texts, he insists that his borrowings have always been adapted to the modes and aesthetics of traditional Japanese thought: so much so, in fact, he says, that 'I feel that among Japanese directors today I must be the most Japanese' (Yakir, 57). And in none of his work is recognition of a specific cultural context more important than in his two samurai adaptations of Shakespearean tragedy: Kumonoso-jo, his 1957 black-and-white version of Macbeth, obscurely titled Throne of Blood in English though The Castle of the Spider's Web' (or 'Cobweb Castle') is its more literal and pertinent translation; and Ran - meaning 'Chaos' - his 1983 adaptation of King Lear in cinemascope and colour.' Both these films are set in a sixteenth-century period of Japanese history called gekoko-jo (literally, 'overthrow by underlings') when central government had broken down and the country was torn by struggles between the samurai of rival warlords {daimyos), a period not unUke that of England's War of the Roses. The two adaptations thus belong to a subgenre of Japanese historical film known as chambara or ken-giki (sword theatre): a form usually exploited merely for costume melodrama which Kurosawa is one of the few directors to explore seriously.^ He is remarkable among his colleagues not only for the pains he takes to establish authenticity in the minutest 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 and Ran and their screenplays as published in translation; unless otherwise noted, the citations are from the film versions. Donald Richie wrote the subtitles for Throne of Blood, Anne Brau those 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, 'way of the warrior'), the ethical code that dictates samurai behaviour and is still an important factor in contemporary Japanese life. With a family of samurai descent, a father who was an instructor in a military academy, and an admired older brother who committed suicide (which Kurosawa also attempted in 1970), Kurosawa's attitude to bushido seems always to have been ambivalent. Some aspects of it - its regimentation and brutality - he has always disapproved of; others (for example, its emphasis on loyalty and duty) he admires; and this ambivalence of attitude was subject to particularly severe strains in the middle of the 1950s. Japanese education has traditionally had a Confucian moral concem with family obedience and duty to the Emperor, but in the years leading up to and during the Second World War (when Shakespeare's plays were banned from Japan), traditional samurai ideals of plain living, skill at martial arts (Kurosawa himself is an expert at 'Kendo' swordsmanship), and obedience to authority were exploited as tools of an aggressive militarism. Kurosawa calls this period 'the Dark Ages,' and in his early films after the war he reacted against it by a humanist emphasis on individual responsibility and concem for the marginalized unfortunates of Japan's very hierarchical society. A typical example of this phase of his work 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 through the venality and sloth of a bureaucracy to which he has been unquestioningly subservient for forty years. Such an emphasis can be seen as a reflection of the existentialism which dominated European thought immediately after the Second World War, but it also taps traditional Japanese respect for hoganbiki - sympathy for a loser who nevertheless retains spiritual integrity.' The same victory-in-defeat also concludes the most famous of Kurosawa's samurai films. The Seven Samurai (1954), in which the 'magnificent seven' (as a Westem adaptation named them) rescue a peasant village from bandits but recognize sadly at the 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 to sympathy with the positive aspects of bushido, for which there seems to have been two causes. The first of these was growing resentment at the American army of occupation's attempt to eradicate all aspects of Japanese military tradition; the second, a revulsion from the ruthless postwar capitalism which Kurosawa saw transforming traditional Japanese society for 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.

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1950-53 war in Korea, deteriorated further because of American testing of atomic bombs in the Pacific Ocean from 1946 to 1958, with the test on Bikini atoll in 1954 providing a point of especial provocation because fall-out from the explosion killed several Japanese fishermen, causing panic about possible contamination of the fish supply that has always been a staple of Japanese diet. Record ofa Living Being (1955), the Kurosawa film immediately before Throne of Blood, has a protagonist who responds to the Bikini test by trying to persuade his family to emigrate from Japan, only to have them cynically commit him to a lunatic asylum in order to seize his business assets. The experience of political impotence and frustration' portrayed so strongly in this film seems to have had the effect of diverting Kurosawa from consideration of immediate social problems to a deeper, more metaphysical concem with the roots of human - and specifically Japanese - selfdestructiveness. And Throne of Blood, with its focus on the collapse of samurai ethics, was the vehicle for this shift of focus. As a code of conduct, bushido has inherent contradictions because it combines elements from irreconcilable philosophies. It combines Shinto reverence for martial prowess and Confucian insistence on obedience to authority, on the one hand, with influences from Chinese Taoism and Zen Buddhism, on the other, which emphasize instead the individual's personal responsibility for his actions while at the same time devaluing all earthly phenomena in favour of a belief in the spiritual oneness of all things after death. Awareness of such a unity behind the transience of earthly experience creates a bitter-sweet emotion that the Japanese call mono no aware, a paradoxical feeling, not unlike Virgil's 'lacrimae rerum,' of sad thankfulness before the evanescent loveliness of ordinary life. The calm acceptance of this complex mood is the goal of most classical Japanese art.* However, such a combination also produces paradoxes that have been called 'highly dramatic and even schizophrenic' (Silver, 22). At an ethical level there exists recurrent tension between giri - absolute loyalty to one's family and overlord, with its emphasis on the duty to revenge and praise of ritual suicide {seppuko) - and ninjo, one's own moral intuitions of right conduct, as taught by traditional Buddhism. More metaphysically, there are tensions within the Buddhist tradition between self-sacrificing, salvationary Amida Buddhism (represented by Sue in Ran) and the total world renunciation of mystical Zen; and, most fundamentally of all, there is a paradox within Zen teaching itself, where the demand for responsible moral choice clashes logically with the perception of all life as samsara - an insubstantial experience 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 Japan during the late 1950's' (181). 6 A condensed introduction to this complex of ideas can be found in Prince 1988,4-17. See also 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 as karma: fate as negative recurrence. Stephen Prince has called this latter paradox 'one of the main dialectics informing Kurosawa's works' (1991, 124), and it is crucial for our understanding of both his samurai interpretations of Shakespeare. Besides these socio-political and philosophical contexts, we must also take into account Kurosawa's stylistic and semiotic borrowings from traditional Japanese painting, theatre, and music, and his respect for the aesthetic principles that underlie them. In painting, for instance, the style of his samurai fihns is much influenced by picture scrolls of the Heian and Kamakura periods, in which the unrolling of monstrously detailed battle scenes is contrasted with depictions of the delicate, rectilinear architecture and formal rituals of Japanese domestic life.^ Kurosawa, who began his career as an artist, has made a special study of these scrolls, and a modem practitioner of the style, Kohei Esaki, was enlisted as artistic advisor for Throne of Blood - though the style is perhaps even more central to Ran.^ The black-and-white photography of Throne of Blood reflects more strikingly the influence of suiboko-ga, the Japanese art of ink brush-painting, represented by the starkness of the film's dark mountains, trees, armour, and heavy fortress architecture and the black, volcanic soil of the lava slopes of Mount Fuji where most of it was shot. Characteristically, suiboko-ga leaves large areas of its pictures blank, stimulating a sense of mystery and distanced universality, and such aporia are represented in the film by the blanketing grey fogs and swirls of sulphur fumes and obscuring rain that block out parts of many of the frames. Important though such pictorial influences are, however, the main formal influence on Kurosawa's style for these two Shakespearean adaptations is the traditional masked dance-drama of the Noh, which was a 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 of compression is extreme, and it is full of symbols, full of subtlety.'' He is influenced in both films, though particularly in Throne of Blood, by the shuramono subgenre of Noh, in which ghosts of famous warriors re-enact past violence in the hope of eventual redemption; and there are also touches in both films of other Noh subcategories which deal with desperate women, madness, and demonic possession. In both, too, the facial make-up of the dramatis personae is based on specific Noh masks, which has the effect of depersonalizing and universalizing character;'" costume, posture, and gestures constantly reflect Noh stylization; traditional referents - like the
7 8 9 10 SeeZambrino. See Parker 1986. Quoted in Richie and Mellen, 117. For illustrations and description, see Komparu, 224ff, esp 236-9.

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crows in Throne of Blood or the stone fox head presented to Lady Kaede in Ran - are used as a form of symbolic shorthand; and there are even reminiscences of specific Noh plays, especially in the presentation of the Forest Demon in Throne of Blood and the blind boy, Tsurumaru, in Ran. The disembodied shrill of the nohkan (Noh flute), invoking 'a world infinitely distant from ours, filled with suffering we cannot comprehend' (Keene, 20), and accompanied by the thud and rap of two contrasting drums, is also crucial 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 to murder their overlord offstage, or the conscience of Hidetora (the Lear character in Ran), as the stripling he has blinded uses his flute to express despair and grief. Such music is not merely emotional background, moreover, but adds an independent semiotic to the action, helping to produce the distance between character and audience that is essential if the action's universality is to be grasped." This distancing has led some Shakespearean critics, accustomed to a closer sympathy with tragic protagonists, to censure both Kurosawa adaptations as 'lunar,' 'ice cold,' and even 'emotionally unsatisfactory; but in Noh one is not supposed to identify too personally with the characters. To do so would be to surrender to samsara and lose spiritual transcendence. Finally, as regards context, these influences have fostered certain cinematic techniques that have become virtual Kurosawa trademarks. As in Noh, scenes of tensely stylized stillness alternate with bursts of violence; and, in accordance with the Zen principle of mushin-no-shu (unselfconsciousness), there is little introspection or analytic dialogue, with action and visual imagery carrying more significance than words - another great difference from Shakespeare that has bothered critics unfamiliar with Noh semiotics, though it has been praised enthusiastically by such Shakespearean film-makers as Peter Brook, Grigori Kozintsev, and Peter Hall. Kurosawa's early work is notable for its skill at fluid tracking shots, where the cameras keep pace with rapidly moving characters (as in the scenes where the Macbeth and Banquo figures, Washizu and Miki, gallop madly through the forest at the beginning of Throne of Blood), though by the time of Ran this technique is used more sparingly. By shooting from different angles with three cameras simultaneously (and even five for the great battle scenes in Ran), Kurosawa is able to create a dynamic montage of violent action, with occasional sequences in slow motion - or even momentary 'freezes' - pointed by an abrupt cessation of sound to emphasize a particular image (and to add a dreamlike quality to it): as when the mysterious 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.

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changes to the yase-ototo mask's recognition of death." And increasingly, Kurosawa has combined long takes and stationary cameras with telephoto lenses so as to foreshorten and flatten perspective to the two-dimensional, surface orientation traditional in Japanese art. As a result, characters seem closely related to background, and visual imagery detached from normal perspective - according to Kurosawa himself - acquires 'a weight, a pressure [that is] almost hallucinatory, making the rhythms of the movements emerge."^ An excellent example of such two-dimensional flattening is provided by the shots of the ranks of 'forest' advancing on Washizu's stronghold at the end of Throne of Blood, which the telephoto lenses transform to the semblance of a relentlessly cascading waterfall. And in Throne of Blood (though not in Ran) the distancing effect of such 'metacinematic' devices is enhanced by sometimes changing scenes with an obvious horizontal 'wipe,' in place of the less stylized 'dissolve' favoured by Western directors. All these factors, but particularly the paradoxes of Zen and semiotic stylizations of Noh, need to be kept in mind if the significance of Kurosawa's relation between Nature and Society in the two samurai adaptations is to be interpreted aright. Despite more striking resemblances than their Shakespeare originals - castles, mountains, cloud vistas, galloping horses, scurrying samurai in insect-like armour backed by fluttering pennants, and cool geometrical interiors of ritualized behaviour - the implications of Throne of Blood and Ran are ultimately very different. Whereas the vision of King Lear is bleaker and more problematic than the Christian context of redemption established for Macbeth, Ran - although it too has been condemned in recent criticism for 'pessimism' and 'fierce bitterness' (Prince 1991,149,284) - is actually much less negative and more open than Throne of Blood. But this can only be grasped if the films are placed in a proper Buddhist perspective.
II THRONE OF BLOOD

The impression of Nature offered in Throne of Blood seems almost completely negative, and is closely linked to the protagonist's state of mind. The film is shot in bleak surroundings and stormy weather; and, exploiting the dream structure oi shuramono Noh, the story of Washizu's fall is presented as a recapitulation, set within the framework of a prologue and epilogue occurring many centuries later. Such a structure inevitably establishes a strong sense of negative Fate, with Nature seeming to determine human destruction.
12 This 'freeze' effect is like held poses called kimaru in Japanese dance. For the yase-ototo suggestion, see Goodwin, 189. 13 Quoted in Shirae, Shibata, and Yamada, 76.

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After titles shot against a 'web' of intertwining branches, the film opens with thick mists parting to reveal a stony mountain landscape, darkened by fog and rain and beset by howling winds, with the camera panning into a declivity with curiously regular sides"* to focus on a fenced-off post on which is written 'Here stood the Castle of the Spider's Web.' Underneath these shots comes the s/iura-like chant of a male chorus: Behold within this place, now desolate, stood Once a mighty fortress, lived a proud warrior Murdered 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 it also occurs twice within the story proper. At the beginning of the formal banquet where Washizu will see Miki's ghost, an old general begins a dance to a guttural Noh recital of the disasters that punished an ambitious warrior of the past, only to be interrupted - Claudius-like - by the guiltstricken Washizu; and the same insistence on the vanity of all human endeavour is also the burden of Kurosawa's replacement for Shakespeare's three witches, the old spinning-woman who is really a Shinto demon, the forest's spirit-of-place. After this prologue, the mists close, and when they reopen we are transported back into the sixteenth century, with a castle in what Kurosawa calls the 'Black Style' now filling the declivity. The action proper begins with messengers alerting its daimyo, the Duncan-figure Kuniharu, of the defeat of a rebellion by one of his generals, Fujimaki (Cawdor),and the repulse of an invasion by the daimyo of the neighbouring province. Lord Inui. There follows a deservedly famous sequence in which the heroes of these wars, Washizu and Miki, summoned to receive promotion, get lost in the mazelike paths and bewildering half-lights of a forest that has been adapted - as is several times emphasized - into a outer defence-work for the daimyo's castle: When I went into the way castles were constructed in those days [explains Kurosawa], some of them made use of the wood which was grown as if it had been 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 title The 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 with green scum, glimmering dimly,' and 'a sobbing old pine tree [that] rustles against a stone wall,' like the pine that forms the background of all Noh stages; see Niki, 155. 15 Quoted in Manvell, 104.

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Developing 'Fair is foul and foul is fair' (i.i.io) in the song of Shakespeare'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 of fog, rain, flashes of lightning, and gleams of sunshine, with thunder alternating with what sounds like distant laughter. An interesting gloss on the traditional menace of such contradictions can be found in the first episode of Kurosawa's more recent film Dreams (1990), entitled 'Sunshine and Rain.' This recounts a Shinto story told to Kurosawa by his mother about evil fortune coming to a boy who stumbles on a wedding of foxes in a wood where sunshine mingles with rain - foxes being frequent Shinto avatars for malevolent spirits (as can be seen in the stone fox head presented to the evil Lady Kaede in Ran). Initially confident, Washizu and Miki become disoriented and finally lose all self-control. Washizu fires an arrow at the lightning,'* to be met with a mocking laugh that provokes the warriors to charge even deeper into the trees with weapons at the ready. This futile attack is fihned brilliantly by a camera tracking beside their galloping horses behind screens 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 calm and sunlit clearing. In its centre is a frail thatched hut of poles, whose inhabitant - obscured initially by a tree trunk that for the first time decisively separates the two warriors - is chanting in a low, sepulchrally toneless voice about the vanity of human pride: Men are vain and death is long And pride dies first within the grave ... Life must end in fear. Only evil may maintain An 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 - like Fortune with her wheel or the Creek fate Clotho in Western tradition - a web of human destiny that seems to be equated with the labyrinthine paths of the forest.
16 There is a Buddhist ceremony where priests fire arrows against evil spirits (cf Titus Andronicus). This arrow may relate to the arrow that finally transfixes Washizu's throat, which comes from a different direction from the other arrows.

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Noh influence is particularly strong in this scene. Kurosawa says it was based on a specific Noh play: 'In the case of the witch in the wood, I planned to replace it with the equivalent to the hag which appears in the Noh play named Kurozuka'^^ - in which travelling monks encounter a demon 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 another Noh script, Tsuchigomo (The Spider'), in which a warrior has to defeat a demon spider disguised as a priest, in a set that literally represents the spider's web.'* Kurosawa also says that he 'showed each of the players a photograph of the mask of the Noh which came closest to their respective role,"' which in the demon's case was a mask called Yamanba ('the mountain witch'). The face of the actress is thus made up to resemble the unrealistic white immobility of this mask; and her white robe and posture (sitting with one knee raised and eyes lowered), her slow hieratic gestures turning the spinning wheel, and her curiously atonal voice are all typical of Noh. The flimsy hut of poles is a well-known Noh locale, familiar from several other famous plays besides Kurozuka,"^ and its fragility contrasts ironically not only with the surrounding forest but also with the massive timbers from which the castles are constructed. Significantly, the spinning wheel has two spools, a larger one from which the demon spins onto a smaller, accelerating as she forecasts Washizu's brief career and slowing to forecast that of Miki, whose descendants will prolong it. These double spools seem to relate the karma of mankind as a whole, as lamented by the chorus, to the more limited but matching fates of the two warriors. After her prophecies, the demon vanishes, merging into the white mists as later Washizu's wife will apparently merge with darkness. The hut too vanishes, and the warriors find themselves among mounds of skeletons in antique armour, samurai like themselves who perished long ago. Fleeing this vision, they get lost again, in another celebrated film sequence. This time they are not misled by labyrinthine paths but bewildered in dense fog, a more subjective image of their own confusion. Kurosawa uses a static camera to record them crossing the same location no fewer than twelve times, in varying combinations of distance and direction and with gradually diminishing speed, until suddenly the mist clears again, as it did after the opening chorus, to reveal once more the Forest Castle in the distance. Sigruficantly, this vision now separates the nervously jocular comrades to either side of the screen, a division that the tree before the demon's hut began.
17 18 19 20 Quoted in Manvell, 103; the title means 'Black Mound.' See Keene, 90, for an illustration. Quoted Manvell, 103. For example, in the Noh play Semiramu, which is a source for the Tsunimaru episodes in Ran; for a picture, see Keene, 89.

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The brilliance with which this sequence conveys mental confusion has often been remarked on;"" and later, when Washizu alone visits the demon a second time, in search of reassurance against news of unexpected tempest and an imminent attack, the forest's expressionist significance becomes more marked. Vistas are even more distorted and weather more grotesquely incongruous: lightning comes from several directions simultaneously; the demon now runs behind the brush parallel to Washizu's gallop, like the camera in the earlier tracking sequence; she no longer sits, but aggressively stands to address him; and having given him the misleading assurance that he will be safe until the forest moves on the castle," it is she who openly laughs at him, no longer a disembodied voice among the trees. She conjures up, not symbolic figures and future kings as in Macbeth, but ghosts of warriors from the forest chamel heaps, to recapitulate their ancient savagery in antique dress and armour. They accost Washizu from every direction, 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 the structure 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 used here partly as symbols for Washizu's state of mind, but clearly they are also more significant than this, metonymic rather than metaphoric, because they also exist independently. Like Shakespeare's hags, they raise the possibility (and problem) of a predetermined fate. Critics of the movie invariably interpret the forest and the castles as rival, antagonistic signifiers, whether these are seen as Nature's amoral energy subverting human efforts to establish civilized order - as in Jack Jorgens's interpretation (1977,153-^0, 1983) - or, conversely, as natural vitality overwhelming the exploitative hierarchy of a feudal aristocracy, as Elihu Pearlman has argued subsequently. Such opposition is certainly a major part of the film's effect, but beneath the differences between Nature and Society lie similarities that are finally more important. In both Kurosawa movies, but especially Throne of Blood, they are perceived ultimately as collaborating. Within the castles, for example, the presentation of the Forest Demon is paralleled by sequences in which the Lady Macbeth figure, Asaji, dominates. These too are dense with remiruscences of Noh. Like the demon, the actress playing Asaji wears the white, immobile make-up of a specific Noh mask, 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 if we have stepped into and out of the depths of the protagonist's mind' (159). This is also Blumenthal's view in his pioneering study 'Macbeth into Throne of Blood,' 191. 22 Lynda Boose made the interesting suggestion (in discussion with the author) that Washizu's fatal complacency is Kurosawa's criticism of Japanese reliance in the Second World War on the impregnability of their island, protected by the kamikaze (sacred winds) which became the destructive blast of atomic bombs.

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to go mad: The actress who wears this mask, when she gets angry, changes her mask for one the eyes of which are golden-coloured, this mask represents that state of an unearthly feeling of tension and Lady [Asaji] assumes the same state.'^^ Asaji's white robe, low voice, seated position with one knee raised and eyes averted, her positioning in the cinema frame, and the contrast between her tense stillness and Washizu's facial grimaces and restless pacing are all reminiscent of the demon scene; while her gliding walk, the muted clack of her tabi (sandals) and sussuration of her silk kimono over the wooden floors, like the rustling of the demon's spinning wheel, are all familiar minimalist effects of Noh. The action of Shakespeare's play is considerably pared down by Kurosawa in order to emphasize that Asaji's evil is much more unqualified and active than Lady Macbeth's. Though she echoes the source's incitement of Washizu's ambition and scorn for his timidity, Asaji's crucial argument is one that does not appear in Macbeth but fits instead the central samurai concem with political loyalty and betrayal. She plays upon Washizu's paranoia by arguing that Miki is sure to betray him to their daimyo, and easily quashes his own feeble appeals to giri by reminding him that Kuniharu, unlike the saintly Duncan, himself came to power by murdering the previous overlord. It is Asaji who then leads Washizu by the hand to the tatami (mat) from which Kuniharu has recently held court and persuades him to sit hubristically upon it, and Asaji who, leaving him squatting in a glaring stupor, goes to drug Kuniharu's guards, then returns to check that they are unconscious, seeming in one striking sequence to vanish into, then rematerialize from, the darkness itself; as the Forest Spirit had earlier disappeared into fog ('Come thick night, / And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell' i.v.51-52). It is Asaji, not a visionary dagger, who forces a spear into Washizu's nerveless hands and compels him from the room to commit the murder. And after he returns, sinking back into his stupor, it is she who wrenches the spear from his bloody hands and plants it on a drunken guard; she who carefully washes her hands in an exquisite basin (made specially for the film); and even she who flings open the doors to raise the alarm personally. There is no fainting, real or feigned, with Asaji: 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 to gain entrance to the Forest Castle left under Miki's guard; and in the ghost scene she is even more contemptuously forceful in controlling Washizu's panic 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, who played Asaji, was not only a nearly perfect example of classical Japanese ideals of feminine beauty but also appreciably older than Toshiro Mifune, playing Washizu - with implications both for her dominance and her childlessness.

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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 (or Lady Kaede's 'gold room' in Ran), is the 'forbidden room' into which Washizu and Asaji have to move to accommodate Lord Kuniharu's visit. Washizu's defeated predecessor, Fujimaki, committed seppuko in this room rather than face punishment for treachery, and the rectangular patterning of its floor and walls is marred by a monstrous, shapeless stain of blood across the three planes of one corner. Both Washizu and Asaji show themselves aware of this ('It will have blood, they say: blood will have blood,' iii.iv. 123), though they interpose a flimsy screen of arrows between the stain and the tatami where they kneel. This replicates the contrast between the frail poles of the demon's hut and the circumambient menace of the forest with its mounds of skulls. While Kuniharu is being killed (offscreen), Asaji occupies this room alone, her habitual icy composure broken by furtive glances at the stain, until, unable to bear the tension further, to a sudden shriek of nohkan and rapping drums she rises for a spasmodic dance in front of the stain - half ecstasy, half terror - as if acting out the violence, like Lady Macbeth's retrospective sleep-walking: a scene that 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 to confirm Miki's offer of support by naming the latter's son his heir, but Asaji insists again that Miki will betray them; and when this no longer convinces her 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 Kurosawa's happy invention to explain Asaji's madness;^ but her claim is clearly opportunistic, one more manipulation of Washizu. When subsequently it is announced that she has 'miscarried,' the furtive old woman who brings the news consistently blocks Washizu's attempts to visit his wife. Instead, he has to retreat to the audience chamber where, gazing at his daimyo's regalia, he sums up Macbeth's famous aria of despair ('all our yesterdays have 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, when Washizu discovers her dry-washing her hands behind a screen improvised from her own dishevelled kimono - continuing even when he removes the bowl and for the first time speaks her name - she neither has words of remorse nor makes any reference to a child. And this is the last we see of her. 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 conclusion as myself. Hapgood suggests a possible historical precedent, however, in the unexpected pregnancy of the shogun Yoshimasa's wife (236).

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suicide. In bushido, after all, suicide is honourable, and the omission of it in Asaji's case is surely meant to contrast with the elaborate mourning for the seppuko of Lord Kuniharu's widow, which Kurosawa has inserted into the story earlier. The only oblique reminiscence of Asaji at the end is that her disingenuous warning that 'Arrows will seek your life not only from the front but from the rear' proves ironically prophetic of Washizu's actual death (see note 16). The scene in which Washizu learns of his Wife's madness also has an interesting symbolic dimension. The squealing, panicky waiting women who bump into him (so different from the discreet servant who announced the 'miscarriage') relate to the immediately preceding sequence in which his audience chamber was invaded by flocks of screeching, fluttering birds, who even perched on his head and shoulders, clinging (as arrows will do later) to his wooden armour. Besides fleeing from the besiegers' lopping of branches, foreshadowing the castle's eventual invasion, and exposing the already strained morale of its defenders, these birds also relate to earlier birds of ill-omen associated with Asaji. Lady Macbeth's The raven himself is hoarse / That croaks the fatal entrance of Duncan / Under my battlements' (i.v.39-41) is actualized in the croak of a crow when Washizu's servants first see the bloodstain in the 'forbidden room'; this is heard again as Washizu is persuaded to murder Kuniharu, with Asaji opportunistically interpreting it. That means the castle is yours'; and it occurs for a third time as Washizu goes to perform the murder, when there is a brief shot of a raucous night bird crossing the sickle moon that is Kuniharu's insignia. Crows are traditional symbols of death in Japanese culture, and may also have a further special significance for Kurosawa. The eighth vignette in Dreams 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 is identified with horses. When Asaji first persuades Washizu to kill his daimyo (in the 'North Castle' that, ironically, was awarded him for loyalty),the submission of his giri to her browbeating is emblematized by overexposed shots through open shuji (sliding screens) to either side of him. In the courtyard beyond, a horse that previously we have seen walking peacefully with its groom (in a scene where Washizu's retainers praise the pastoral tranquillity of their new abode) now frantically resists attempts to discipline it within the tight circuit of a training rope. A similar scene occurs later in the same courtyard (which by now has passed to Miki) when Miki's horse resists saddling for the ride on which its master is to be murdered, thus reinforcing the warnings of Miki's son; and it is the same horse's return without a rider that economically signals that the murder has been done (Shakespeare's assassination scene having been cut). This reinterprets the madness of Duncan's horses mentioned in Macbeth

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(ii.iv. 14-20), and agaii\ the symbolism has resonances in Kurosawa's other work. His first success was a film actually called Horse (1941), which includes the prototype of the sequence in which Washizu and Miki keep passing the same location in a fog, as a mare searches frantically backwards and forwards for her foal; and it is the dead chieftain's horse alone who is able 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 into a decorative pattem on the walls of the Forest Castle's audience chamber) seem the antithesis of the formless intertwinings of the forest, it soon becomes evident that the castles too are labyrinthine: not only in sudden unexpected openings of shoji and a complex of railed passageways that resemble the entrance and exit ramp of the Noh stage (the hashigakari), but also in the visual patterning of their timbers and especially the railings of their balconies, which form another network, like the forest branches, through which the cameras increasingly seem to spy on Washizu. This comes to a climax in the last scenes, in which, Noh-like, all action concentrates 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-tower and the courtyard, in dense clouds of arrows which leave his body grotesquely porcupined with shafts. However, his impulse to mount, then compulsion downward are a last reprise of the tragic de casibus (like Hidetora's magnificent descent from the burning keep to confront massed enemies in Ran)f^ the angled railings between which he is shot and the tangled mats of arrows that he constantly has to break through recall both the web of the forest branches and the arrow screen of the 'forbidden room'; and the way he keeps being backed literally into corners is reminiscent of the bloodstained corner where Fujimaki killed himself. The number of arrows is not unrealistic, moreover, if we assume most of the rebellious troops in the courtyard are now shooting at him - a final terrible emphasis on the leitmotif oi treachery-itself-betrayed - and also take account of the fact that samurai armour was wooden, so that arrows could stick into it without necessarily piercing the body (there are similar images in Ran and in the misha-e scrolls). And when, bristling with shafts, he dies stumbling towards his rebellious troops retreating into the fog before him - in a shot that replicates the murdered assassin stumbling towards Washizu himself, as he backed towards the fog pattern on the walls of Forest 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 generals and falls headlong from the watchtower, without confronting his enemies (205).

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(and self-destructive) scorpion that has been impressed upon us as his personal insignia.^*
Ill CONCLUSION

And so we come to the conclusion. Washizu's body is covered by swirling mist; there is a brief, foreshortened glimpse of the 'forest' advancing wavelike on the castle; then the fog closes in like a 'dissolve' and clears for the last time to return us finally to the opening framework of barren mountain, solitary memorial, and choric chant about the pointless persistence of ambition: Still his spirit walks, his fame is known, For what once was so now is still true. Murderous ambition will pursue Beyond the grave to give its due.^'' This is certainly more pessimistic than Macbeth. Washizu dies ignobly at the hands of his followers, not bravely in single combat with the Macduff figure (Noriyasu); there is no equivalent of the scene where Malcolm proves his worthiness to be the next king; and though there is a brief glimpse of Noriyasu with the surviving sons of the two heroes, it has been established that the troops they lead belong to the invading daimyo, Inui, who is a far cry from the saintly Edward the Confessor in Macbeth, resembling rather the invader Ayabe who continues civil war in Ran. At the end of Throne of Blood the political succession is left wholly at risk, without any sense of re-established order to offset Washizu's death and the chorus's lament. The original wording of that threnody (see note 27) equates Nature with the attacking force, and there are two details of the film (not in the published text, and unnoted by previous critics) that relate to this and qualify the mainly negative impression of Nature in the film. In his comment about historical models for the forest labyrinth (quoted earlier, p 514), Kurosawa emphasizes that such mazes were man-made defence works. References within the film confirm this, and Noriyasu is easily able to 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 his character. 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.

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march straight through the trees. The deadly and misleading aspect of the forest, then, is not Nature's but something that has been made by man. And this process is shown continuing at the end. In the final glimpse of the attacking besiegers we are shown not only lopped-off branches, as in Shakespeare, but whole uprooted trees transported on carts; and the terrain of the prologue and epilogue is no longer wooded at all, but barren, stony, totally devoid of vegetation, as if 'the catastrophes precipitated by Washizu's action make desolate the whole world' (Prince 1991,147). Nature has 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 to his presentation of Nature in other films, particularly the unexpectedly lovely scenery of Ran.^^ His attitude is spelled out, almost too clearly, in another film, Dersu Uzala (1975), in which a Russian engineer learns respect for Nature from a primitive Siberian hunter but is helpless to prevent the hunter's death and even the obliteration of his grave by technological 'progress.' Similarly, in 'Peach Orchard,' the second episode oi Dreams, tiers of dolls in antique samurai costume tell the young boy who represents Kurosawa himself that he will never be able to return home because his materialistic relatives have cut down the family peach orchard, except for one small tree that bears a single flower. These films are easily interpreted as Kurosawa's rejection of the ruthless industrialization of postwar Japan, but there is another deeper influence involved. If his critique of samurai bushido stems from his resistance to Japan's own militarism, his shifting attitude to Nature is influenced, just as strongly, by the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the continuing threat of accidental nuclear disaster. He has two films specifically about the American bombings: as was mentioned earlier. Record of a Living Being (1955) was made as a protest against the poisoning of Japanese fishermen by the Bikini explosion in the previous year, and the refusal of a Japan intent on rapid industrialization to recognize its ecological danger; and, more recently. Rhapsody in August (1991) is about the difficulty that Japanese even today have in confronting the experience (and therefore leaming the lessons) of the bomb that destroyed Nagasaki. In Dreams there are also two sequences about accidental nuclear disaster: IVIount Fuji in Red' simulates the holocaust that might be caused by the explosion of a nuclear power plant; and in The Weeping Demon,' the sole survivor of such a disaster is conducted through a nightmare landscape of mutations by a demon who complains that Nature has vanished from the earth because 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.

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is a kindred spirit to the laughing, punitive demon in Throne of Blood, but relates also to the 'Weeping Buddha' on the saintly Sue's scroll in Ran. The last episode of Dreams, 'The Village of Waterfalls,' shows a beautiful bucolic village of children, presided over by a wise old man who warns against destroying the paradise of Nature. In the press kit for the film, Kurosawa notes. The theme here is nostalgia - nostalgia towards the loss of Nature and with it, the loss of the heart of humankind'; and during the course of the joyful funeral with which the episode concludes, the wise old man explains that 'Living in harmony with nature makes a friend even of death.' This is pure mono no aware, and the same mood is caught in the beautiful panoramic sunset with which Ran on one plane concludes, while the cortege of Hidetora and his son, passing in deep shadow in the foreground, represents on another plane the tragic karma experienced in Throne of Blood; and between the two experiences, alone in the middle distance, hesitating on the brink of his family's ruined castle, is the enigmatic figure of blind Tsurumaru, who Kurosawa has said is representative of modem man: The solitary blind person represents for me the essence of humanity today... [But] my film is not... despairing... it is more of a warning: "Concentrate your efforts on becoming happier, and not on heading for even greater unhappiness." '^ The karmic aspect of Nature in Throne of Blood is thus incorporated into a larger, much more complex comment in Ran.^' Within the system of Buddhist thought, Kurosawa's presentations of Nature in his samurai adaptations of Shakespeare can be recognized not as the contradictions they seem at first to be when interpreted 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 Review
18:14 (1991), 5-11

Blumenthal, J. 'Macbeth into Throne of Blood.' Sight and Sound 34:4 (1965), 190-95 CoUick, John. Shakespeare, Cinema and Society. Matichester and New York: Manchester University Press 1989 Desser, David. The Samurai Films ofAkira Kurosawa. Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press 1983 Goodwin, 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 the parallel sacrifices of Sue and Subaru.

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Hapgood, Robert. 'Kurosawa's Shakespeare Films.' Shakespeare and the Moving Image: 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), 167-73 Kodansha Encyclopedia of Japan. Tokyo and New York: Kodansha 1983 Keene, Donald. No, the Classical Theatre ofJapan. Tokyo: Kodansha International 1966 Komparu, Kunio. The Noh Theatre: Principles and Perspectives. Trans Jane Corddry. New York: Weatherhill/Tankasha 1983 Kurosawa, Akira. Something Like an Autobiography. Trans Audie E. Bock. New York: Vintage 1983 Manvell, Roger. Shakespeare and the Film. London: Dent 1971 McDonald, Keiko. Cinema East: A Critical Study of Major Japanese Films. Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press 1973 Mellen, Joan. The Epic Cinema of Kurosawa.' Take One 3:4 (1972), 16-19 Morris, Ivan. The Nobility of Failure: Tragic Heroes in the History of Japan. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston 1975 Niki, Hisae. Shakespeare Translation in Japanese Culture. Tokyo: Kenseisha 1984 Parker, 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), 75-90 Pearlman, Elihu. 'Macbeth on Film: Politics.' Shakespeare Survey 39 (1987), 67-74 Perret, 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 1991 Richie, Donald, and Joan Mellen. The Films ofAkira Kurosawa. Rev ed Berkeley: University of California Press 1984 Shirae, Yoshio, Hayao Shibata, and Koichi Yamada. 'L'Empereur.' Cahiers du Cinema 183 (1966), 35-43,74-9 Silver, Alain. The Samurai Film. Woodstock, NY: Overlook Press 1983 Suzuki, Daisetz T. Zen and Japanese Culture. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 1973 Tessier, Max. 'Propos d'Akira Kurosawa.' La Revue du Cinema 408 (September 1985), 67-70 Yakir, Dan. The Warrior Returns.' Film Comment 16 (November-December 1980), 54-57 Zambrino, Ana Laura. Throne of Blood: Kurosawa's Macbeth.' Literature and Film Quarterly 2 (1974), 262-74