Abstract
The decision that sets the tragedy of Akira Kurosawa’s Ran (Japan: Toho, 1985) in motion is prefaced by the main protagonist’s announcement: “Now is the time!” In its immediate context, the “now” marks the moment when the old Lord Hidetora Ichimonji transfers his power to his oldest son, Taro, making the latter the “head of the House of Ichimonji, the lord of the land.” Hidetora himself plans to keep only a few retainers and “the title and forms of lordship,” leaving to his other sons the (smaller) castles he once obtained from his neighbors by brutal conquest (p. 13).1 Hidetora’s decision results in the eponymous chaos of Kurosawa’s film. Hidetora’s “now,” however, has much wider implications, highlighting how time, how temporalities are constructed. More precisely, the film reflects on the politics of constructing temporalities and attendant representational, aesthetic concerns. Adapting William Shakespeare’s King Lear, a play crucially concerned with the transition from the medieval to the modern, Kurosawa’s medieval Japanese setting transfers Shakespeare’s engagement with temporalities into a different cultural framework, multiplying and transforming further Shakespeare’s already multiple temporalities.
We would like to thank Andrew James Johnston and Margitta Rouse for their stimulating and generous feedback and their help in focusing our ideas.
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Notes
All parenthetical references to the screenplay are to Akira Kurosawa, Hideo Oguni, and Ide Masato, Ran, trans. Tadashi Shishido (Boston, MA: Shambhala, 1986).
for the introduction of firearms as a turning point see, for example, Marius B. Jansen, The Making of Modern Japan (2000; repr. Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2002), kindle edn.
See, for example, Anthony Davies, Filming Shakespeare’s Plays: The Adaptations of Laurence Olivier, Orson Welles, Peter Brook and Akira Kurosawa (1988; repr. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 152–53,
but cf. Samuel Crowl, “The Bow Is Bent and Drawn: Kurosawa’s Ran and the Shakespearean Arrow of Desire,” Literature Film Quarterly 22.2 (1994): 110–11.
for the film’s historical precedent, the history of Motonari Mori and the Tale of the Heike, see esp. Robert Hapgood, “Kurosawa’s Shakespeare films: Throne of Blood, The Bad Sleep, and Ran,” in Shakespeare and the Moving Image: The Plays on Film and Television , ed. Anthony Davies and Stanley Wells (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 234–49.
Akira Kurosawa, “Kurosawa Directs a Cinematic Lear: Interview with Peter Grilli,” New York Times, December 15, 1985, 2:1; Joan Pong Linton, “Kurosawa’s Ran (1985) and King Lear: Towards a Conversation on Historical Responsibility,” Quarterly Review of Film and Video 23 (2006): 341–51.
Anthony Dawson, “Cross-Cultural Interpretation: Reading Kurosawa Reading Shakespeare,” in A Concise Companion to Shakespeare on Screen, ed. Diana Henderson (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), p. 158 [155–75].
J. Lawrence Guntner, “Hamlet, Macbeth and King Lear on film,” in The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare on Film, ed. Russell Jackson, 2nd edn. (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 137 [120–40]. In an interview Kurosawa stated that the “secret subject of Ran … is the threat of nuclear apocalypse” (Michael Wilmington, “Ran: Apocalypse Song,” The Criterion Collection, available at: www.criterion.com/current /posts/402-ran-apocalypse-song).
James Simpson’s Reform and Cultural Reformation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002) raised vexing questions about the current ways of peri-odizing the medieval and the Renaissance, in turn prompting further analyses of literary-historical discontinuities, inter alia:
Carolyn Dinshaw, “Temporalities,” in Middle English, ed. Paul Strohm (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 107–23;
Jennifer Summit and David Wallace, eds., Medieval/Renaissance: After Periodization, special issue of Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 37 (2007);
Gordon McMullan and David Matthews, eds., Reading the Medieval in Early Modern England (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007);
Kathleen Davis, Periodization and Sovereignty: How Ideas of Feudalism and Secularization Govern the Politics of Time (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008);
and, more recently, Brian Cummings and James Simpson, eds., Cultural Reformations: Medieval and Renaissance in Literary History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010);
and Carolyn Dinshaw, How Soon Is Now: Medieval Texts, Amateur Readers, and the Queerness of Time (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012).
Andrew James Johnston, Performing the Middle Ages from Beowulf to Othello (Turnhout: Brepols, 2008), esp. pp. 225–312.
for Shakespeare’s medievalism generally, see esp. Curtis Perry and John Watkins, eds., Shakespeare and the Middle Ages (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009);
Helen Cooper, Shakespeare and the Medieval World (London: A & C Black, 2010);
Ruth Morse, Helen Cooper, and Peter Holland, eds., Medieval Shakespeare: Pasts and Presents (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2013);
The familiar tropes utilized to medievalize the Middle Ages, however, might be seen as rendering the “medieval” somehow coterminous with a general premodern “everywhen.” for Shakespeare’s sources, see R. A. Foakes, ed. and Introd., King Lear (Walton-on-Thames: Thomas Nelson, 1997), pp. 92–110; parenthetical references are to this edition.
Grigori Kozintsev, Shakespeare: Time and Conscience, trans. Joyce Vining (London: Dobson, 1967), pp. 61, 67;
Jan Kott, Shakespeare Our Contemporary, trans. Boleslaw Taborski (Garden City, Ny: Doubleday, 1964), p. 110.
See further Edwin Muir, The Politics of King Lear (Glasgow: Jackson, 1947), pp. 19–24;
Theodore Spencer, Shakespeare and the Nature of Man, 2nd edn. (New york: Macmillan, 1949).
for an overview of postwar Lear-criticism, see R. A. Foakes, Hamlet vs. Lear: Cultural Politics and Shakespeare’s Art (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 51–54.
John F. Danby, Shakespeare’s Doctrine of Nature: A Study of King Lear (1949; repr. London: Faber, 1951), pp. 34–35, 41, 46, 52.
for the influence of Danby’s reading, see esp. Richard Halpern, The Poetics of Primitive Accumulation: English Renaissance Culture and the Genealogy of Capital (Ithaca, Ny: Cornell University Press, 1991), pp. 216, 305–6 n. 5.
Stephen Greenblatt, “General Introduction,” in The Norton Shakespeare: Based on the Oxford Edition, gen. ed. Stephen Greenblatt, ed. Walter Cohen, Jean E. Howard and Katharine Eisaman Maus (New York: Norton, 1997), p. 1;
cf. Patrick Cheney, “Introduction: Shakespeare’s Poetry in the Twenty-first Century,” in The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare’s Poetry, ed. Patrick Cheney (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 6–10 [1–13].
Kozintsev , Shakespeare, p. 94; Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (1998; repr. New York: Riverhead, 1999), p. 488.
David Bevington, This Wide and Universal Theatre: Shakespeare in Performance, Then and Now (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2007), p. 160;
for Edmund’s acting and stage management, see John Reibetanz, The Lear World: A Study of King Lear in Its Dramatic Context (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977), pp. 58–59.
See Patrick Cheney’s Shakespeare, National Poet-Playwright (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004)
and Patrick Cheney’s Shakespeare’s Literary Authorship (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008), for the poet-playwrights in Lear, see esp. pp. 34, 205–6 in the former and p. 103 in the latter; for summary of Cheney’s argument in the context of Shakespeare’s recourse to medieval conceptions of literary authorship, see Keller, “Shakespearean Medievalism.”
Bloom, Shakespeare, p. 489. for Edgar’s medievalism (his knowledge of Samuel Harsnett’s Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostors and quotation from Bevis of Hamtoun), see Cooper, Shakespeare, p. 168; for the religious dimension, see Richard Wilson, Secret Shakespeare: Studies in Theatre, Religion and Resistance (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), pp. 271–93.
The lines closely approximate verse by Thomas of Erceldoune, but were included in William Thynne’s edition of Chaucer (1532) and labelled as Chaucerian by George Puttenham in The Arte of English Poesie (1589; repr. Menston: Scolar Press, 1968), pp. 187–88. See also Cooper, Shakespeare, p. 167; foakes, King Lear, 268–69nn.
See Siegfried Wenzel, “The Wisdom of the fool,” in The Wisdom of Poetry, ed. Larry D. Benson and Siegfried Wenzel (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute, 1982), pp. 225–40.
Without commenting on issues of temporality, Rachael Hutchinson mentions that the intertextuality in Kurosawa’s films, namely the appropriation of noh, kabuki, and jidai-geki, destroys binaries of East/West as well as Hollywood/national cinemas. See her “Orientalism or Occidentalism? Dynamics of Appropriation in Akira Kurosawa,” in Remapping World Cinema: Identity, Culture and Politics in Film, ed. Stephanie Dennison and Song Hwee Lim (London: Wallflower, 2006), pp. 182–83 (173–87); we extend her thesis to all four medieval theater genres.
Elise K. Tipton, Modern Japan: A Social and Political History (2002; repr. London: Routledge, 2008), kindle edn.
Jean Herbert, Shintô at the Fountain-Head of Japan (1967; repr. London: Routledge, 2011), p. 390.
See Robert Hapgood, “Kurosawa’s Shakespeare films,” p. 236. for the historical Japanese background, see also Mitsuhiro yoshimoto, Kurosawa: Film Studies and Japanese Cinema (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), p. 355.
Hutchinson , “Orientalism or Occidentalism,” p. 177; see also Sato Tadao, “Kurosawa und seine Zeit,” in Akira Kurosawa und seine Zeit, ed. Nicola Glaubnitz, Andreas Käuser, and Hyunseon Lee (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2005), pp. 27–28.
Kenneth D. Nordin, “Buddhist Symbolism in Akira Kurosawa’s Ran: A Counterpoint to Human Chaos,” Asian Cinema 16.2 (2005): 242 [242–54].
for the boar as representation of Hidetora’s animal self, see Julie Kane, “from the Baroque to Wabi: Translating Animal Imagery from Shakespeare’s King Lear to Kurosawa’s Ran,” Literature Film Quarterly 25.2 (1997): 149 [146–51].
In “Buddhist Symbolism,” Nordin claims that Hidetora follows a path toward enlightenment that continues after his death, which we believe to be unlikely in view of the centrality of the Amida in Ran. In shinshū (The -True Sect of the Pure Land) and in its predecessor, jodo (the Pure Land Sect), the sects dedicated to Amida, enlightenment could be achieved in only one way: by reciting Amida’s name with complete faith and love, that is, experiencing enlightenment in one moment, the pure way (jodomone), rather than progressing gradually by following the “way of the wise” on earth (shodomone); for the latter, see E. Steinilber-Oberlin and Kuni Matsuo, trans. Marc Logé, The Buddhist Sects of Japan: Their History, Philosophical Doctrines and Sanctuaries (London: Allen & Unwin, 1983), pp. 208–9. In our view, Hidetora’s bouts of enlightenment thus do not lead to his eventual ascension to the Pure Land.
Hutchinson A, “Orientalism or Occidentalism,” p. 177; for the influence of the American Western film on Kurosawa’s samurai films, see Stephen Prince, The Warrior’s Camera: The Cinema of Akira Kurosawa (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991). for the noh elements in the film.
see Donald Richie, The Films of Akira Kurosawa (1965; repr. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1996), p. 217.
Story Lines and Theatrical techniques are frequently lent by and borrowed from each of the traditions: noh (a poetic and minimalist theater that incorporates Buddhist and Shinto elements), kyôgen (a light and comic “mad speech” staged between each noh play in Japanese all-day theater), kabuki (secular dance-drama), and bunraku (high-culture Chinese- and Korean-influenced puppet theater often dealing with the Confucian conflicts between duty and human compassion). for an overview, see Martin Banham, Cambridge Guide to Theatre (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 560–62.
Karen Brazell, “Japanese Theater: A Living Tradition,” in Traditional Japanese Theatre: An Anthology of Plays, ed. Karen Brazell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), p. 13 [3–43].
Saviour Catania, “Wailing Woodwind Wild: The Noh Transcription of Shakespeare’s Silent Sounds,” Literature Film Quarterly 34.2 (2006): 89 [85–92].
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Keller, J., Keller, W.R. (2014). “Now is the Time”: Shakespeare’s Medieval Temporalities in Akira Kurosawa’s Ran . In: Johnston, A.J., Rouse, M., Hinz, P. (eds) The Medieval Motion Picture. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137074249_2
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