Quarterly Review of Film and Video, 23: 341351, 2006 Copyright Taylor & Francis Group, LLC ISSN:

: 1050-9208 print / 1543-5326 online DOI: 10.1080/10509200690897608

Kurosawas Ran (1985) and King Lear: Towards a Conversation on Historical Responsibility
JOAN PONG LINTON

Adaptations have a way of speaking back to their sources, and a brilliant adaptation revises its source and provokes a conversation. This may not at rst be apparent about Kurosawas Ran (1985), since, unlike other adaptations of King Lear, the lm seeks neither to remain faithful Shakespeares language nor to provide visual equivalents in another medium (Parker 412). Indeed, the lm is only loosely based on the Lear story and Kurosawa disavows having consciously set out to adapt the play (Grilli 1). When he became aware of the connection however, he also had questions about the play that he tried to work out in his lm. The result in Ran (1985) is an ongoing conversation with King Lear, one that never becomes explicit but that informs his engagement with history. In commenting on King Lear, Kurosawa observes that Shakespeare gives his characters no past, without which I have never understood the ferocity of the daughters response to Lears feeble attempts to shed his royal power (Grilli 1). Indeed, the play seems more concerned to invite sympathy for Lear in the form of his question, Is there any cause in nature for these hard hearts? (3.6.3435). Kurosawa, however, would locate the cause of hard hearts in the feudal landscape of sixteenth-century Japan, a time of clan warfare and power struggles within the military class. In Ran (1985), therefore, he undertakes to give Ichimonji Hidetora, Lears counterpart, a history: I try to make clear that his power must rest upon a lifetime of bloodthirsty savagery (Grilli 1). This lifetime of savagery spans ve decades of ghting and treacherous domestic alliances. Specically, Hidetora married his two older sons, Taro and Jiro, to daughters from rivals clans, Kaede and Su e. Then, taking advantage of their relaxed vigilance, he murdered the brides families in their castles. The lm opens with a boar hunt that both symbolizes the savage world of hunters and hunted and ushers in marriage arrangements for the third son, Saburo, and a new generation is poised to inherit his violent legacy. A character with such a history could hardly claim to be more sinned against than sinning (King Lear 3.2.60), and there are further implications for the lm as well. As Ann Thompson points out, compared with King Lear, there is much greater emphasis [in Ran] on social networks and relationships: the personal is replaced by the domestic and the historical (Thompson 8). I would suggest that the personal is not replaced but located within the family as the institution that mediates societal violence, and this mediation ensures that the personal is inevitably political and historical, even as the inheritance of land and power is inextricable from a legacy of socialized violence. When the personal
Joan Pong Linton is an associate professor at Indiana Universitys English department. Her publications include The Romance of the New World: Gender and the Literary Formations of English Colonialism. Her current research focuses on trickster poetics in early modern English literature and drama.

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does not function on a mode of sympathy or identication, but is seen within the socializing and generational context of the family, it becomes clear why Ran (1985) is not a tragedy in the vein of King Lear. Instead, as Brian Parker observes, the lm presents a tragic view of history, one that reects Kurosawas own sense, in looking at Japanese history, of how man repeats himself over and over again (416). The lm does not simply impose its view, however, but poses it as a question of personal response and responsibility that the unfolding narrative explores. At the heart of this exploration, I will argue, is an understanding that the sense of sight is a socializing medium and, as such, provides a basis for human dispositionones way of inhabiting social space and responding to othersin the violent and possessive world of Hidetora. At the same time, in the gure of Tsurumaru, a character dispossessed of sight, the lm also attends to the human agency that escapes social denition and raises the possibility of thinking a different response and historical destiny. In doing so, Ran (1985) not only radically revises the theme of eyesight and blindness in King Lear but also denes a means to responsibilityboth a style and an ethic of respondingin its engagement with history. In a very real sense, the style of Kurosawas cinema is one that engages audiences, through their own eyes, in negotiating an interplay of the personal and political, the familial and social. From a technical perspective, Kurosawas use of the long shot allows him the necessary distance to show characters in relation to their environments, natural or social. Closer up, in both interior and exterior scenes, his camera achieves similar effects through the use of the long take and static groupings of character. A staple in his late lms (Prince 84), these techniques, together with minimal dialogue, ensure that the audience sees characters in their social settings, and that interactions between persons and groups are located in the histories within and between families or other social nexes. In narrative terms, the static groupings maintain a sense of ceremony and restraint against which characters seem to explode into action from deeply rooted personal histories and motivations. As well, strategic alternation between interior and exterior scenes in effect links the intimate violence of domestic politics with the socialized violence of battle. In formal terms, these techniques complement Kurosawas style of cinematic representation, in which the camera operates rst to present the givens of a situation before coming to focus on a character who acts within or responds to the situation. As Gilles Deleuze explains, this style lends itself to the two-part structure that operates in many of Kurosawas lms: the rst, a long exposition and the second when senseless, brutal action begins (188). Within this narrative structure, there is moreover an element of profound originality in its exposition of the givens: the givens, of which there must be a complete exposition, are not simply those of the situation. They are the givens of a question which is hidden in the situation, wrapped up in the situation, and which the hero must extract in order to be able to act, in order to be able to respond to the situation. The response therefore is not merely that of the action to the situation, but, more profoundly, a response to the question, or to the problem that the situation was not sufcient to disclose. (189) Variations of this narrative structure operates in Kurosawas lms from Seven Samurai (1954), Throne of Blood (1957), and Red Beard (1965) to Derzu Uzala (1975) and Kagemusha (1980); in each, the hero must search for the question and its givens through the situations (192). Although Deleuzes formulation predates Ran (1985), I believe it nds another variation in the lm. The hero Hidetora, who is an integral part of the social

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machinery of violence, fails to fully confront the question posed to him until it is too late. In the senseless brutal action that follows, the question is repeated in different forms and contexts and ultimately posed to the audience. From the beginning, Hidetora is confronted with the question of his legacy, when he announces his decision to cede total authority over his domain to his eldest son. In the words of Saburo: You have spilled so much human blood you cannot measure it. You have lived without mercy or pity. Whereas Hidetora expects love in return for inheritance, Saburo points to the madness of such expectation: But father, we, too, are children of this degraded age of strife; you do not know what we may be thinkingmy dear children, you think. To me, Father, you are none other than a madmansenile old madman (Screenplay, sequence 8). If Hidetoras reaction is to banish the truth-teller, it is because in his world there is no room for reection on the consequences of ones actions. Those in power never have to reect; those in decline are afraid to do so. As an aging warlord, Hidetora seems, at some level, to be aware of his precarious situation, recognizing himself in the boar he has just killed. This recognition, however, only spurs his refusal to confront his bloody past. Despite his refusal, his legacy of violence continues to unfold, through his family, eventually to engulf his entire domain in conict and chaos. Within the house of Ichimonji, Taro and Jiro certainly prove themselves worthy of their fathers ruthlessness, but it is in the daughters-in-law that we see direct responses to his violence. In Kaedes case, revenge emerges as the motive through which the personal and the political, the familial and the social merge in the generational reproduction of violence. For her part, Su e turns to Buddhist prayer and compassion, a choice that indicates violence is not the inevitable answer to violence. If their responses seem extreme and schematic, they also highlight the stark choices available to their historical counterparts. As Mieko Harada, the actress who played Kaede tells us, these women were married off by fathers because they wanted to dominate a part of the country or to make peace (Haberman C20). Indeed, the lm invites comparison between the two daughters-in-law in their relation to the samurai world. The comparison is most direct in the judgment of Kurogane, who associates them with the dual aspects of the fox from traditional folklore: Su e with the fox as the messenger of the benecent god Inari, the kami of rice, harvest and fecundity, and Kaede with the fox as a wicked demon, haunting and possessing people through its supernatural power to transform itself into a human being (Serper 147). As Jiros retainer who subverts Kaedes order to have Su e murdered, Kuroganes judgment carries the weight of moral commentary. Beyond moral commentary, which comes towards the end, the lm also implicitly compares Kaedes and Su es dispositions to their world through the cameras different spatial framing of them. As Kathy Howlett has shown, Kaede is consistently located in interior, domestic spaces, while Su e is never limited or framed by domestic space (362, 365). Within the interior spaces she inhabits, Kaede asserts her dominance by redening her power relations with the Ichimonji men, ironically, . . . in her performance of designated female tasks and in the space of the traditionally female identity (362). The presentation of Su e likewise breaks the frame of the hierarchical, patriarchal samurai world, though in a negative sense. In her rst appearance close by but not inside a prayer hall, Howlett writes, the camera, in effect, sympathizes with the perspective of the female encoded by the samurai system, withdrawing or refusing, much like the female subject in its frame, to participate in the sacred enclosure of the samurai (365). What is equally signicant about this spatial framing of the characters, I would suggest, is that it invites the audience to explore the characters relation to space, which turns out to be inseparable from their personal histories and goals as survivors of Hidetoras violence.

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Kaedes dominance within interior spaces has to do with her sense of ownership, when we consider that her sphere of action, the First Castle, was once her family castle. Returning with Taro to this castle, she reclaims to it through the personal history it holds for her: I was born and bred in this castle, which used to belong to my father. Then I left it to marry you. My father and brothers, all unaware because of our marriage, were murdered by your father, Hidetora. Then I was brought back to this castle, which was seized from my family . . . . I have waited for this day ever since. (Screenplay, sequence 24). Seated perfectly still in this delivery, Kaede now turns her head and marks with her eyes the spot where her mother had committed suicide. Right there, she says, her use of the deictic revealing a relation to space that is at once visual and possessive, albeit understated. This possessive mode of seeing extends to objects and persons as well in her struggle for power, especially following the death of her husband. Presented with Taros hair, Kaede asks instead for his armor, directing her gaze at Taros retainer rather than Jiro, who is wearing the armor. She then addresses Jiro: I never thought you could wear his armor and helmet so soon after his death. It is too much for me to notice (sequence 126), her sarcasm indicating just how much she does notice. In the seduction scene, the camera tracks the breath-taking speed and precision with which Kaede moves to redene power relations. In offering Taros helmet to Jiro, she springs from a kneeling position to pin Jiro beneath her with her dagger, drawing two lines of blood on his neck, forcing him to confess her husbands killer. Her eyes still trained on Jiro, she then rises to slide shut the wall panels, moving his sword beyond his reach, laughing and spitting at the enclosed object of her scorn, before proposing a pact with him that would allow her to remain in the First Castle he has taken over, reiterating that it is hers. In this play for power, she has taken her measureand possessionof the space Jiro occupies and made it her own. Her dominance in the sex act that followstopping him, kissing him, baring his chest, licking the blood from his neckmerely raties her victory. At the same time, however, Kaedes perfect possession of her familial space also indicates how much she is trapped by loyalty to her murdered family into playing out a pre-scripted role from a dead past. Not surprisingly, her revenge begins and ends in the same room where her mother had died, her own death marking the completion of another cycle of violence. By contrast, Su es location in exterior scenes effectively renders her an outsider to the realm of domestic and political intrigue. Unlike Kaede, Su e neither uses her eyes to assert ownership of the space she inhabits, nor does she aim to wield power in her dealings with others. The Second Castle in which she lives has never been her home, her own family castle, the Azusa Castle, having been reduced to ruins by Hidetora. Indeed, our introduction to Su e is not through the eyes but the ears, the sound of her prayer-chanting close by the prayer hall where Hidetora has gone in search of her. The camera then nds her on top of a stone wall, attended by a servant. With her back turned to the audience, she stands unguarded in the sunset, chanting to Amida Buddha, the god of mercy. Su es relation to open spaces signals an inner spaciousness, a capacity for forgiveness inspired by her Buddhist acceptance of human events as preordained in our previous lives (Screenplay, sequence 33). Signicantly, her disposition gives her a certain moral agency over Hidetora, something outside his logic of action and over which he has no control. The look of tenderness with which she greets him has the power to awaken his guilt, if not remorse, about the crimes he committed against her family; a look of hatred, he tells her, would have been easier to bear (sequence 33). At the same time, however, Su es

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sense of resignation also renders her powerless against the evil going on around her, so that in due course she loses both her husband and her life to Kaedes plotting. In her second appearance, she is already eeing for her life, homeless and unprotected as the powerless often are. Our nal image of Su e is that of a headless body lying on the grass: like the bundle of wild owers . . . picked by rough hands that covers her neck, she claims no space in the earth for herself even in death (sequence 189). While neither revenge nor resignation proves a viable response to the legacy of violence, the lm creates through its comparison of Kaede and Su e a critical and moral framework that extends to the samurai world. In her Buddhist resignation, Su e embodies a tragic view of history, one that sees the world as essentially an impermanent stage for repeated actions, the wheel of recurrence (Parker 421). This tragic perspective, which reects the inuence of Noh theater in Kurosawas samurai lms, nds poignant expression in the deaths of Saburo and Hidetora, shortly after their reunion out on Azusa Plain. Their deaths prompt an exchange between Kyoami, Hidetoras fool, and Tango, his loyal retainer, in which the former wonders whether the gods care about human beings, while the latter insists that it is the gods who are crying: The evil of human beings . . . the stupidity of the sinful creatures, who believe their survival depends on killing others, repeated again and again throughout all time . . . Even God or the Buddha cannot save us from it (Screenplay, sequence 183). In fact, it is not the gods who are looking down on the human drama, but the generals from the rival Ayabe and Fujimaki clans who not so long ago were surveying the eld from their mountain perches. Signicantly, Tangos insistence on human responsibility for the repeated cycles of violence reiterates in broader philosophical terms the question Saburo had posed to his father. One result is to locate individual subjects as agents in history, to articulate an ethics of history that goes beyond self-interest or personal investment in power relations and inheritance. The question would nd its echo in the nal scene, as the two dead bodies are being borne away. The camera tracks the party bearing Hidetoras body, then Saburos, then cuts to a long shot catching at the top left corner the walls of the ruined Azusa Castle in the distance. In the next long take, the camera zooms up and closes in on the lone gure of Tsurumaru, Su es sole surviving brother whose eyes Hidetora had years ago gouged out in exchange for his life. In the present scene, Tsurumaru has been led by Su e to their family castle. The two have been eeing for their lives and now he waits alone while Su e goes back for an old servant, having left with him a painting of Amida Buddha for his protection. Poised on the outer wall of the castle, with the image of Buddha in hand, Tsurumaru is elevated in position like the generals. At the same time, he has also symbolically stepped into the place where only moments before Hidetora had made his leap and survived (only to die shortly after). A lone gure on whom the weight of the future seems to fall, Tsurumaru becomes the human embodiment of the question to which Hidetora could not respond, and to which Tango has just given voice. It is signicant that Tsurumaru, who has lived on the margins of Hidetoras world through most of the lm, should emerge at the end so fraught with symbolic latency. But in one sense, his character ts the role, given Kurosawas preference for unformed characters. For him, they represent raw human potential to shape a destiny in the face of challenges: This destiny lies not so much in their environment or their position in life as within their individual personality as it adapts to that environment and that position. For all the straight-forward and exible people who do not let their environment and position get the better of them, there are just as man proud

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In describing the unformed character, Kurosawa has in mind the eponymous hero of his rst lm, Sanshiro Sugata (1943), a wild and stubborn youth who learns humanity from his judo master. What wakens his humanity is the purity of a lotus ower in a muddy pond where he has, for his correction, stood through the night, holding on to a post, allegorized in the lm as the stake of life. The experience continues to inform his choices as he becomes a legendary judo ghter and a man of thought. While Sanshiro typies the optimistic humanism critics have noted in Kurosawas early works, Tsurumaru represents a far bleaker but no less insistent interest in the human potential to shape a responsible way in a difcult world. It is true that an enormous distance separates Sanshiro Sugata and Ran, especially when we compare the lms social visions and protagonists (Prince 290). But such comparison tends to overlook the signicance of Tsurumaru in relation to both Hidetora and the audience. In the brutally possessive world of Ran (1985), Tsurumaru is the most radically unformed character, being dispossessed not only of an inheritance but, in his blindness, also of the means to wield power through violence. He is stripped even of his masculinity in the perceptions of other characters, being mistaken for a woman when Tango and Hidetora seek shelter at his hut. But if Tsurumaru is rendered unt for the violence of a sighted, possessive world, this unforming of his character also opens him to a different source of nurture. Su es gift of a ute and her Buddhist counsel enable him to make of his dispossession a different way of responding to the world. Confronted with an old and defeated Hidetora, therefore, Tsurumaru is able to offer his former tormenter hospitality of the heart (Screenplay, sequence 122)music on his ute so affectively powerful it breaks down Hidetoras defenses and sends him screaming into the night. The signicance of Tsurumarus ute music goes beyond the moment. As Parker points out, this same mournful ute music underscores the opening boar hunt and closes the lm beneath the cortege of Hidetora and Saburo and the long shot of Tsurumaru abandoned at the very edge of his familys ruined keep (419; see also Crowl 116). The ute music thus not only connects Tsurumaru to Hidetora but, through this connection, underscores the possible if uncertain emergence of a new kind of human destiny that departs from the cycles of violence.In this light, the encounter between fallen oppressor and surviving victim is signicant precisely because of the ideals of the samurai code it evokes through its allusion to the Noh play, Atsumori. Although these ideals no longer hold in the world of possessive violence, they provide the moral framework within which Tsurumaru can be seen as one with a different destiny. As Nogueira Diniz observes, the ute played by Tsurumaru, who wears a Noh costume when Hidetora enters his hut, is a reference to Atsumori, a Noh warrior in whom the ghost of a samurai is disguised as the ute-playing reaper (62). The reference also indicates the extent to which Tsurumaris story rewrites Atsumoris. In the play, the ghost of Atsumori reconciles with his killer who has undertaken a pilgrimage to pray to Amida Buddha for the salvation of Atsumoris soul. The former enemies thus become friends in Buddhas Law (Waley 70), leaving unquestioned the system of violence that maintains the social order. In the lm, reconciliation remains a projected but unfullled ideal. We learn that despite Su es counsel Tsurumaru is still struggling with his hatred for his enemy (Screenplay, sequences 33 and 122). More important, deprived of sight Tsurumaru devises an alternative means to agency in the sighted world by cultivating a different sensibility and disposition to the world. In doing so, he turns the warriors ute into an instrument of the ear and the heart, one that comes from neither revenge nor yet forgiveness but that holds responsible

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his former oppressor for his violence without repeating the violence. Remarkably, it is a sensibility to which the powerless Hidetora has also lately become responsive. Wandering about on the Azusa Field, he associates the raindrops with people he had killed: These are their tears! Their weeping voices (sequence 120). One can only speculate on how the social order might be different had the ear and heart been the preferred sensibility in a sighted world, or had Hidetora acquired this sensibility while still in power. But in Tsurumaru at least, the lm explores the radical remaking of character that issues from yet resists the determining force of the social environment, through which a new order of human relations, including power relations, can be shaped. In this connection, it is most tting that Hidetora should in his fall from power encounter again the victim he has blinded. For, if blindness is aligned with dispossession in his world, eyesight is aligned with possession and domination. The lms rst close-up is of Hidetora at the boar hunt, his eyes staring down the shaft of an arrow at his quarry. Later, in announcing his will, Hidetora marks the expanse of his domain with a sheathed sword in his hand and pasturing eyes, eyes that possess what they see and dene a self by what they possess: I, Hidetora Ichimonji . . . (Points to the small castle in the distance) . . . was born in that small castle. At that time this plain of Unno was the scene of ghting, a struggle among countless lords. When I was seventeen, I raised my ag over that castle. I fought hard for fty-odd years . . . and at last I conquered this plain and raised the Ichimonji standard over that castle there. . . (Points to the massive castle on one side of the plain) (Screenplay, sequence 8) In his deictic emphasis Hidetora displays a possessive mode of seeing and being we have already noted in Kaede, and it underscores the shared socialization that connects the two enemies in their motives of conquest and revenge. In his territorial conquests, this possessiveness entails such violent exclusion of others that the existential horror of it crystallizes only in a dream, in which Hidetora nds himself in a wilderness utterly alone: No matter how far I went I saw no one. I shouted and screamed, but no one answered (sequence 6). Nor is it surprising that, confronted with his unfolding legacy of violenceviolence he no longer monopolizeshis eyes should grow increasingly intense with terror. The pivotal moment occurs when Taro and Jiro join forces against him, and his own violent legacy thus comes home full circle. Driven from both their castles, Hidetora and his retainers make a nal defense at the Third Castle, the one vacated by the retainers of the banished Saburo. At the height of battle, Hidetora retreats into the innermost keep of the castle, where his concubines have committed suicide and he falls into a stupor, only to be aroused from it by the dying cry of his retainer. Hidetora is unable to seek the honorable death of seppuku, having broken his sword in the ghting and nding no replacement in the confusion. He even escapes the gunre and arrows, some tipped with re, shot into the castle, while on the outside the scene alternately expands to take in the epic scene of battle and contracts to focus on a dying soldier. As he emerges from the burning castle, Taros and Jiros soldiers part rank to let him pass. In this moment, Hidetoras eyes stare out of a face which, having grown progressively mask-like, is now frozen in perpetual terror. If the effect of the entire scene is, in Stanley Wells words, deliberately alienating (276), it owes something to Hidetoras eyes: xed

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on no one in particular, they are directed beyond the lms world, catching viewers in the safety of their specular pleasure. In this fracturing of the cinematic gaze, audiences are not only distanced from the spectacle of Hidetora but also made aware of their own mediated participation in the possessive economy of the eyes. In Ran (1985), then, eyesight and sightlessness are not merely metaphorical, though they are that. They dene dispositions, ways of inhabiting the world and responding to others, in which the personal and political converge. If in Hidetora, the lm presents the tragedy of inheritance as a schooling for the eyes, eyes that would possess and dominate, in Tsurumaru the lm explores the possibility of a different kind of human agency emerging from dispossession. Not surprisingly, the meeting between the two marks the turning point for Hidetora, since he can neither possess the sightless Tsurumaru with his eyes, nor close his ears to the latters music. Although the encounter drives him to madness, it explains why, despite comments that the lm is pessimistic (Johansen 74; Prince 289; Thompson 7), Kurosawa thinks that Ran (1985) is less tragic than King Lear: By way of contrast to King Lear, who has no regrets, who never thinks about the past, who never has any reason for undergoing these terrible experiences, Hidetora does reect on his past, and he regrets it: in that sense, my version is less tragic, I think. (Tessier 69) To be sure, Hidetora comes too late to reection, when he is already swept up in the violence. Hence Tony Rayns comment that the script of Ran is less interested in the possibility of Hidetoras moral regeneration than in charting the ramications of his past crimes and misjudgments (116). And yet, even a morally regenerated Hidetora would not be able to individually undo the systemic ran he has set in motion. Moreover, for Kurosawa, the world will not change unless we steadily change human nature itself and our very way of thinking (Hirano, in Goodwin 57). In this light, the unforming of character through the sight that he envisions in Tsurumaru is far more radical than any moral reform Hidetora can achieve. The comparison of Hidetora to Lear is thus only an index to a more complex engagement with the plays exploration of sight and blindness, from which Kurosawa shapes a fundamentally divergent view of society and the making of human destinies. In the play as in the lm, eyesight is, from the start, associated with inheritance and possession. Hoping to win her third of Lears kingdom, Goneril declares that he is dearer than eyesight, space, or liberty to her, and for failing to see the true motives of his daughters, Lear is told to see better (King Lear, 1.1.55, 156). But it is Gloucester who, for the same failing, literally loses his eyes when his bastard Edmund betrays him to Lears bad daughters. For both patriarchs, the immediacy of their suffering enables them to blame the evildoers and thus overlook their part in engendering their own victimization. Out on the heath, confronted with Edgar disguised as Tom o Bedlam, Lear does learn to see better the social ills of his kingdom, but the lesson he learns has little to do with the familial bonds and inheritance he manipulates to such disastrous consequence. While this lack of alignment between the familial and the social may well contribute to the plays multi-dimensionality, the alignment of the same in the lm gives it the clarity of a social critique. In the case of Gloucester, his plight relates directly to the question of inheritance, specically the system of primogeniture from which Edmund is excluded. Even so, both his blinding and his rescue from suicide by Edgar serve to recuperate dominant cultural values. In the rst place, while Gloucesters blinding teaches him to see the world feelingly (4.5.143), the play never goes beyond the regime of the eyes. Indeed, his blindness makes

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it possible for the sighted Edgar to trick him into believing that he has miraculously survived his jump from the dizzying heights of Dover Cliff, in a speech that invokes the use of perspective in illusionistic representation (Goldberg 149). Paradoxically, then, Edgars trickery both conrms the goodness of the legitimate heir against the evil of the bastard and reafrms Christian values against suicide as a sin of despair that damns the soul. If in King Lear blindness precipitates a crisis of faith that leads ultimately to a reafrmation of the value of religion and family, in Ran (1985) where a sighted Hidetora seeks suicide and a blinded Tsurumaru preserves the will to live, the result is to question the very social order that produces tragedy through its repeating cycles of violence. Hidetoras suicide attempt, like Gloucesters, is framed by religious perspective, albeit a distorted version of the Buddhist desire for release from the repeating cycles of error and suffering. In the sequence leading up to his leap, Hidetora returns in his wanderings to the ruined Azusa Castle, his sunken eyes looking wildly about without recognition. He remarks that he is lost and that he has been there before, to which Kyoami replies: Human beings are always lost. Human beings have walked the same way again and again from the earliest times. If you prefer not to do it, jump from this wall (Screenplay, sequence 166). In surviving his leap, Hidetora is frustrated in his desire for release from a world to which his distracted sight no longer binds him. One might say that he has undergone a kind of blindingan uprooting of his sight from its accustomed possessive relation to space. Unlike Gloucester, who is restored to free and patient thoughts (4.5.80) and dies reunited with his good son, his blindness shielding him from the full brunt of reality, Hidetora lives long enough to experience Lears fate, reuniting with Saburo only to lose him again, denied even the illusion of familial support and religious release in the end. What is the condition of death for Hidetora is the condition of life for Tsurumaru, who must, if he is to survive, nd his way in the world entirely on his own. By the closing scene, Tsurumarus dispossession has been made complete. Having already left behind his ute in his ight and lost his sister to the assassins, he stands at the edge of the Azusa Castle wall. As he tests the path before him, his cane reaches past the edge and he draws back in alarm, letting fall from his hand the image of Amida Buddha Su e has given him. The camera closes in and lingers on the image, then pulls back to show him at the edge of a sheer drop. As Kurosawa tells us, What I wanted to say in the last scene is that we should stop thinking that we can count on God or Buddha. We should make an effort to accept responsibility for our own lives (Tessier 69). To do so requires, in the rst place, reection on ones participation in and reliance on the social institutions that produce violence. The challenge this poses becomes clear when we compare Tsurumarus situation with that of Edgar, the only innocent victim left standing at the end of King Lear. Like Tsurumaru, Edgar also suffers dispossession, but his suffering is temporary, and he ultimately returns to power and reclaims his social position. In the play, then, the good can survive and even prevail in institutions that are all too susceptible of corruption through the folly or evil of those in power. If to this end Edgar must employ trickery and disguise and await his opportunity, this only underscores the moral complexities the play explores as part of its social vision. For Kurosawa, however, continued participation would only repeat the tragedy. While this is not a rejection of family or religionafter all, Tsurumaru has beneted from both through Su es carethe challenge remains as to how one might use the nurture provided by these institutions to radically remake ones relation to others in the world. In their respective worlds that will continue as before, King Lear and Ran (1985) do seem to depart most visibly at this juncture. While the play ends with the personal imperative (delivered by Edgar himself in the 1623 Folio edition) to speak what we feel, not what we ought to say

350 (5.3.300), Ran (1985) imagines a different future to history in which ones responsibility to others begins in the dispossessed self. Will Tsurumaru survive dispossession to shape a destiny? The nal scene seems to ask. The question demands an answer that the situation in the lmto return to Deleuzeis insufcient to disclose. The situation is insufcient, because accepting responsibility for ones life entails a response to the past, to which neither vengeance or resignation (in the lm) or vindicated trickery (in the play) provides an adequate logic. Furthermore, although accepting responsibility is a matter of personal initiative, the change Kurosawa envisions goes beyond the personal. In the gure of Tsurumaru, the challenge to responsibility is posed to a collective we, to which a response is possible only if audiences nd it relevant to their own historical circumstances. For his part, Kurosawa is condent that his historical lms contain modern dimensions because I live in modern society (Shrai et al., in Goodwin 56). In fact, the tragedy of inheritance already has a modern context in his lm Record of a Living Being (1955), made three decades before Ran (1985). The setting of this early lm is an island close to ground zero in the aftermath of the atom bomb. The protagonist Nakajima sets re to his foundry in a last desperate attempt to free his family from their expectations of inheriting the business and to make the plan to emigrate nally viable (Goodwin 132). Ironically, his act of self-dispossession destroys the livelihoods of the foundrys workers, who are doubly dispossessed since they do not have the economic means to emigrate in the rst place. Stephen Prince has rightly noted that, in the lm, political analysis of the nuclear phenomenon is secondary to Nakajimas struggles with his family (166). The result, then, is to foreground the tragedy of inheritance. When family members petition the court to have him declared mentally incompetent, the presence of the court locates the family within the political economy of post-war Japan. As Prince points out, the space of the family has not merely absorbed the energy of Nakajimas protest, but it has itself been absorbed by the dominant structures of state and society (166). That the tragedy of inheritance has both a feudal and a modern face in Kurosawas lms reinforces his claim that he has been tackling problems which transcend specic periods (Hirano, in Goodwin 57). In both lms, the tragedy persists because the family is an integral part of the social order, and the violence it harbors in the name of inheritance illustrates, in Walter Benjamins terms, the barbarism that inhabits the institutions of civilization (258). But in his attention to the dispossessed as well as what may come of the dispossessed self, Kurosawa can be said to perform through historical ction the task Benjamin urges upon the historian: to brush history against the grain (259). While Record (1955) addresses Japanese society on the threshold of an age of terror with global implications, Ran (1985) presents the long view of history, engaging an international audience through its conversation with King Lear. The lm offers the past as a distanced perspective from which audiences may reect on the present, from which reection a different future may emerge. Just how we imagine this different future depends, of course, on our own situated perspectives on history. In this age of corporate feudalism, dynastic oil interests, and the proliferation of the military-industrial complex, when war and terror are waged in the name of God, democracy, or revenge, perhaps we, too, have a collective history to bring to the conversation.

Works Cited
Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. Trans. Ed. Harry, Zohn. Hannah Arendt. New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1968.

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Crowl, Samuel. The Bow is Bent and Drawn: Kurosawas Ran and the Shakespearean Arrow of Desire. Literature and Film Quarterly 22 (1994): 10916. Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 1: The Movement-Image. Trans. Hugh, Tomlinson.and Barbara, Habberjam. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1986. Goodwin, James. Akira Kurosawa and the Atomic Age: in Goodwin, 132. Goodwin, James, ed. Perspectives on Akira Kurosawa. New York: Hall, 1994. Goldberg, Jonathan. Perspectives: Dover Cliff and the Conditions of Representation. In King Lear. Ed. Ryan, Kiernan. New York: St. Martins, 1992, 145157. Grilli, Peter. Kurosawa Directs a Cinematic Lear: Interview with Peter Grilli. New York Times (Dec. 15, 1985) Section 2: 1. Haberman, Clyde. Mieko Harada, Japans Unknown Star. New York Times (Dec. 25, 1985): C20. Hirano, Kyoko. Making Films for All the People: Interview with Kyoko Hirano. In Goodwin, 5758. Howlett, Kathy. Are You Trying to Make Me Commit Suicide? Gender, Identity, and Spatial Arrangement in Kurosawas Ran. Literature and Film Quarterly 24 (1996): 360366. Johansen, Ib. Visible Darkness: Shakespeares King Lear and Kurosawas Ran. In Screen Shakespeare. Eds. Skovmand, Michael and Caudery, Tim. Cambridge: Aarhus UP, 1994, 6486. Kurosawa, Akira. Something Like an Autobiography. Trans. Bock Audie E. New York: Knopf, 1982. Cited in the text as Autobiography. Kurosawa, Akira, Oguni, Hideo, and Masato, Ide. Ran: The Original Screenplay an Storyboars. Trans. Tadashi Shishido. Boston: Shambhala Publications, 1986. Cited in the text as Screenplay. Nogueira, Diniz, and Flores, Thais. King Lears Filmic Adaptation: a Chaos? Canadian Review of Comparative Literature 23 (1996): 777778. Parker, Brian. Ran and the Tragedy of History. University of Toronto Quarterly 55 (1986): 412423. Prince, Stephen. The Warriors Camera: The Cinema of Akira Kurosawa. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1991. Rayns, Tony. Ran. Monthly Film Bulletin 53 (April 1986): 115116. Serper, Zvika. Lady Kaede in Kurosawas Ran: verbal and visual characterization through animal traditions. Japan Forum 13 (2001): 145158. Shakespeare, William. King Lear: A Parallel Text Edition. Ed. Weis., Rene. London: Longman, 1993. Citations are to the 1623 folio edition of the play. Shrai, Yoshio et al. The Emperor: Interview with Akira Kurosawa. In Goodwin, 5556. Thompson, Ann. Kurosawas Ran: Reception and Interpretation. East West Film Journal 3 (198889): 113. Waley, Arthur. trans. The No Plays of Japan. New York: Grove Press, 1957. Wells, Stanley. Reunion and Death: Review of Ran. Times Literary Supplement (Mar. 14, 1986): 276.