Throne of Blood 9781838713591, 9781844576647

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For Nathaniel Watson

© Robert N. Watson 2014 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published in 2014 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN on behalf of the BRITISH FILM INSTITUTE 21 Stephen Street, London W1T 1LN www.bfi.org.uk There’s more to discover about film and television through the BFI. Our world-renowned archive, cinemas, festivals, films, publications and learning resources are here to inspire you. Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. Series cover design: Ashley Western Series text design: ketchup/SE14 Images from Throne of Blood (Akira Kurosawa, 1957), © Toho Co. Ltd; Ikiru (Akira Kurosawa, 1952), © Toho Co. Ltd; The Hidden Fortress (Akira Kurosawa, 1958), Toho Co. Ltd Set by Cambrian Typesetters, Camberley, Surrey Printed in China This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress ISBN 978–1–84457–664–7

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Acknowledgments How deep the roots of this project extend for me will be evident as I begin by thanking two friends who went to school with me from the ages of twelve to twenty-one: Michael Salzman, who convinced me to watch Throne of Blood forty years ago, and Michael Eric Stein, who lent his expertise as a screenwriter to the final revisions. My thanks also to my colleague Stephen Dickey, a great teacher of Shakespeare adaptations, and to Herman Ooms, an eminent historian of Japan, for reviewing the manuscript so helpfully. Emily Chou did excellent groundwork for the book as an undergraduate research assistant. Another outstanding undergraduate, Nicole Malek, has been instrumental in shaping an XML file that, in conjunction with Stephen Mamber’s ingenious and inexpensive ClipNotes app, instantly launches any of over a hundred sequences from the film with my explanatory text underneath. This XML file is available free at , which also provides links to download the iPad and Windows 8.1 versions of the app that – along with a copy of the film itself – will be needed to use my running commentary. Thanks to the excellent editorial team at Palgrave Macmillan/ BFI Publishing for offering such intelligent and efficient support. Thanks, finally, to my family for mustering something like affectionate amusement when they found me watching Throne of Blood yet again.

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Introduction In 1955, the great Japanese film director Akira Kurosawa and his colleagues began work on an adaptation of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, transposing from medieval Scotland to medieval Japan the tale of a heroic warrior tricked into a violent and ultimately futile usurpation by supernatural prophecies and an ambitious wife. Kurosawa had aspired to undertake this project for many years, but his initial effort was delayed by the release of Orson Welles’s 1948 version – which, with its low-budget Halloween atmospherics and its abortive attempt to mimic medieval Scottish pronunciation, was neither a critical nor a commercial success. Kurosawa’s version has emerged as a classic both in the world of Shakespeare performances (screened and discussed in countless secondary and university literature courses every year) and in the world of cinema (it was the inaugural screening of the National Film Theatre in London, and was handsomely reissued by Criterion in 2003). The greatness of Throne of Blood – titled Kumonosu-jo ˉ ( ), which would be better translated as ‘Spider’s Web Castle’ – was not immediately noticed in Japan. It proved only mildly profitable for the Toho movie studio, which was hoping to catch a share of the booming market for samurai films (in the jidai-geki genre of historical period pieces) while keeping the international art-cinema audience won by Kurosawa’s Rashomon/Rasho¯mon in 1950; and it only tied for fourth place in Kinema Junpo¯’s influential ranking of the year’s best movies in Japan. But – in contrast to the tepid domestic response, a contrast that has fuelled charges that Kurosawa abandons Japanese authenticity to please foreign audiences – the impact in the West was remarkable. Although initially laughed off by Bosley Crowther in The New York Times as an ‘odd amalgamation of cultural contrasts’ that

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inadvertently ‘hits the occidental funnybone’,1 Kurosawa’s adaptation quickly commanded high and wide respect. The then-vast readership of Time magazine was told that Throne of Blood was ‘the most brilliant and original attempt ever made to put Shakespeare in pictures’, an effort for which Kurosawa ‘must be numbered with Sergei Eisenstein and D. W. Griffith among the supreme creators of cinema’.2 Among notably distinguished directors of the Shakespearean stage and international film, Sir Peter Hall called Throne of Blood ‘perhaps the most successful Shakespeare film ever made’, and Grigori Kozintsev (who made the justly famous Russian King Lear/Korol Lir [1971]) called it ‘the finest of Shakespearean movies’.3 The renowned film theorist Noël Burch, who also wrote what is still probably the most important western study of Japanese film, lauded Throne of Blood as ‘indisputably Kurosawa’s finest achievement’.4 T. S. Eliot reportedly identified Throne of Blood as his favourite movie – or perhaps just as his favourite Shakespeare movie, or at least as presenting his favourite Lady Macbeth. Harold Bloom’s best-selling study of Shakespeare has praised it as ‘the most successful film version of Macbeth’,5 and many scholars of Renaissance literature concur. I certainly do: if a friend had not overcome my adolescent reluctance to attend a midnight college film-club screening of a battered print of some old, subtitled, samuraithemed, black-and-white Japanese retelling of Macbeth, I probably would not be a Shakespeare professor today. How could a masterpiece as dependent on its intensely poetic language as Macbeth survive so well its translation into a verbally sparse Japanese film? Although some of Kurosawa’s collaborators have said they did not even read Shakespeare’s play in preparing their screenplay,6 the director clearly sought out visual parallels to Shakespeare’s specific language, and drew on some large moral and existential ideas that Shakespeare articulates. The dominant theme of this film is the futile struggle of the self against nature. Kurosawa implicitly condemns the doomed battle of human pride and desire against an indifferent universe of overpowering scope, weight and persistence, but also mourns the suffering of the great

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human spirit tricked into waging that battle. The struggle to pull free of the spider’s web is foolish to undertake, but – and here we may see Kurosawa’s controversial humanistic investment in the individual – at moments heroic, and perhaps inevitable. That may seem a remarkably universalising moral, from the perspective of twenty-first-century cultural studies that instead emphasise local and material phenomena. But Kurosawa’s film (like Frazer’s comparative anthropology, which was still hugely influential in the mid-twentieth century) is clearly interested in highlighting analogies: in this case, analogies between British and Japanese medieval history, and between Shakespeare as an epitome of high western civilisation and Noh drama as an epitome of high Japanese civilisation. The film thus asserts a truth about our condition that transcends historical boundaries. The opening chorus told audiences in 1957 that ‘what once was so is now still true’, and that the spirit of the doomed warrior ‘is walking still’. The film then proves how broadly the moral of this story can be applied. This theme of the vain struggle of reflexive human will against time and space is certainly present also in Shakespeare’s Macbeth, as I have argued at considerable length elsewhere7 – although I suspect my reading of Shakespeare’s work was itself shaped by that compelling early encounter with Kurosawa’s adaptation. But in Macbeth, that pessimistic nihilism is mitigated (characteristically of Shakespeare) by a contrary suggestion of a more positive determinism that harmonises with human values, as divine Providence defends virtuous linear royal inheritance through the medium of natural order. Kurosawa pays less attention to that optimistic view: he undermines the benign aspects of both supernatural and monarchical control, and consistently employs the visual aspects of his medium to reinforce a message that (depending on the cultural position of the viewer) invites a Buddhist or nihilist interpretation. Kurosawa’s film adaptation thus shifts from Shakespeare’s theological and psychological exploration of the nature of evil

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towards a dark meditation on existential entrapment that is latent in Macbeth. What at first appears to be a version of mugen Noh theatre – a supernatural tale outside of time – collapses back into the genzai Noh of ordinary existence; as with the portents in Act 4 of Macbeth, the real betrayal is that the truth is literal, material and reductive, not that it is otherworldly.8 Some commentators see Spider’s Web Forest as ‘not so much a natural as a supernatural labyrinth’,9 but for creatures aware of their own mortality, nature itself is a force no less terrifying and overwhelming than evil deities. Some spiders inject poison, but others simply wait for their captives to waste away in the webbing. The recalcitrance of natural order against human will, depicted mostly as a blessing in Shakespeare’s tragedy, becomes in Kurosawa’s version an almost – but not quite – demonic assault on our desires for control and transcendence, desires which prove to be nearly as stupid and tireless as the biosphere that defeats them. One commentator accuses Throne of Blood of imposing a ‘simplification of the moral framework’ of Shakespeare’s tragedy through ‘the replacement of the Western concern for the individual soul by the rigid social ethic of feudal Japan, which encouraged obedience within a well-defined framework of social and political obligations’.10 Perhaps, however, the film instead achieves its deepest complexities by keeping those cultural values in tension – a tension reflected even by the contrast between the wildness of the forest on the one hand, and the well-defined framework of the human dwellings and their clean rectilinear designs on the other.11 That tension is reinforced by the juxtaposition, in the style of the film’s performances and storytelling, of modern western psychological realism on the one hand, and on the other hand the traditional Noh masks and movements towards which Kurosawa guided his performers.12 Kurosawa was attacked not only for naively believing in the possibility of individual human freedom, but also for not being ‘humanistic’ enough on that topic: ‘There are other film-makers who have a clearer regard for the individual in Japanese society, the individual free from the constraints of a

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feudal relationship.’13 But, as in Macbeth, the deeper tragedy in Throne of Blood depends on recognising that complete individual freedom is no less dangerous an illusion than complete control by higher powers. This tension would have been important in the Sengoku period depicted in this film (as well as in Seven Samurai/Shichinin no samurai [1954] and The Hidden Fortress/Kakushi-toride no san-akunin [1958], made shortly before and after Throne of Blood). Roughly the century preceding the birth of Shakespeare and half a world away, this was an era agonised by warring samurai factions and multiple phases of gekokujo ˉ : the overthrow of leaders by their supposed subordinates. Kurosawa commented that most people in Japan as well as the West misunderstood ‘what a Samurai is’ – or at least, what it was when ‘a peasant could still become a warrior’, before the codifications of behaviour that the Tokugawa shogunate initiated during the seventeenth century.14 The tension between traditional authority and individual self-assertion would have been extremely important both during the years Macbeth was produced (because of the lateRenaissance upheaval of socio-economic order and the uncertain launch of the Stuart dynasty in England), and during the production of Throne of Blood. As Erin Suzuki has helpfully explained, imperial defeat in World War II broke down ‘the tradition-bound dictates of Japanese culture’ and introduced a western emphasis on ‘the revolutionary concept of the “individual self”’: As Japanese society suddenly found itself coming to terms with these new ideas of the self and the radical potential of individualism, the young intellectuals of the Meiji Era felt a particular affinity with the early Renaissance writings of Shakespeare, which were written during and in response to an era faced with a similar conflict between a traditional past based upon hierarchical group identification and potentially dangerous new ideas about the individual self that threatened to destabilize and undermine the existing social structure. Early Japanese stagings of Western plays attempted to negotiate this ambiguous territory, particularly as the

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productions of Western drama required some adjustment to fit into Japanese theatrical conventions. The idea of dramatic realism, as opposed to the intentionally formal artifice of traditional Japanese theater, was from the first closely aligned with the idea of Western art and the cult of the individual.15

So it is hardly surprising that Throne of Blood – made in the midSho ˉ wa period when ‘Meiji ideals of public dedication and selfsacrificing service had to accommodate a new ethic of success that honored the individual’ – would be part of what Stephen Prince calls Kurosawa’s ‘series of inquiries on the place and the possibilities of the autonomous self within a culture whose social relations stress group ties and obligations’.16 This context is what I believe rival Japanese directors in the 1960s and film critics thereafter wrongly overlook in complaining that ‘with evidence readily at hand of democratic protest in modern Japan, of real spaces where farmers or fishermen could confront or defy the policies of the state, Kurosawa chose instead in his work to retreat to the past and to mythical spaces’.17 As so often, the force of the artwork derives exactly from its ability to evoke from the past an apt cautionary tale for the present, without any explicit political programme. In the dynamics even of the filmic technique in these opening scenes, it takes the deeds of Washizu – the Macbeth figure, played by Kurosawa’s perennial leading man, Toshiro ˉ Mifune – to restore motion to the Great Lord Tsuzuki’s seated body and bring affect into his stoic visage. Washizu is usually followed by a moving camera, whereas Tsuzuki is always shown in static compositions. Emperor Hirohito’s failure would have been coded in the passivity of the Great Lord in the face of imminent defeat, and the force of modern western consumerism would have been visible in the blind hunger of Washizu, who does not yet quite recognise the deadly labyrinth into which it might be leading him. Nor can Washizu quite understand, right up to his dying moment, how he was caught (as tragic heroes so often are) between the commands of two contradictory cultural imperatives.

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Thus – without losing an element of transhistorical human truth highlighted by the correspondences with Shakespeare – ‘the nihilistic vision of Throne of Blood represents a particular stage of liberal disillusionment in a Japan caught between the hard-earned lessons of its militaristic past and the unfulfilled promise of a democratic future’.18 As Kurosawa states in his autobiography, The Japanese see self-assertion as immoral and self-sacrifice as the sensible course to take in life. We were accustomed to this teaching and never thought to question it. I felt that without the establishment of the self as a positive value there could be no freedom and no democracy. My first film in the postwar era, Waga seishun ni kui nashi (No Regrets for Our Youth) takes the problem of self as its theme.19

Kurosawa was nicknamed ‘the Emperor’ by many who worked with him, and it was as much complaint as compliment; he seems to have been constitutionally incapable of relinquishing control, incapable of the tranquil resignation to the transience of his world that characterises the films of his great countryman Ozu.20 Yet Kurosawa also warned, especially through Rashomon, that ‘Egoism is a sin the human being carries with him from birth; it is the most difficult to redeem.’21 The liberation of personal desire risked replicating, at the level of the individual, the imperial appetites that had so recently led Japan into an ocean of bloodshed that resulted only in the national devastation epitomised by Hiroshima and Nagasaki – their ground as razed and ash-black as the site of the former Spider’s Web Castle on the volcanic soil of Mount Fuji. The very fact that the film begins with a retrospective chorus initiates the disturbing theme of scripted fate; yet we all must know, even if we resist considering it, that the distant future is sure to offer a similarly dismissive retrospect on any of our lives. Forcing us to recognise this tragic scripting brings into focus the reflexive denial (of fatedness and futility) most viewers share with Washizu. Yet within that dark world, there is beauty, as the composition of

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many shots reminds us. And within this dark tale, Kurosawa provides brighter moments that show there is room for laughter, loyalty, hearty male companionship, domestic pleasures and hope for the renewal of life. Central to the film’s ethical argument, I believe, is the implication that recognising the inevitability of death need not entail the poisonous fate Washizu is tricked into choosing for himself. Two years before Throne of Blood – during the same period of intense anxiety about nuclear annihilation – Ingmar Bergman’s great The Seventh Seal/Det sjunde inseglet (1957) similarly balanced the knight’s grim chess game with Death against the sweet domestic hopefulness of Jof and Mia, which the knight is able to protect by dauntlessly playing out a losing position. Watanabe, the protagonist of Kurosawa’s wonderful Ikiru (1952) – the title means ‘To live’ – knows he is soon to die. But the film warns that submission to the hierarchical bureaucratic rituals of Japanese life in which Watanabe has wasted decades – in effect, forbidding the self to be fully alive – is not a valid answer to human mortality. Nor is the lurid indulgence of the self in the sexual titillations, drunkenness and consumerism that are his first line of resistance when he learns he is terminally ill. Instead, he finally achieves a selfless assertion of self: an insistence on personal vision and morality that serves the larger project of human nurture and joy, represented here by the protective mothers he guides tirelessly through the bureaucratic maze as they seek to have a pond of toxic waste converted into a park, and by the children who eventually fill that park with exuberant life and laughter. The paradoxes of fate and free will were especially acute in an English society making the transition from medieval feudalism to Renaissance individualism;22 Kurosawa may thus have seen much the same artistic opportunity in this story that Shakespeare did. Ironically, Washizu’s attempts to function as a free agent of personal desire are what draw him into a fate predicted by traditional Buddhist warnings. And, as in Macbeth, the fundamental force resisting that human project of freedom is the seemingly benevolent order of nature itself, in all its patience and complexity.

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Human beings still tend to endorse the idea of a morally intelligent Creation, in which we must obey the dictates of nature; and yet we must all (as Asaji, the Lady Macbeth figure, convinces her husband) make war on nature in order to survive. Trees must be turned into houses, vessels and fire. Even feathers must be turned into weapons (to aid the flight of arrows), and livestock into food. The philosopher Pico della Mirandola saw these needs as proof that God authorised us to exercise free will. Renaissance Christians were then offered this sovereignty in a new technological form by Francis Bacon’s empirical science, and in a new economic form by the shift from serfdom to wage-labour. Yet John Calvin’s theology of predestination, which had recently become dominant in England, fiercely admonished these same Christians to accept that they ultimately had no such freedom at all. No wonder, then, that Kurosawa recognised and welcomed, in the Macbeth story, an occasion for ‘setting the ritualised gesture of traditional Noh theater and the static frame – popular in early Japanese cinema – in tension with the realistic cinematic conventions popular in western film, which he uses to represent the idea of transparent free will and human agency’.23 Like many other great works of art, Throne of Blood is a profoundly ambivalent exploration of human morality that is at once intensely localised and transhistorical – and is deeply self-conscious about its medium. It empties the world of false and toxic meanings, and when that emptying seems to leave nothing to sustain human morale, its aesthetic graces make the lack of meaning seem itself meaningful. As in the catharsis that Aristotle recognised as the work of tragedy, the despondency of Throne of Blood seems morally charged; not itself a nothingness, but a call on our self-overcoming, our moral heroism, even in the blank face of doom.

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A Guided Tour through the Spider’s Web After a minute of gorgeously composed shots of the barren, mist-swept Mount Fuji, reminiscent of suibokuga ink-painting, Kurosawa begins his human story with a subtle self-deprecating irony: he follows the opening credits – culminating in his own, which asks to be read down five levels of a column of Japanese characters – with a pan across some grave-marker slabs arrayed like another page of credits, then down a five-level sequence of Japanese characters resembling his own vertical listing a few seconds earlier. But this is the grave-marker of Spider’s Web Castle, and in saying so, it also declares itself a gravestone of this film whose name it bears, and announces the film as the gravestone of the world it reconstructs. Ars longa, but the medium fades. This column, its wood worn and the ink thinned with age, is the core of the monument marking the site of the long-erased castle through which the film’s characters materialised their transient claims to glory. The opening chant echoes some standard Buddhist precepts about the transience of worldly aims and acquisitions; it will be essentially replicated in the song of the Forest Spirit, who corresponds to Macbeth’s witches, and then repeated to close the film. As reinforced by the image of open ground where the great castle once stood, the warning also corresponds to a haiku by Basho ˉ – Japan’s greatest seventeenth-century poet (as Shakespeare was England’s), writing in a genre Kurosawa himself practised – apparently inspired by visiting an old battlefield: ‘Summer grass – /all that’s left/of warriors’ dreams.’ The English literary text that best summarises the ironies of this erasure may be, not Shakespeare’s Macbeth, but Shelley’s ‘Ozymandias’:

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Opening credits for the lead actors, Toshiro ˉ Mifune and Isuzu Yamada; and the grave-slabs in the opening montage

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And on the pedestal these words appear: ‘My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings. Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!’ Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare, The lone and level sands stretch far away.

The film’s opening landscape is dark and barren, the weather is dull and bleak, there is no individual human voice, and all that survives is a weathered, abandoned obelisk surrounded by nameless graves. The Buddhist lessons of mujo¯kan (impermanence) and mu (nothingness) are conveyed by ku (the artistic deployment of empty space), as James Goodwin has explained.24 The flattening effect of the telephoto lens25 (pioneered in Japanese cinema by Kenji Mizoguchi and here employed by Asakazu Nakai) and the deadening of the treble in the sound palette augment the depressive force of this opening sequence. They correspond to Kurosawa’s rejection of the original tall design of the buildings: this is a world that constantly tamps down anything that seeks to lift itself out of the ordinary, any aspirations to individuality and ascendancy. The vasts of space in Kurosawa’s befogged mountain setting for Throne of Blood serve to signal also the vasts of time. They establish a contrast that will be exploited to render more needful but also more futile the human struggles of the plot, and to emphasise the claustrophobia of the film’s low interior spaces, as part of an ongoing contrast between human aspirations (intense, but finally trivial) and the world in geological time (seemingly passive, but finally overwhelming, as ‘Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow/Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,/To the last syllable of recorded time’26). Where Shakespeare opens with the vivid Weird Sisters, suggesting the superior power of the supernatural over Macbeth, Kurosawa frames his story instead with the blank superior power of the natural, which has long since erased the glorious structure for which we are about to see people struggle so desperately.

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Clearly – that is, foggily – nature has its own dissolves, into which time disappears: by fading to the story as a distant flashback, the cinematic medium becomes (not for the last time) complicit with the natural world in signalling the folly of most human striving. Day One The film then turns to action – action as strenuous and urgent as the opening sequence was stagnant and demotivating. An anonymous rider churns uphill, as almost everybody seems obliged to do in this film, as if the world were an Escher stairway, as it seems also in the Sisyphean climbs that punctuate Kurosawa’s The Hidden Fortress a year later. The rider falls to the ground and pounds frantically on the bottom of the giant outer gate of a castle, with a low-angle shot reinforcing the sense of overwhelming obstacles; Kurosawa thus replaces the porter’s comic complaint about persistent knocking on Macbeth’s door with an emblem of human desperation. Mount Fuji, where Kurosawa chose to shoot these scenes, would have been an apt locale for recognising human civilisation similarly dwarfed by the power of nature. His officers’ lack of any plan beyond miserably enduring a siege exasperates Great Lord Tsuzuki in this opening sequence, and will exasperate Great Lord Washizu in a similar tableau before the final battle. That Kurosawa intended the parallel is clear from the screenplay, which describes both sets of advisors as ‘gloomily silent’.27 Both instances suggest the discomforts – for those who have had a taste of glory in their prime – of accepting ordinary survival, playing out the string of a declining old age, where (as the supplyofficer reports to the Great Lord here) one can only hope to ‘eke out three months, slurping gruel’. The passivity and impassive expression of Tsuzuki (and his senescent, almost silent and motionless officers) echoes the emasculation of Shakespeare’s Duncan, who is repeatedly unable to defend himself. This failing is set against the heroic efforts of the messengers, and of the warriors they praise: Washizu and his

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friend Miki (the Banquo role, played by Minoru Chiaki), whom we then see on the backs of similarly striving horses. We see them, however, through the tangled – and implicitly entangling – undergrowth of the forest, which repeatedly comes into primary focus as a chastening reminder that the heroic story may not be the most fundamental one: growth, decay and erosion will wait out and wipe out human creations. The film thus establishes early on not just its signature tension between the grid and the tangle, and not just its signature rhythm of eerie stillness alternating with violent agitation (matching Kurosawa’s belief that in Noh ‘quietness and vehemence co-exist together’28), but also the implication that this rhythm corresponds to the tension between the stasis of the collective world and the brief, desperate, erratic appetite of individuals. As Washizu and Miki ride through a weird mixture of rain and sunlight (matching Macbeth’s famous opening line, ‘So foul and fair a day I have not seen’), their determined masculine efforts, with spear and arrows, are therefore all the more refreshing and impressive. But those efforts are also scoffed at by circumambient nature: the conventional westernised brass accompaniment of a heroic charge that revs up as the men do (in contrast to the minimalist traditional Japanese instrumentation of most of Masaru Sato ˉ ’s score) is erased by demonic laughter within twenty seconds. It is hard to imagine a more vivid depiction of the absurd battle between human will and natural entropy than these men’s effort to attack the weather and the forest with their weaponry. Washizu’s announcement that, against the ‘evil spirit’ trapping him in the forest, he ‘shall depend on my faithful bow and arrow’ recalls a Buddhist ritual of archers shooting at evil spirits,29 but also foreshadows the final scene when the arrows of soldiers who have lost faith in Washizu will trap and kill him: his prideful assertion will prove to be his punishment, matching the extensive pattern of poetic justice that pervades Macbeth. In an echo of the thematic tension, this scene intersperses tracking shots that follow the riders with some stationary shots that

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The two warriors, already visibly caught in the dark tangles of Spider’s Web Forest; Great Lord Tsuzuki and his generals passively receive bad news

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emphasise the stability and stillness of the vegetation around them, even pulling the focus to make the dripping vines, rather than the riders passing by them obliviously, the subject of the shot. (This contrasts with the more alienated view of the forests Kurosawa offers in Dersu Uzala [1975], where ‘the camera pans only to follow figures’,30 although there too the point ultimately seems to be that forests swallow up human life indifferently.) We are spying on the riders from the position of nature, and that is finally as predatory as spying down from the arrow-slots on enemies approaching the invincible Spider’s Web Castle. The camera in the opening scene within the castle was as static as the characters: all symmetrically framed against a nearly blank battle-screen, and held in long shots. Our introduction to Washizu is instead dynamic and often close up, registering the passion of a soldier astride a live mount, rather than perched on traditional little stools like the lords in the previous scene. We are thus drawn visually, as Shakespeare draws us verbally, into the allure of the protagonist’s unsettling powers, even while receiving signals on another frequency warning that those powers are, in both senses, vain. Washizu and Miki then receive those dispiriting signals explicitly from the Forest Spirit, though it weaves delusive promises of glory into the warning. The bamboo stalks and branches tied with vines that comprise the Spirit’s thatched hut offer a middle case between the neatly manufactured planks of the other buildings and the wild growth of the forest – a contrast that will eventually return to prominence when the forest comes to recapture the fortress. At first the trunk of a massive tree hides the centre of the hut where the Spirit squats, but the dark, ancient tree may be just another version of that Spirit, as nature again invites humanity to mistake its obstruction of the will of mortal individuals for supernatural malice. The Spirit occupies a field of light which may suggest either enlightenment or demonic energy (and matches the overexposed white that characterises Lady Asaji, and later Miki’s ghost), while the men are lost in heavy forest darkness, which they match in tone every

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time the shot turns back towards them. The horizontal crescentmoon emblem on Washizu’s helmet makes him, as shot here from behind, resemble a beast with horns or the pincers of his centipede emblem; Miki’s look like the ears of a hare, as on his flag emblem. Throne of Blood never lets us forget – and this is especially true of its only three on-screen deaths – that human beings are fundamentally animals struggling in their various inarticulate ways to survive. The editing and framing of shots are highly emblematic here. As Washizu and Miki ride through the forest, Kurosawa several times cleverly aligns intercut shots of each of them at the same position in the frame, blurred by the rain and foliage and by the distance and speed of their ride so that they seem to be the same person: allies united in a single continuously panned figure. Even when they encounter the Forest Spirit, at first all the shots keep them nicely paired. Yet, when the Spirit recites to them their different destinies, each instead appears in a single shot. Throughout the film, Kurosawa Captain Miki (left) and Captain Washizu (right), with the Forest Spirit between them

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composes three-person shots, with the central point as a symbol of conflict or power; here it is aptly the Spirit framed between Washizu and Miki. While Washizu and Miki frame the Spirit, they are framed by their sashimono banners. Soon they will, similarly symmetrically, frame mounds of corpses (which, in an existential sense, frame them). Then they will frame the castle which – like the Spirit here, and like Lady Asaji, who stands between them in a later diagonal shot – will divide them into deadly enmity. In this sense, Throne of Blood may be thought of as a buddy movie that – under the influence of femmes fatales – swerves into film noir instead, with the standard misogynistic implication that pushy women, too clever for their own good, destroy an honourable world of male solidarity while compromising their own feminine virtues. To extend its disorienting effect, the Spirit squats on a hay thatch that resembles its roof, and the lines of the back wall (which suggests a spiderweb in close-ups of the Spirit) are horizontal while the sides appear vertical. The Spirit’s sexual ambiguity recalls the three Weird Sisters in Macbeth, who ‘should be women,/And yet your beards forbid me to interpret/That you are so’ (1.1.43–5). And, as in Macbeth, such unsettling ambiguities are merely an overture to many others, including – at the moral centre of the tragedy – the interplay of free will and determinism in human action. Not all critics believe Kurosawa keeps that interplay balanced. Anthony Davies argues that ‘Where Macbeth has choice, Washizu has only destiny’; and Judith Buchanan asserts that ‘The ambiguity sustained in the Shakespeare play is resolved in Kurosawa’s film. Washizu’s fate, as the Forest Spirit makes clear and the ensuing action confirms, is not his to determine.’31 Stuart Galbraith saw Throne of Blood as ‘a formal experiment in which everything is fated’,32 Donald Richie felt it depicted a world where ‘Freedom does not exist’,33 and Michael Jeck’s commentary track on the Criterion DVD re-release of the film insists on the same reading. But perhaps the fate Washizu could not overcome was merely his own mortality, and the futile attempt to do so led him (like Voldemort

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in the Harry Potter books) into a worse waste of whatever value life might have offered within the span. The fog, the tangled vines, the shifting focus and camera angles, the labyrinthine paths, the partial echoes and the mysterious prophecy which seems to hover between absolute knowledge of destiny and a mere tricky provocation all tend to refute Richie’s claim that Throne of Blood allows ‘nothing soft, nothing flowing, nothing amorphous. Everything is rigidly either/or … Things are as they are, preordained.’34 Furthermore, Kurosawa preserves the function of the Banquo figure and adds the arguments of that character’s son as a demonstration that a less hasty and brutal response to the prophecy was possible. Washizu rightly ends up berating himself for his folly, not the universe for his destiny. The Forest Spirit wants Washizu to believe it foresees a specific and ineluctable fate for him. As Buchanan observes, the Spirit ‘puns on the Japanese word Ito ˉ which is both the name of the Japanese goddess of Fate, and the word for thread’.35 The Spirit’s steady turning of the spinning wheel not only suggests a spider spinning out a trap, but also implies the cyclical nature of life, and perhaps alludes to the Three Fates who spin out and then cut off life in Greek mythology. It may recall the old man’s watermill that figures so prominently in Seven Samurai. The larger, and therefore slowerturning, of the linked wheels is aptly on Miki’s side of the shot; and, in Richie’s subtitles, the Spirit tells Miki that ‘your luck turns slowly’ compared to that of Washizu. Furthermore, the Spirit’s spinning wheel strongly resembles a movie projector,36 linking the moment reflexively to its medium, with the implication that the biographies of these men (deluded by desire into believing they have free will) are already scripted, as part of the cycle of life. This meta-cinematic symbol updates Macbeth’s despondent view of human life as ‘a poor player/That struts and frets his hour upon the stage/And then is heard no more’ (5.5.23–5). The ferocious Washizu is comparably caught on film as the spool runs out. That note of futility is strongly implied – with echoes of Eastern philosophical and religious warnings against desire (and about

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karma, mentioned in the Spirit’s song) – by the fact that the Spirit is spinning but apparently making nothing, perhaps just moving the yarn from a loose spool onto a tighter one. But – in a line omitted by the subtitles of what was the standard English version for nearly half a century, now restored in Linda Hoaglund’s version of the new Criterion release, and emphatically present in the screenplay – the film acknowledges that humanity at least may hope (if it manages to feel this as hope) that cyclical existence means its horrid corpses will eventually produce sweet-scented flowers. This is Kurosawa’s echo of the cyclical agricultural metaphor Shakespeare established by locating hope in ‘the sovereign flower’ Malcolm and his new generation of greenery-carrying soldiers who overthrow the shrivelling ‘yellow leaf’ Macbeth (5.2.30; 5.3.23). Perhaps a gentlerhearted protagonist than Washizu could have heard in the Spirit’s song – as the dying hero of Kurosawa’s Ikiru hears in the enchanting carpe diem song (‘Gondola no uta’) that warns ‘Life is brief’ at the culmination of that film – a provocation to a loving acceptance of transient life rather than furious resistance to inevitable death. Its first round of prophecy ended, the Spirit disappears, and its hut does too. Perhaps it constitutes a portal to the nihilist vision, by the very evanescence of that portal. The ease with which the men swat it out of existence is palpable – but does nature find it any harder, in the long run, to sweep away the supposedly invulnerable Spider’s Web Castle? The disappearance of the one building predicts the disappearance of the other, but in ways the soldiers – characteristically and fatally – cannot appreciate. In place of the hut, Washizu and Miki stumble upon heaps of human remains studded with military helmets – a silent analogue to the Sergeant’s early description of Macbeth and Banquo slaughtering rebels as if they meant to ‘Memorise another Golgotha’ (1.2.40), the biblical ‘place of skulls’. This is another physical manifestation of the Spirit’s prophecy that Washizu – and perhaps most viewers of Throne of Blood – are unwilling to register, though it is staring us all in the face. In other words, the Spirit’s amusement may reflect the fact that

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these aspiring men are begging for a prophecy of their fate, when they only have to look at corpses all around them in time and space to receive a very reliable prediction – but they cannot register it, could not tolerate understanding it. By moving the camera so we see the skull-mounds before Washizu does, Kurosawa achieves an existentialist version of the classic horror-movie effect of making the audience helplessly aware of a menace that the protagonist has not quite yet noticed. The scene certainly draws from the Noh drama Kurozuka (The Black Mound), which features an old woman who works at a spinning wheel and seems to speak timeless wisdom, but has a pile of corpses hidden away in a back room that the spiritual pilgrim glimpses at his peril. These heaps may also recall Kurosawa’s traumatic boyhood encounter with decaying bodies on a visit to the epicentre of the 1923 Great Kanto earthquake, when he observed that ‘In some places the piles of corpses formed little mountains.’37 Washizu (left) and Miki (right), with the mound of skulls in place of the Spirit

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Those heaps also resemble the toxic waste dump, bristling with bits of modern industrial garbage, that lurked at the centre of Kurosawa’s 1948 film Drunken Angel/Yoidore tenshi. All of these are occasions to contemplate – or (as Kurosawa’s brother warned him at the earthquake site) to recognise the costs of refusing to contemplate – the wastes of mortality. In their befogged wanderings immediately after meeting the Spirit, as in many other subtler instances, Washizu and Miki repeatedly pass back and forth over their own tracks, while the strings on the soundtrack keep cycling. Shakespeare’s play similarly signals, by echoes of speech and parallels of circumstance, that its characters repeatedly cross over their own and each other’s paths. In a scene – absent from the original screenplay – that conceivably derives from Kurosawa’s stint as an assistant director on Horse/Uma (1941), where the title creature repeatedly gallops in and out of the mist, these captains ride in and out of view through heavy fog a dozen times. They are abundant in determination, but lack any certainty about which direction to push. Like all of us, they emerge from the realm of the indistinct, and – despite their best efforts – return to it. This moment is a miniature of their lives, which are in turn miniatures of the framing fate of Spider’s Web Castle itself, which we have already been shown will disappear into fog on this dark earth. Their confused wandering, reinforced by a diligent technical modulation that makes each shot in this sequence unique,38 also evokes the film’s thematic illusion of freedom. They may choose to go in any direction at any moment, and they are set on a goal; but in the absence of any stable landmarks by which to navigate, is such freedom any different from captivity? The fact that, immediately after encountering the Spirit, they meander so helplessly around an area of open ground suggests that their helpless meandering in Spider’s Web Forest right before that encounter was more a metaphor for human consciousness than a compulsion of geography. The fact that they finally discover the castle only when they give up in

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exhaustion and let the horses walk (Chiaki reports that he and Mifune were truly exhausted from hard riding at this moment) also evokes Zen precepts of finding only by not seeking. Their decision to rest before proceeding to the castle, however, seems to be partly a cover for their uneasy need to discuss the prophecies in private – as Macbeth and Banquo agree to do. They choose to have this conversation in a hypothetical register, with reassuring mutual laughter that trails off into uneasy, distracted silence, each one wanting the other to speak first – as both Lady Macbeth and Lady Asaji must do for their hesitant husbands shortly afterwards. The motif of the divisive central image returns with the castle looming in the background between Washizu and Miki, who are sitting in the foreground. The tip of Miki’s trusty spear and the tip of Washizu’s trusty bow point almost towards each other’s bodies, and meet on a vertical plane that bisects the castle. The composition of the shot thus reveals the conflict lurking in their conversation.

Washizu (left) and Miki (right), now separated by the castle

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They have been seeking that castle, and now they are seeking it in a more possessive sense, as a symbol of supreme power and status. As it comes into their physical views, it comes also into their consideration as a viable object of desire. As it unites their physical vision and their vision of the future, it also divides them in rivalry. As Washizu and Miki enter the castle by torchlight in the next scene, the camera following their figures from behind draws renewed attention to the morally themed contrast between their costumes: Washizu’s clothing and banner are black and white, while Miki’s are shades of grey, suggesting his role (here as for the parallel character Banquo in Macbeth) as an ethically liminal foil to the protagonist who plunges from heroism into utterly black-hearted evil. The next sequence offers a brilliant cinematic exposition of the dynamics of power. A low-angle dolly shot follows the triumphant Washizu and Miki as they approach the Great Lord, who is framed between them. This camera angle makes them appear already to tower above him as they ascend the steps of his dais. They stop one level below him, however, now framing his heir Kunimaru as well (the obstacle to Miki’s part of the Spirit’s prophecy), kneel down, and finally, by bowing, bring their heads just below those they have not yet usurped. The relatively shallow depth of field in the initial shot makes the Great Lord appear distant, but also blurry, coming into focus only as the camera, which travels with the movement of these soldiers, approaches the throne. Their path is oblique to the rectilinear forms of the castle, conveying a subliminal sense of things beginning to shift out of control there. In Hoaglund’s subtitles, the Great Lord calls Washizu ‘most distinguished’, then paradoxically calls Miki ‘equally distinguished’: a paradox that breeds a deadly sibling rivalry, or what René Girard would call a crisis of mutual emulation, arising from the prophecy that somehow promised each of them perfect sovereignty. (At the parallel moment [1.4.30–1], Shakespeare’s King Duncan praises Macbeth but then insists that Banquo ‘hast no less deserved, nor must be known/No less to have done so’.) Given a sword – recalling

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Miki forces himself to bow beneath the honorary sword

Miki (left) about to join Washizu in rising towards glory

Miki rises between the Great Lord and the Great Lord’s son

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the violence by which they won this glory, but also the temptation they must be suppressing at this moment to seize more glory by more violence – the soldiers both struggle visibly to re-subjugate themselves under it. The diligent blankness of their faces proves not quite sustainable around their eyes at exactly the moment when the prophecy of even greater status seems to be verified. These close-ups are framed between the ring of torches representing the court and the swords the men grasp, signalling the tension between the status quo and the warriors’ newfound power. When Washizu returns to his kneeling place, his head sits slightly higher in the frame than the Great Lord’s; Miki’s remains below until he, too, returns with the first element of the prophecy provocatively fulfilled. As Miki approaches to receive his promotion, the angle of the shot inserts him exactly where the prophecy provokes him to imagine his heirs interposing: between the Great Lord and Kunimaru. After he receives it, and until he turns to depart, his sword lingers against the body of Kunimaru, the heir-apparent to the throne that the prophecy has promised to Miki’s son, Yoshiteru. The soldiers once more bow just enough to bring their heads marginally beneath those of their social superiors. This pressure to stoop, as a visual cue to frustrated ambition, is reinforced by the architecture of Yoshiro ˉ Muraki’s set throughout the rest of the film. As Kurosawa recalls, ‘To emphasize the psychology of the hero, driven by compulsion, we made the interiors wide with low ceilings and squat pillars to create the effect of oppression.’39 Kurosawa uses very few close-ups in this film, which increases the impact of the extreme close-ups of Washizu and Miki’s faces here, offering us access to an emotional interiority that defies the highly acculturated show of reverence. The struggle these men so visibly endure when obliged to lower themselves beneath the symbols of their risen (but, by the prophecy, not yet crested) status echoes the anxieties, on all sides, in many societies throughout history, when conquering generals return home to civilian authorities who must fear the possibility of a coup. This also means

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The newly exalted soldiers above their Great Lord and his son; the soldiers bow one more time beneath their Great Lord and his son, with Miki’s sword ominously placed

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that those generals must fear that the authorities will try to preempt that threat. The moment thus captures, in compact visual form, the elaborate rhetorical efforts of the corresponding scene in Macbeth (1.4) in which King Duncan assures the two captains who have saved him of imminent great rewards, and the captains in turn assure him of their happy subservience. The negative undercurrent of this theme resurfaces in Lady Asaji’s warning that the Great Lord will kill Washizu for fear that Washizu will claim the throne for himself. With the first stage of that prophecy fulfilled, the upwardly mobile soldiers march out looking haunted, fighting the urge to make eye contact: Miki’s eyes flick towards Washizu once, then each turns a simultaneous furtive gaze sideways towards the other for an instant, while never daring to turn their heads. The secret knowledge they share makes it difficult to stay on the straight path of soldierly discipline.

Miki’s sidelong glance at a haunted Washizu

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Day Two After a fade-out, this torch-lit nightmare yields to the film’s glimpse of pastoral idyll, with a soothing shift to a woodwind soundtrack, and the raw, black volcanic scree around Spider’s Web Castle gives way to green or golden fields of harvest around the North Garrison. As at the corresponding moment in Macbeth (1.6), the sense of a human community, and of a community between humanity and generative nature, is alluringly signalled, just as it is about to be rashly squandered. Most commentators seem to share Richie’s view that Throne of Blood is ‘ice-cold … allowing no hope and no escape’,40 but they are looking at the world through the eyes of the film’s myopic protagonists. The mountain fortresses may appear chilly and barren on their black soil, yet somewhere down below them the grain fields are still swaying in the sun and maturing towards a harvest that will eventually feed happy families. The screenplay emphasises this lovely and promising tranquillity of

A glimpse of the good life at the North Garrison

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nature: ‘Green rice fields everywhere … the brilliant sun of early summer … Bush warblers singing … Sprightly neighs of young horses. Everything in the scenery is peaceful and blooming.’41 Unfortunately, neither Washizu nor Miki is prepared, at their moment of rising glory, to understand the Spirit’s promise that their corpses may someday help flowers grow. They are determined to climb, even if that means climbing into the deadly darkness of that scree and that forest. In Seven Samurai, Kurosawa offered several glimpses of this alternative – the sweetness of the peaceful cycles of life – and the story ends with an ambivalent recognition that the glorious but violent era of great warriors must give way historically to the era of ordinary farmers. The painful lessons of World War II for Japan are certainly legible in that moral, as is the history of a hunter-gatherer species that has become an agricultural species. Yet again, Kurosawa blends the local with the universal in human experience. Brief though it is, this field-work scene in Throne of Blood helps refute the consensus that Washizu is doomed to his dreadful course by supernatural destiny. Yes, he is destined to die: who isn’t? But he forfeits the right to live long and well by yielding to Asaji’s implicit alliance with the Forest Spirit. The first human voice here is not even language, but a yawn, leading into a kind of loose choral window scene of relaxed servants, as the second of four main time-sections of the story begins with a pleasant feeling of timelessness. The servingmen assume that their masters must now be happy. Yet their observation that ‘Life can always be improved … but our lord and lady must be well satisfied’ raises the problem of desire as inherently unquenchable. As a scowling Washizu steps out into their scene, it is clear he is (therefore) finding no joy in his new station. He is about to let himself be misled into choosing death over life. The scene then cuts to the still interior he returns to: a bare, empty plank-scape, with the stillness of Lady Asaji anchoring it and seeming to represent the immovable aspect of his unfulfilment, the implacable obstacle of the appetitive self between human nature and the inner peace known as satori and nirvana.

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The first shot of Asaji – played by the great stage and film actress Isuzu Yamada, in the middle of her very lengthy career – recalls the Forest Spirit. Both are dressed in light-coloured garments in a cone of light (reminiscent of the contrasts in German Expressionistic lighting, which also sought to unsettle viewers’ sense of reality), seemingly calm and nearly motionless in a wooden room of intense vertical and horizontal lines, like spiders in their webs awaiting prey. Both are attuned to a music of their own that bespeaks reserves of insight, and passively aggressive under the pretence of womanly self-abnegation before the renowned warrior Washizu. The connection is reinforced when Asaji speaks, in a flat, monotonous voice echoing the Spirit’s monotone. Much of this presentation derives from Noh theatre, but Asaji’s seeming flatness is contradicted by – or perhaps lends more force to – the power of her words to puncture the armour of Washizu’s samurai persona, to make human fears and desires bleed out of him. The Spirit provoked Washizu to draw his bow when it made defiant eye contact for the first time and told him that human beings are ‘terrified to look into the bottoms of their own hearts’. Now Asaji does the same thing. Her suggestion that treason lurks in ‘the depths of your heart’ makes Washizu feel his guilty interior has been exposed. Her emotionally blank mask suddenly awakens into a smile as she says it, and her modestly averted eyes make their first contact with his. This note of brazen intimacy and complicity is no less startling than her flat insistence that he is lying. It is a photographic convenience, but also a cautionary metaphor, that Asaji and Washizu are repeatedly shown against an interior wall rather than the bright, living exterior we can see invitingly nearby. The window of nature lit up between the doomed couple from the very start of this conversation is one of several compositions in the film that suggest a way out, back into comedy and pastoral, that goes tragically unexplored because people cannot escape from the prisons of the striving, desirous human self and its constructions. As Washizu listens to Asaji’s argument that ‘My Lord,

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you have but two paths ahead’, we see through the next window a horse being ridden in circles (anticlockwise and clockwise) around the courtyard. This not only echoes the motions of the Spirit’s spinning wheel, but adds the suggestion of an animal spirit (and Washizu is emphatically that) being forced to run its native energies through a preconceived trajectory. And, really, Asaji is saying he has only one viable path. Washizu, like Macbeth, resists the act of treason his wife proposes by claiming to be content and trusted. Asaji reminds him that Tsuzuki, the current Great Lord (and equivalent to Shakespeare’s King Duncan), won his title in the same brutal way now proposed. Although this previous regicide is not mentioned in Macbeth, the Holinshed chronicle that was Shakespeare’s main source tells a similar backstory. Ran (1985), Kurosawa’s stunningly beautiful and painful adaptation of King Lear, similarly departs from Shakespeare to compromise our sympathy for the ageing Great Lord by revealing Lady Asaji’s impudent first eye contact

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that he had taken power as ruthlessly as power is now being taken away from him. Asaji implies (as she will later explicate) that this is simply a fact of how life works: a vicious cycle, but perhaps as ordinary and inevitable as the turning of the Spirit’s spindle-wheels. In response, Washizu justifies Tsuzuki’s bloody deed by saying that he had little choice: ‘his lord sought his life’, so he had to either seize sovereignty or be destroyed by the sovereign. The idea that one must either exert power or be destroyed by the powerful not only plays into Asaji’s next argument, but also reinforces the film’s subliminal association between the proposed crime and the basic physical and psychic self-assertions that seem to be – though some Asian philosophies warn this is a delusion – necessary for human survival. Although this extra level of existential entrapment is absent from Macbeth at the level of plot, it may be present thematically in Shakespeare’s relentless reminders of a fundamental enmity between, on the one hand, nature, and on the other, a human species not well Washizu and a horse – each being trained by a cleverer creature

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equipped, either in body or in mind, to thrive without clothing, housing and weapons – without, that is, striving against the bare given order of the world. Lady Asaji’s argument echoes the hints of existential entrapment in Shakespeare’s version: because Great Lord Tsuzuki would presumably have Washizu killed to prevent the prophecy from coming true, Washizu must kill Tsuzuki first. It is impossible to rest satisfied and unafraid in a universe of ambition, competition and mutual inscrutability. Peace does not seem to be an option. From another perspective, however, Washizu simply mishandles the famous ‘prisoners’ dilemma’ of game theory: by failing to trust the loyal Miki to remain silent, he destroys both of them. Kurosawa thus reverses Shakespeare’s surprising tendency to erase the clear motivations that explain the main characters’ actions in his source stories.42 In Throne of Blood, almost everything (including the partial morality of the Banquo figure) is motivated by the pragmatics of political ambition. Kurosawa certainly simplifies the protagonist, persistently reducing the intelligence, eloquence and imagination Shakespeare implies in Macbeth, apparently in order to preserve the sense of Washizu as fundamentally a trapped animal: a creature with a durable body and a strong will but lacking prudential perception or spiritual reference. Macbeth’s famous ‘If it were done’ soliloquy in 1.7 survives only in Washizu’s futile and largely inarticulate resistance to his wife’s murder plan, and a few vague invocations of honour. Other films – Sanjuro/Tsubaki Sanju ˉ ro ˉ (1962) a few years later, for example – prove that Kurosawa was capable of drawing a more witty, nuanced warrior out of Mifune, so this flattening must be deliberate. In other ways, however, Kurosawa is most actively engaged with the particulars of Shakespeare’s text during the night of the initial murder. Shakespeare implies that Macbeth, as the new Thane of Cawdor, somehow inherits the regicidal tendency as well as the title of the previous Thane of Cawdor, who suddenly repented just before his execution for attempting to overthrow King Duncan. Kurosawa has Washizu and Asaji, just before they kill the Great

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Lord, move into the same chamber where the conspirator Fujimaki committed suicide after rising against that same Great Lord. Treason thus appears to be contagious, or metempsychotic. Shakespeare’s and Kurosawa’s protagonists argue quite similarly against the planned assassination. Washizu’s stated determination to ‘savour the peace of a life befitting my rank’ echoes Macbeth’s claim that their new honours should be ‘worn now their newest gloss’ (1.7.31–5); and Washizu’s insistence – twice, five minutes apart – that ‘our Great Lord trusts me’ echoes Macbeth’s consideration that Duncan is ‘here in double trust’ (1.7.12). Lady Asaji’s reply that this is true ‘only because he does not know the depths of your heart’ derives partly from Lady Macbeth convincing her husband, at the end of the parallel scene, that ‘False face must hide what the false heart doth know’ (1.7.82). The play and the film correspond further when Shakespeare has a minor character report that ‘The obscure bird/Clamored the livelong night’ of Duncan’s death (2.3.51–2); Kurosawa has a minor character sent to clean that bloodstained chamber startled by the doubled harsh cry of a crow. Two minutes later, Asaji responds to a similar cry, interpreting it as endorsing the regicidal plan, much as Lady Macbeth observes that ‘The raven himself is hoarse/That croaks the fatal entrance of Duncan/Under my battlements’ (1.5.31–8). Asaji hears the bird asking, ‘Will you risk the world?’, much as Macbeth considers whether he would ‘jump the life to come’ to seize an earthly crown (1.7.7). Four minutes later, as Asaji hands the intensely reluctant Washizu the spear to commit the murder, a similar cawing is heard; at the moment of the killing, Lady Macbeth hears an ‘owl that shrieked’ (2.2.3; 2.2.15). Kurosawa gives us a glimpse of the bird next to a crescent moon that matches Great Lord Tsuzuki’s helmet ornament – which has perhaps now become the familiar lunar symbol of transience. The diegetic voices of birds off screen foreshadow the later scene when the birds chaotically fly in all directions. Asaji’s over-optimistic interpretation of this harsh omen anticipates Washizu’s over-confident reading of that later bird

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invasion – yet another way the film, like Macbeth, persistently gives the impression of crossing back over its own tracks. In support of the Forest Spirit’s prophecy, Asaji insists that ‘Ambition makes the man’, and points out that the necessary steps towards usurpation have ‘come to pass without the slightest help from you … The Great Lord himself has flown into your very hands. If you let this night pass, such an opportunity will never come again.’ This is highly similar to Lady Macbeth’s argument – again, fraught with sexualised challenges to her husband’s virility – at 1.7.49–54: When you durst do it, then you were a man. And, to be more than what you were, you would Be so much more the man. Nor time, nor place Did then adhere, and yet you would make both. They have made themselves and that their fitness now Does unmake you. The crow is faintly visible nearing the left edge of the frame, halfway up

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Both wives then propose essentially the same plan for drugging the sovereign’s guards and blaming them and his son for the killing. Lady Macbeth’s first words are read from her husband’s letter; Asaji starts as an off-screen voice, almost as if she were merely an audible transcript of Washizu’s own thoughts. The sprawled heaps of the Great Lord’s drugged guards match Lady Macbeth’s prediction that she can put Duncan’s guards into ‘swinish sleep … as in a death’ (1.7.67–8). The persistently phallic portage of the fatal spear Kurosawa arranges is a visible equivalent to the masculinising of Lady Macbeth and Macbeth’s vow to ‘bend up/Each corporal agent to this terrible feat’ in the corresponding Shakespeare scene (1.7.79–80), where the stabbing of King Duncan is repeatedly associated with sexual penetration. The two moving torches seen through the rectilinear grid of a translucent sho ˉ ji screen match Washizu and Miki moving through the fog earlier, but – moving as they are towards the Great Lord’s bedchamber – these lights also take the place of the dagger hovering along Macbeth’s fateful path towards the slumbering Duncan. Meanwhile the camera circles behind Washizu, emphasising his entrapment. When he finally takes hold of the spear Asaji presents to him, he is trembling and resentful; the close-up of his face shows a wincing, helpless agony. This may be (as some have observed) Mifune imitating the Noh warrior heida mask shown him by Kurosawa, but the expression also seems to plead that Asaji spare him from committing a deed he feels will be terribly wrong even though he knows he cannot refute his clever wife’s justification of it. This struggle resembles the way Macbeth feels obliged to replace the moral and pious aspect of his argument against the deed that had just dominated his soliloquy (King Duncan’s ‘virtues/Will plead like angels, trumpettongued against/The deep damnation of his taking-off’; 1.7.18–20) with arguments based on basking in opulent glory when he tries to convince his worldly wife (‘He hath honoured me of late, and I have bought/Golden opinions from all sorts of people,/Which would be worn now in their newest gloss’; 1.7.32–4). It is a beseeching,

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Washizu appears to be an extension of the traitor’s bloodstain on the wall, while Asaji carries the spear suggestively

Washizu too holds the spear at his groin, but now it bends upwards

Again the spear – now slimy with bodily fluids – is suggestively positioned

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exasperated face that implicitly asks: how can you do this to me, how did I get trapped into this terrible moment? (Near the end of the film, Kurosawa will impose another close-up version of this miserable grimace and stare of bafflement in Washizu’s dying moments.) Asaji’s possessed Noh dance is a choreographed reading of Lady Macbeth’s ‘That which hath made them drunk, hath made me bold;/What hath quench’d them, hath given me fire’ (2.2.1–2). But the quasi-erotic bloodthirst elides into a frantic guilt evocative of the half-drunk Lady Macbeth’s ‘Had he not resembled/My father as he slept, I had done’t’ (2.2.12–13). Asaji recovers by the time Washizu returns, but he, like Macbeth, appears frozen by the horror of his bloody ‘hangman’s hands’ (2.2.30). Asaji, like Lady Macbeth, therefore takes over the task of smearing the drugged guards with that blood. She then washes her hands with a kind of brisk, prim complacency, but sees that her husband still hasn’t shaken off his horrified trance. This provides a close non-verbal equivalent to Lady

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Macbeth’s ‘My hands are of your colour, but I shame/To wear a heart so white. … A little water clears us of this deed’ (2.2.67–70). Meanwhile the themes have been developing in nonShakespearean ways as well. The stealthy arrival of the Great Lord’s soldiers seems to verify Asaji’s warning, but that turns out to be a false alarm (a twist on Lady Macbeth’s confusion at 1.5.39, where she revealingly misunderstands for a moment a report of King Duncan’s approach). Instead of cut-throat competition, Kurosawa briefly renews the idyllic pastoral-agricultural scene, with pleasant sunlight and music. Could life be benign this way, if we didn’t all fear each other, and kill for fear of being killed? Laughter is the main speech of the successful hunt, although the procession with slain animals carried in its midst (the idyll has slipped ominously from herbivorous to carnivorous) foreshadows Great Lord Tsuzuki’s own funeral procession, and all those who die on screen will become creatures deprived of human attributes – especially articulate speech – in their mortal agony and fear.

The Great Lord’s entourage (some carrying slaughtered animals) follows an oddly angled path towards Washizu’s garrison

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The royal party rides horizontally along the upper frame of the shot, but then – often a signal of things going askew in the social and moral order, as (again) in German Expressionism – at an odd diagonal towards the castle, an angle all the more visible because the long-distance lenses flatten the image. In that evening’s council meeting, the Great Lord is seen straight ahead, and the shot as a whole is handsomely balanced, but everyone else appears slightly misaligned. Several times in less than a minute, Washizu, Asaji and Miki are lined up in a diagonally composed shot. Washizu in the foreground and Miki in the upper-right frame are divided, again, by a calculating Asaji, as she has already begun fatally dividing them through her insinuations to Washizu. Then Kurosawa wipes from a close-up of Asaji to a wider shot of a similarly posed Asaji some time later, still calculating within herself; this axial shot disturbs our sense of time, as so much does in Macbeth as well. Now, as the camera looks in at a dizzying diagonal on both axes, the upper body and head of Asaji occupies the opposite corner of a medium shot shared with Washizu’s lower body, as if the film were stuck in the projector at a 45-degree angle between two frames. In this composition, they could be a single person (as Macbeth and Lady Macbeth are often complementary, and as Washizu and Miki had been blurred and edited into each other in their fierce ride). Asaji is the thinking head, while Washizu is the armed, restless body. This intense mental inwardness is Asaji’s power, but will also eventually become her punishment, when nothing outside her imagination can penetrate the hand-washing nightmare. For more than a full minute, Washizu alone is persistently framed by a half-lit screen of rectangular lines, within the already oppressive rectilinearity of his chamber (compare the way Watanabe is hemmed in by the vertical and horizontal stacks of bureaucratic paperwork in Ikiru). Pondering, in his inarticulate way, whether he has the courage and right to seize the Great Lord’s position, Washizu paces around a mattress – itself edged with dozens of vertical lines – that seems identical to the platform where the Great Lord sat in the

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The diagonal shot shows Asaji dividing Washizu from Miki physically, as she schemes to break their mutual trust

Halfway through Kurosawa’s right-to-left wipe, as Asaji conceives her plan and then launches it

Asaji’s unshakable mind and Washizu’s restless body, diagonally divided

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The hero of Kurosawa’s Ikiru (1952), framed by the files that have cut him off from his humanity

Washizu, also in the grip of the grid

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previous scene. The pacing parallels his mental process, wavering and skirting around the idea. Asaji then takes Washizu’s hand and leads him directly onto that political platform, which seems also to be their conjugal mattress. This move evokes the element of sexual aggression – and the confusion of manly ambition with manly erotic success – in Lady Macbeth’s tactics for convincing her husband to proceed with the murder. Asaji then kneels to him, and he sinks alongside her; she no longer needs to pull him down, because he is mirroring her movements hypnotically. After backing Washizu into her plan by speaking aloud to the servants about serving sake to the guards, Asaji disappears with a rustling, whispering shriek of silk, then dematerialises, last seen as the billowing back of her cloak, as was the Forest Spirit that brought them to this deed. When she comes back (disturbingly quickly) bearing the jar of drugged sake, she seems less to have walked back from a closet than to have rematerialised out of a dark void. As the regicidal moment approaches, Washizu crouches in a (premonitory) cage of arrows – another, even narrower set of vertical lines – through which he sees the bloodstains of the previous rebel. Those billowing stains of mortal anguish that cannot be cleaned from the walls suggest again that the neat lumber of the castle cannot finally exclude the chaos of nature’s native forms. No act of human washing – a primal act of civilised humanity against the threatening mess of nature, and one we will see fail again for Lady Asaji – seems able to erase this violation of the house’s precise geometry, any more than civilisation can erase the primal competitive drives that seem to haunt this chamber. It also seems significant, however, that Kurosawa had cut directly from the servants attempting to wash those horrifying reminders of the previous rebel’s seppuku to Washizu and Asaji debating their murderous plan in a room where the whorls produced by the knotpattern (reflecting the passage of years and their shifting weather) in the clean boards behind them resemble those clouds of residual blood, contrasted again with the artificial vertical lines of the

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Washizu silently assents to the plan, but has second thoughts when alone

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mattress. Even without extraordinary violence, we are doomed to be both the perpetrators and the victims of destruction in this swirling but circular world. As in Macbeth, trees and blood jointly carry that message of generational life. Asaji and Washizu each turn around twice to look at the bloodstains – perhaps having second thoughts, or perhaps just to second the way almost everything in Macbeth happens twice. As Washizu will ultimately be destroyed by arrows, which sit beside him at this crucial moment, so Asaji will ultimately be destroyed by unwashable blood, which in the same shots fills the wall behind her, despite all the efforts to clean that chamber. This mise en scène will recur after the killing. The focus on Washizu and Asaji’s hands (as in Shakespeare’s version) prepares for the later hand-washing scene while also underscoring the obscene magnitude of their actions. For a moment they hold the spear simultaneously, sharing the guilt. Asaji laboriously unclasps Washizu’s bloody fingers from it, and quickly washes off her own hands, while he remains stunned, his chest heaving. Seeing her husband thus frozen, Asaji launches a crisis by raising the alarm, so that the soldier in him wakes up and takes over. Within half a minute, Washizu – his face again a mask of generic heida fury, as if he had to rouse physiologically the killing rage that he cannot justify within his own psyche – stabs the drugged, helpless guard. This is one of only three killings we actually witness in the film, and all are agonising to watch, probably because each of the victims, though each doubtless a killer himself, is essentially defenceless, and dies only after a kind of desperate implicit plea and considerable physical agony, reminding us of the animal terror that awaits each mortal creature possessed of (or by) the will to live. The guards, who had been sitting in a neat symmetry that corresponded to their praised dutifulness, are now seen sprawled chaotically – the combined effect of sleep and drugs, two forces that undermine human control and turn us back into non-rational beings.

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A vivid sidelight on the lead guard’s will to live comes from Takeshi Kato ˉ , who played the part in his first role for Kurosawa: It was summertime at the open set, I was hot, the lighting was hot, and bugs were swarming all over me, but I couldn’t move until I was killed. … I kept hoping Mr Mifune would kill me as soon as possible.

That rash wish almost came true: I put a piece of wood up my sleeve for safety when he stabbed me. However, Mr Mifune was so quick and powerful that he broke right through the wood and really stabbed me! It was so painful. I was not acting in that scene and I still have a scar under my arm.43

Kato ˉ was probably therefore very grateful for a fact that unsettled many other actors: Kurosawa liked to use multiple cameras, but only a single take.

Life nearly imitates art as Mifune stabs his fellow-actor

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Day Three All hell breaks loose. Chaotic noise revs up in the background, and as the lead guard’s body tumbles to the ground from its platform, the scene shifts to troops scrambling frantically at cross-purposes, while the battle-screen banners are pulled down by loosed horses – a cinematic equivalent of the report in Macbeth that ‘Duncan’s horses … Turned wild in nature, broke their stalls, flung out,/Contending ’gainst obedience’ on the night of his murder (2.4.14–17). The scene conveys breathlessly the sudden and seemingly complete collapse of the elaborate social organisation by which this human community survives. The uneven angular shifts and tilts of the camera reinforce this sense of unleashed chaos, and a ground-level shot gives us no perspective, only the terrifying energy of the hooves of galloping horses close up and out of focus in the dust they scatter. Tsuzuki’s son and the military leader Noriyasu appear on horseback, pulling each other in roundabout struggle (another version of the constrained circling of horses seen through Washizu’s window earlier). This struggle animates the tricky and time-pressured decision Shakespeare’s Malcolm faced: whether or not to flee the murder scene for immediate safety, at the risk of seeming to confirm the slander that he was the murderer. The flight of Noriyasu and the heir-apparent produces what seems at first a rather conventional chase scene out of American Westerns, signalled even by a momentary shift from the Noh combination of Japanese bamboo flute and drum into the pounding string-and-percussion music of Western action scenes: yo¯gaku briefly displaces ho¯gaku. One shot shows the escaping men on a left-to-right uphill path, seen through vines: essentially the same shot in which we first saw Washizu and Miki riding, and one that again momentarily shifts our perspective from the urgent needs of this chase and flight to the indifference of nature into whose encompassing, entangling stability it will all be absorbed. Our heroes are now these other two horsemen, also trying to reach Spider’s Web Castle. After starting down one branch of the path, they then choose the alternative, creating a false trail that

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Washizu mistakenly follows for a few precious seconds. This seems to present them as blessed, in a broader sense, with a power of choice – of branches on a path, or a decision-tree – that Washizu could not recognise until too late. Washizu then makes another questionable choice: he decides to confront Miki rather than chase the Great Lord’s son and Noriyasu any further, much as Macbeth decides to destroy Banquo before going after Malcolm and Macduff. On the advice of the crafty Asaji, Washizu approaches Spider’s Web Castle accompanying the coffin of its murdered Great Lord, so Miki will feel obliged to open the gates. But it is an agonisingly tense approach, with Kurosawa again utilising diagonal shots to signal a world tilting uncertainly. The close-up pans of the castle walls and arrow slits (scored with ominous, low-octave, minor-key blasts from a horn section), interspersed with reverse shots of Washizu’s wary face, invert the power of the gaze the camera normally confers on the spectators. By offering us many viewpoints Noriyasu and the Great Lord’s son escaping Washizu, but not escaping nature

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on Washizu’s procession but never a glimpse behind the walls, Kurosawa implicates us in the guilty anxiety that Washizu must feel while being watched from those potentially fatal apertures in the castle walls. The film thus plays on the common human fear, signalled in Macbeth by the knocking on the gate shortly after the regicide, of having one’s sins subjected to some unknown level of scrutiny that is ready to turn into a fatal nemesis at any moment. When, after a pause of terrible, silent uncertainty, the massive gates finally groan open, Washizu stares guiltily into the mirror of himself presented by Miki here (as Banquo is made a partial mirror of Macbeth by Shakespeare, one who shows greater morality under similar provocation). Under Miki’s stare, Washizu becomes again, in body language and facial expression, the needy little boy he became under Asaji’s disapproval (which was itself an evocation of the combination of disdainful mate and threatening mother that Lady Macbeth plays to her husband at 1.7.47–59). In a subtle but utterly compelling moment of film acting, Miki, after a punitive pause, finally rolls his eyes away in a combination of disgust and willingness to overlook; aspiring actors could do much worse than study Minoru Chiaki’s use of his eyes in this film. Miki then brings himself alongside Washizu, but only by turning his horse away from him first. The deadpan accusation (reflecting a balance between necessary acceptance and profound disapproval) recurs on Miki’s face as he tells of the suicide of Great Lord Tsuzuki’s wife, with a sidelong look towards Washizu, then a disgusted look away. These nuanced but powerful signals of reproach effectively replicate Banquo’s ‘Thou hast it now … as the weird women promised, and I fear/Thou played’st most foully for’t’ (3.1.1–3). The rest of that speech then turns to Banquo’s great expectations for his son through the Weird Sisters’ prophecy, about which he conducted some guarded, euphemistic negotiations at 2.1.20–9. Miki is thinking along similar lines: he will complacently explain to his son in the next scene that he needs Washizu’s help to deter a renewed invasion by Inui, whom the two had defeated at the opening

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An ashamed Washizu cringes under Miki’s stare; a disgusted Miki turns his eyes away

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of the film. In effect, but without quite saying so (at least in public), he is offering to overlook Washizu’s crime and to support his succession to the role of Great Lord in return for Washizu protecting the territory for Miki’s son to inherit. As they settle into their corrupt bargain, their horses fall perfectly in step. The silent partner in all these transactions is Great Lord Tsuzuki himself, whose coffin mounted with his crescent headgear follows these aspirants ominously. Where Tsuzuki was once seated in power in front of Washizu and Miki, now he is enclosed inertly behind them. His coffin, however, sometimes occupies the central foreground of the screen, again an implacable divider between the old allies; and we watch their entrance to his castle through the mooncrescent atop the coffin. The next year, in The Hidden Fortress, Kurosawa would similarly frame the threatened Princess heroically inside the crescent-moon symbol of her Akizuki clan. But the Throne of Blood version is anti-heroic, and the shallow depth of field in the

Washizu and Miki enter the castle, seen through the moon-crescent headpiece on the Great Lord’s coffin

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moving camera shot that slowly follows them means that at first the men are distinct and the coffin fuzzy and vague, but soon the coffin comes into focus and the men become a blur. It is as if Washizu and Miki are being watched at this moment of complicity not only by Great Lord Tsuzuki under his helmet, but also, no less judgmentally, by mortal transience itself, which is often symbolised by a waning moon. As the scene ends, and the pall-bearers approach the camera, we too seem to be headed into the coffin, soon and directly. Day Four The film then shifts – aptly, by a fade to black – to a new era, with a new chorus for the next time-sequence: Washizu’s soldiers looking down dismissively from the top of Spider’s Web Castle at their former fort, without quite registering (though we see it quite clearly) that they are still dwarfed by the mountain and the clouds. They renew, in a seemingly optimistic vein, their observation from the first chorus scene that ‘Life can always be improved.’ These are proud, strong, healthy young men looking down on a way of life they have risen above. But the negative side of that message was prominent at the same stage in Macbeth, with the newly crowned protagonist complaining that ‘To be thus is nothing’, and his wife observing that ‘Nought’s had, all’s spent/Where our desire is got without content’ (3.1.49; 3.2.4–5). This is very much the warning of the Second Noble Princess Yuki, seen through her clan’s moon-crescent flag in The Hidden Fortress (1958)

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Truth of Buddhism that echoes in the Forest Spirit and through the whole film: desire is endless and therefore pointless, a blind craving that can produce only dissatisfaction, anxiety and pain. From that perspective, Asaji – like many of Shakespeare’s villains – may be seen less as some supernatural essence of evil than as the embodiment of a common human error: the determination to take control of a situation, to attempt to force the world to conform to our preconceived desires. That determination destroys our inner peace and our ability to perceive the beauty of the external world in all its transience and incalculable complexity. The soldiers immediately add, ‘If only there were an heir, this house would have great joy.’ As after Washizu’s first promotion, the film cuts promptly, almost comically, to the bleak, lonely, silent interior where the supposedly glorious couple sits feeling (as always) the need for something more. Washizu distractedly clicks his fan in a rhythm like a ticking clock in the emptiness. The Lord’s crescent-moon Even exalted human status looks small against nature

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helmet watches over them, perhaps as a symbol of time, perhaps as a symbol of the crime being punished, perhaps as a symbol of the waning lunar cycle of female fertility – and perhaps hinting at the punishment that time imposes on self-regarding mortals, especially in a case of reproductive barrenness like the one Lady Macbeth foolishly invites (1.5.38–46). Washizu insists he will name Yoshiteru his successor at that evening’s banquet, to fulfil his implicit pact with Miki, as a concession to the prophecy, and because he and Asaji are barren and must adopt someone to inherit his position. Asaji insists, ‘I did not soil these hands with blood for the sake of Lord Miki’s son’ (recalling Macbeth, 3.1.62–73). The camera dollies in as, reminded of the prophecy, Asaji declares simply, ‘I refuse.’ That her sentence ends there, without more specification, is apt, because it epitomises a pointless but universal human effort to assert control. Hers is essentially the problem of human will confronting its mortal limits, which I have argued comprised the hidden core of that prophecy. After a pause, she announces, ‘I am … with child’ (leading to a screeching startle-note that is probably still heard in the vicinity of some pregnancy-test results). Procreation helps many people retain hope in the face of mortality; but Washizu merely drops dazed to her side, as he did when he yielded to her arguments for the first murder. This kneeling is a reaction of shock, and also reflects his heart dropping because he knows he must now find a way to eliminate Miki’s son so that, despite the prophecy, his own anticipated son can become the Great Lord. Washizu then rises again to his mission – and, through all the movements of the characters and the camera, his sword has never been out of frame. The scene cuts instantly to a horse running wild, as the horses did the morning after Great Lord Tsuzuki’s murder (and after the slaying of King Duncan in Macbeth). Washizu, who was implicitly the horse being tamed during his first conversation with Lady Asaji, is again running amok. This time he is reflected in Miki’s horse, instinctively refusing to be saddled to carry its master into the

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ambush Washizu has quickly planned. Miki is now both literally and figuratively right where Washizu was after their promotions – commanding the second castle, and awaiting the next advance promised by the prophecy – and he chooses to overlook the cautionary equine omen his son points out, as Asaji dismissed the cautionary avian omen Washizu heard before the regicide. In another extraordinary moment of bodily film acting, Miki – as in Shakespeare’s hints that Banquo is not completely immune to the prophecy’s temptations in unguarded moments (2.1.7–10, for example) – radiates a dangerous paternal smugness about how he has handled events, and what it means for his legacy, despite the inauspicious reluctance of his horse and despite his son’s earnest insistence that he would rather not become further entangled in the Spirit’s prophecies, however outwardly promising. Even while relying heavily on the prophecy, Miki chooses to ignore the omen, much as Washizu chooses to believe in the prophecy when it offers him what

A smug Miki ignores his son’s warnings

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he wants, and to disregard any discouraging words. Like Asaji less than two minutes earlier, Yoshiteru says ‘I refuse’ to the prophecy – but he says it out of a due suspicion that the prophecy might be a diabolical trick, and a willingness to relinquish power rather than to cling to it. This sane and dignified resistance is further evidence that we should not consider Washizu purely fated: one can listen to a flattering prophecy and choose not to believe it, not even (as Yoshiteru argues to his father) when it has partly come true. Eventually the terrified horse is captured and saddled; the screen wipes to Miki’s servants conversing that night when, to their amazement, the horse comes galloping home alone. In a scene of less than thirty seconds – and seemingly relaxed ones at that – Kurosawa has hauntingly told the story of Miki/Banquo’s murder. Kurosawa then takes us to the same moment at Spider’s Web Castle, where (as Keiko McDonald observes) Wooden floorboards run in vertical stripes perpendicular to the camera frame, encountering vertical stripes on a wall interrupted by thick, white horizontal lines. Kurosawa cuts repeatedly from one group of lords sitting in a straight line almost perpendicular to the camera across to another group opposite.44

This illusory order, matched by the rituals of social hierarchy (epitomised here in the serving of the sake), offers a foil against which the violent psyche of Washizu can be more vividly exposed. Again the contrast with Ikiru is illuminating: a sake ritual breaks down in that film also, but that loss of decorum is healthy because it occurs in a modern Japan trapped in its calcified hierarchies and proprieties, whereas Throne of Blood depicts an ancient Japan lacking adequate restraints on personal appetite. An old general begins his cautionary storytelling with the same wingspan poses that the servants in the previous scene used to try to block and contain Miki’s rampant horse. Kurosawa thus reinforces visually the sense of déjà vu that Shakespeare produces through verbal

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A servant tries to catch Miki’s frantic horse; the storyteller rouses Washizu’s guilt about Miki’s murder

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and symbolic echoes, to induce uncertainty about whether time is really the branching line in which we imagine we exercise free will, or instead a closed circle, like a repeating nightmare. Furthermore, this tale from the distant past is an all-too-present reality for Washizu, and one that threatens his future. Kurosawa repeatedly frames the storyteller between Asaji and Washizu, and the story he is telling is very much what is driving them apart. By the end of the scene, they will be standing a body’s length apart, facing opposite directions, and unable to look at each other at all for over a minute. Washizu interrupts the old general’s theatrical performance – as King Claudius interrupts Hamlet’s ‘Mousetrap’ performance – because its tale of doomed royal treachery comes too close to what weighs on the new leader’s conscience. Perhaps Washizu is especially enraged because what was supposed to be an act of self-assertion has thus only cast him further into a traditional role; he knows he has already become the character that this old tale had long since Asaji and Washizu, now visibly alienated

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foreseen. What upsets him is not just that the outcome is unhappy, but also that it is ‘Foretold in ancient legend’, as the song itself declares. He is merely playing a series of roles in the old story of a leader whose ‘henchmen murder him in betrayal’. Another long, awkward silence ensues. The sidelong glance that Washizu casts towards Miki’s empty mat recalls their sidelong communications after receiving promotions, and again when they re-encounter each other after the regicide. But now there will be no answering glance, just the blank forward stare of Miki’s ghost. Instead, Washizu casts a desperate sidelong glance at Asaji about Miki, who appears to his murderer bathed in an otherworldly light. Washizu’s heavy, clumsy, panicked footfalls fleeing this apparition contrast sharply with the traditional artistic, balanced choreography of the storyteller that opened the scene. Flinging himself back in the corner and then panting as he staggers along the wall, Washizu is inadvertently rehearsing for his panicked flight from his own soldiers’ arrows in the final scene, the culmination of his former ally Miki’s revenge. The dreadful failure of this banquet echoes Macbeth’s recognition that his ambitious treachery has deprived him of ‘that which should accompany old age,/As honour, love, obedience, troops of friends’ (5.3.24–5). Asaji’s sarcastic praise of her soldier-husband’s panic matches that of Lady Macbeth at the parallel moment (3.4.60–8). But then she herself shrieks, because the chief assassin arrives with his ominous bundle. For the literal-minded Asaji, diligent in blinding herself to the horrors her schemes unleash, the scarier residue of Miki is the tangible one: not his guilt-generated, guiltgenerating image, but his actual severed head, which she clearly does not want to see. She is more interested, anyway, in his living remainder – specifically, his son, who (like Banquo’s son in Macbeth) has narrowly escaped, keeping the prophecy alive. Asaji’s exit is a cue for Washizu to kill again, with a truly horrible pithing of the assassin he employed – the same soldier who walked at the head of the Great Lord Tsuzuki’s coffin and has now

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The terrified Washizu, cornered by Miki’s accusing ghost, and later similarly by his vengeful archers

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brought the head of Miki. The assassin’s animalistic death throes, writhing and hissing and gurgling within the turtle-like carapace of his armour, make this, for me, the most unbearable sequence in the entire film – again, I believe, because it revokes the supposed exemption (fiercely defended by our cultures) of our species from the terror and pain of mere creaturely death. The desperate, futile plea expressed here – as by Tsuzuki’s guard earlier and Washizu himself later – through the language of a body that wants above all to live reminds us that neither our will nor our words can save us from dying in our bodies. All that remains of the assassin is an amorphous black lump with a head-shaped bundle lying nearby. Kurosawa then fades to an unusually extended blackout – four full seconds of nothingness. Day Five The film fades back in to a scene like the one that opens it, with a harsh wind besieging Spider’s Web Castle, effacing it with swirls of Washizu cowers away from the death throes of the soldier he stabbed

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dust and fog (one of Kurosawa’s favourite visual effects) in the short run, and threatening to erase it with sheer erosion in the long run. Kurosawa then takes us partway inside for another choral scene among the soldiers, but now they talk about the castle’s vulnerability, not its invulnerability. Next, we move inside the castle doors, by what seems like an unusually straight cut for Kurosawa, but it becomes a wipe when Asaji’s elderly attendant slides open a door panel, leaving Washizu framed by the panels in a pose of formality that belies his inner agitation. The way the camera then dollies back makes it appear that the walls are closing in on Washizu. He startles much the way he does when he sees the ghost of Miki, and again what startles him proves to be a manifestation of mortality. The attendant has come to report the stillbirth of Asaji’s expected child to the intensely expectant Washizu. This news seems symbolically apt: a focused version of the poetic justice that imposes barrenness on Lady Macbeth because she has ambitiously opposed the normal cycles of nature. If not supernaturally determined through the prophecy, it could still be a karmic punishment for obeying the prophecy. Yet it may also be read as just another piece of political machination. Despite the assumption in most of the published commentaries on the film that a miscarriage actually occurred,45 the fact that Asaji announced her pregnancy at the moment when nothing else could prevent Washizu’s imminent naming of Miki’s son as heir on the grounds of their barrenness, and the absolute determination of the attendant to prevent Washizu from visiting the birth-chamber to see anything for himself (an incident not in the original screenplay), suggest that her announcement may have been a lie. As so often in this film, and in Shakespeare’s tragedy, what looks highly meaningful to both the protagonist and the audience drops down to a merely factual level. The ambiguity about whether Asaji was ever actually pregnant may derive from Shakespeare’s notorious ambiguity about whether Lady Macbeth has actually borne any children (‘I have given suck and know/How tender ’tis to love the babe that milks me’; 1.7.54–5).

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But – like the portents Macbeth misreads in Act 4 – this reported miscarriage helps articulate and reinforce a warning broader than the obvious warning against the shortsightedness of the villains. Both the play and this film acknowledge that the power of the ordinary, which protects society against some forms of evil, also works against the high aspirations that are a foundation and a glory of the human psyche. If the miscarriage is faked, just another ploy in the mundane struggle for control, it contributes to a dispiriting pattern whereby things that appear to carry some grand Providential significance turn out to be merely further manifestations of a depressingly literal world, ruled by mortal biology and universal entropy. The natural is the scary truth behind moments we choose to perceive as supernatural – partly, I think, because we want to believe that death is a contingency caused by evil, not a necessity built into our physical nature. Prevented from going to his wife, Washizu retreats, more alone than ever, to the empty trophies of his conquests: his sword and crown, which now look like barren idols. In a desperate amalgam of laughter and crying – because he has turned his life into at once a bad joke and a worse tragedy – Washizu repeatedly shouts ‘Fool!’ at himself. This single word of exclamation captures the residue of Macbeth’s soliloquy about his wife’s demise: ‘All our yesterdays have lighted fools the way to dusty death. … It is a tale told by an idiot’.46 Now the film again signals a Macbeth-like multiple doublecross across its own path. The series of ominous reports about invaders matches the reports of the previous set of Inui-allied rebels from the opening scene, though much more rapidly and kinetically presented here. Washizu’s pacing feet, back and forth, may remind us of several earlier scenes: the back-and-forth ride in the fog, the half-minute of his lower body pacing (then barefoot rather than in ornate armour) after the Great Lord announces his plans at the North Garrison, and perhaps also the training of the horse. Like the previous Great Lord, Washizu is exasperated that his generals sit silently instead of offering some strategies of resistance (but how

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do mortals defeat the siege of time, except partly and provisionally by procreation?). He is a man incapable of stillness, and a lightning bolt revives – as the demonic powers may intend – his sense of a transcendent and triumphant destiny he should pursue. With a call to horse worthy of Shakespeare’s Richard III, Washizu bursts through the groaning gate into the thunderstorm, calling imperiously for the Forest Spirit. Macbeth similarly seeks out the Weird Sisters for a second consultation because he feels ‘cabined, cribbed, confined, bound in’ (3.4.24). But the escape from the claustrophobia of a castle under imminent siege, the prospect of which propels Washizu back to seek further prophecies, may be an illusion. He is still locked into the labyrinth of the woods: Spider’s Web Forest if not Spider’s Web Castle. A quick wipe leads to Washizu’s furious ride up the same leftto-right slope as earlier, through sun and shower and lightning, with trees all around, and above as well. We may feel relieved to escape the film’s low, heavy, horizontal interiors, but despite all the hard climbing of Mount Fuji, he finds no transcendence, just the relentless, Washizu, alone with his barren trophies, rages at himself

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miserable rain and an enveloping forest that will soon prove a fatal enemy. The Spirit runs along that upslope above him, apparently weightless, and the whole canopy seems to be laughing at his commands. At moments Washizu is blacked out by trees, foreshadowing the means of his imminent downfall. Finally he finds himself back in the vine-woven enclave of the Forest Spirit, where the thunder and downpour have (as in the first arrival at the Spirit’s enclave) given way to an eerie fog-bound quiet. The Spirit now looks much more like a corpse, with its gaping mouth, craggy face and long, dishevelled hair; and it is closely flanked by skull-topped mounds. When Washizu begins a question with the words, ‘If you have the power to tell the outcome of my battle’, the Spirit bursts out laughing – perhaps because it is obvious that no one comes out of life’s battle as anything other than heaps of bones and dirt. Unlike the first encounter, where the Spirit sits peacefully, slowly spins its wheel and chants in an equally slow voice, The Forest Spirit (top centre) leads Washizu to their second meeting

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here the staccato cross-cutting between the figure and Washizu expresses urgency and a terrifying disorientation. The Spirit’s mouth seems disturbingly disconnected from its speech, which is itself aurally distorted; and it is Washizu who is obliged to spin now, turning towards each of the various avatars offering him advice. In a different kind of meta-cinematic ploy, several weapon-wielding actors from Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai share this now-masculinised role, perhaps alluding to the Noh motif in which ‘samurai restage former violent acts in an attempt to gain salvation’,47 or else perhaps mocking Washizu’s pride in both his individual identity and his warrior poses. The text of Macbeth also reasserts itself in the film here in ways that reinforce this sense of overlapping texts and voices out of time. Each protagonist demands to know whether their rival’s son will take over the kingdom as previously foretold. Macbeth’s ‘answer me/To what I ask you’ (4.1.59–60) becomes Washizu’s ‘answer me plainly’. When the Weird Sisters promise that ‘Macbeth shall never Surrounded by the answer, the Spirit laughs at Washizu’s question

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vanquished be until/Great Birnam Wood to high Dunsinane hill/Shall come against him’, his response is, ‘That will never be:/Who can impress the forest, bid the tree./Unfix his earthbound root?’ (4.1.91–5). The Forest Spirit’s similar prediction that ‘Until the very trees of Spider’s Web Forest rise against Spider’s Web Castle, you will not be defeated in battle’ draws a similar over-optimistic response: ‘The trees rise to attack? Such a thing is impossible! Which means I will not be defeated in battle?’ That question, too, provokes uproarious laughter from the Spirit. Again the immortal creature is amused by the myopia of mortals when regarding the landscape of time. This prophecy may also be read more narrowly. Like the portents in Macbeth, it disguises its quibbling literal meaning and thereby lures Washizu into fulfilling it: the forest doesn’t itself rise to attack him, but (because he foolishly boasted of the prophecy to his soldiers) he will be destroyed without actually being defeated in battle. Macbeth’s acknowledgment that ‘I am in blood/Stepped in so far that should I wade no more,/Returning were as tedious as go o’er’ (3.4.136–8), the Weird Sisters’ advice that Macbeth should ‘Be bloody’ (4.1.7–8) and the plan of mass slaughter they generate (4.1.149–52) become the Spirit’s admonition that ‘If you choose the path of bloodshed … If you will make blood flow, let it be a river’, and Washizu’s response: ‘A deluge of blood shall stain these woods crimson.’ Both men rashly challenge all the world, evincing their insanity precisely through their desperate certainty. Macbeth’s spilling of blood – which he predicted would ‘the multitudinous seas incarnadine,/Making the green one red’ (2.2.65–6) – provokes the counterforce that carries green branches against his castle. Similarly, some flowers now sprouting from the corpse-mounds (as promised by the end of the Spirit’s song in their first encounter) should perhaps alert Washizu that, beyond the span of a human lifetime, nature springs back up and recaptures our proud constructions for its own uses. The screen then wipes to a phalanx shot of the anti-Washizu army – very white, in contrast to the darkness enveloping Washizu –

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advancing towards Spider’s Web Forest. The shot implies a parallel between the army and the trees, each a horizontal band occupying perhaps a fifth of the screen, the one preparing to merge into the other. Noriyasu admonishes them to ride straight ahead, rather than letting the forest’s notoriously labyrinthine trails deceive them; but Kurosawa then implies that even they are not really disentangled from the snares of nature by shooting them for several seconds through vines in the foreground, as he earlier shot Washizu. The next wipe brings us back to Washizu in council, furious that his forces have withdrawn from tactically advantageous positions in Spider’s Web Forest – yet another signal, perhaps, that he has forfeited his alliance with nature. He still claims that the castle is invincible, but part of its invincibility lay in the woods as well as the wood: the linear human construction depended on an alliance with the tangled looping labyrinth of nature, which he has alienated by too direct an assertion of human will against the given order of The vengeful army prepares to merge with Spider’s Web Forest

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things. It is not hard to discern an ecological moral. What may seem a contradiction – that the film’s rectilinear grids represent humanity’s triumphant claim to control nature, but also represent humanity’s imprisonment – is not a contradiction at all from this Buddhist/environmentalist perspective. The shots in the next sequence are a relentless blend of lines and angles; Washizu looks down authoritatively on his army, and Kurosawa provides reverse shots that enlist us in looking up at his exalted stature, but there are many complicating signals that the scene could tilt in other directions. Washizu proudly springs up the steps, and views the enemy army swirling on his side of the forest. Apparently because the forest has not followed them, he laughs dismissively, although a small double cough at the end of his laugh suggests his confidence is hardly complete; and when he resumes his laughter it sounds hard and hollow. To bolster his soldiers’ confidence, he then tells them of the prophecy, and gets them to echo

Revealing the prophecy produces a triumphant but ominous moment

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his own recent laughter at the idea that the forest could ever join an attack on his castle – an understandable ploy that will nonetheless prove disastrous. He even tells them, ‘Those of you who trust my fate, raise your spears!’, causing wooden spear-shafts to shoot up towards him in the castle courtyard in a preview of the forest’s sudden and fatal return. Day Six This day starts in darkness, as it will end, prematurely, for Washizu. Kurosawa wipes to a final brief choral scene among the ordinary soldiers, featuring a cute little man (with hints of turtle and bird in his appearance, so his small form stretches from land into both water and air) trying to figure out why the enemy seems to be chopping wood before dawn. Washizu sits above his chief advisors in midnight council, confident in the invulnerability of his castle. Kurosawa, however,

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gives us reasons to doubt his claim: we have just observed the night guard unable to see or understand what the enemy are doing, we are again viewing the scene at an oblique angle to the neat lines of the architecture, the underlings are no longer in straight lines, and the strongest points of light are the waning moon on the headpiece and the candles burning down (a persistent echo of Macbeth’s despondent ‘Out, out, brief candle’). As if to prove that the chaos of nature can easily invade this human enclave, Washizu and his generals are interrupted by the rustling noises that turn out to be birds flying in every direction, which throw his army into disarray. The helplessness of these defenders of the castle against this invasion almost perfectly replicates the helplessness that Washizu had just rashly boasted that the castle – with its ‘bird’s-eye view’ that enables his soldiers to shower down feathered arrows – would impose on the ignorant approaching army. The forty-four seconds that follow involve no fewer than thirteen different shots, each of a different duration; the cuts create a chaotic and fragmented environment that refutes Washizu’s boast of control. As Anthony Davies observes, these birds now ‘link wood with wood: and their haphazard intrusion juxtaposes the unregimented world of nature with the mathematically restrained world of man’.48 Peter Donaldson comments that Kurosawa’s depiction of the forest advancing on the castle ‘may be read as a return of nature itself, an extrusion of the temporary reign of ambition – or even of human culture itself – when that culture sets itself in opposition to the order of the forest’.49 The soldiers’ fear that the noise may be part of ‘a covert attack’ is better justified than they realise, since this is part of invisible nature’s inevitable retaking of the castle, reclaiming the crafted wood of the halls for nesting. Washizu scoffs at the old counsellor’s warning that the bird invasion is ‘an ill omen’, insisting it is a ‘good omen’ instead – much as Lady Asaji had argued about the crow’s call on the night of the regicide. What neither of them can see, but what Kurosawa shrewdly implies, is that it may not be an omen at all. Once again the men’s

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desire to see supernatural meaning in their lives blinds them to the meaningless meaning of nature, the simple biofunctional level, the plain and potentially useful truth to which the birds are a clue: probably this invasion occurs simply because the invading army has been cutting down trees in Spider’s Web Forest, and these birds, displaced from their nests, are scattering in search of another place to roost. The scene wipes once more to the mist-obscured front view of Spider’s Web Castle. Inside, Washizu appears to be asleep, with a row of three guards in front of him, arrayed very much like those who had failed to protect the previous slumbering Great Lord from Washizu. Startled by a cry of women – the same sound that signals to Macbeth the death of his wife (5.5.8) – Washizu fights through a swarm of those terrified servants to reach Asaji’s chamber. Before revealing Asaji herself, the camera shows instead her kimono spread out as a screen just inside the doorway, recalling both the billowed robe that marked the disappearance of the Forest Spirit in the first encounter and our last view of Asaji as she disappeared to get the drugged sake. But we will now be given a peek behind those coverings, and find only madness and despair. As if to anticipate Macbeth’s famous soliloquy on the death of his wife, Asaji’s brief candle is nearly burnt out, as she repeats Lady Macbeth’s endlessly repeated struggle to wash the physically invisible blood-guilt off her hands. Kurosawa gives us close-ups of Asaji’s wildly agitated face, which had always before been such a calm mask, and her formerly steady voice is now breathy, squeaky and racked with anxiety. Her shrewd powers of realistic perception have now been displaced by a psychopathology that prevents her from hearing her husband even when he shouts in her ear, and from seeing the reality of her own hands. Perhaps she has become like the previous Great Lord’s wife, who (Miki reports) committed suicide because ‘she could not bear to see an enemy occupy the castle’. But now that enemy may be an indifferent natural world, which is on the march towards them in the form of the forest, and later will occupy it in the form of mere dust.

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The waiting-woman peers around Asaji’s hanging kimono as Washizu approaches

The Forest Spirit, about to disappear in a gust of wind

Asaji, about to disappear into the dark closet

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A ragged noise draws Washizu back out into the courtyard, where fear and confusion are even more rampant, and he too will have trouble believing what he sees. As so often, Washizu must push through the chaotic flow of other human bodies before he can ascend. What he sees from that high viewpoint are the treetops dancing through the fog towards the coast. If (as I have argued elsewhere) the rising of Birnam Wood against Dunsinane castle is partly an emblem for the inevitable erasure of human constructs by the vegetative and erosive forces of nature in deep time, Kurosawa clinches the point by setting the forest repeatedly against the human control represented by the neat linear lumber of the architecture. Here Washizu tries to take control by looking through neat defensive vertical slats (replacing the mere ‘observation hole’ proposed by the original screenplay50) at the incalculably complex movement of the branches through the incalculably complex movement of the fog.

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This vision leaves Washizu gasping in terror again, undone by life, or its ghost, which has turned against him in vengeance. He stumbles and cowers, again appearing caged and cornered by the rectilinear bars of his home. The soldiers have become eerily still, and – not for the first or last time – we can hear this very strong and brave man struggling just to breathe and swallow. Kurosawa makes us engage with Washizu’s panic by focusing closely on him, following his staggering flight while the camera twists and dips awkwardly. We are close behind him looking out at the soldiers as he vainly orders them back to their posts, but then the camera swings around so that he is momentarily framed from the side by the horizontal bars of the stairs, and in the middle of Washizu’s imperious gesture Kurosawa cuts to a long shot that renders Washizu a tiny figure framed by two horizontal-slat windows, while the foreground is filled with hundreds of faceless soldiers, their spears pointed up towards the man they have collectively deemed no longer worth obeying.

Compare image on p. 76: Washizu is now alone on the balcony, and his gesture is ineffectual

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What follows feels inevitable, as perhaps the erasure of individual will by the mass of life always is. The army will sacrifice Washizu to save themselves. A first arrow misses him, and he flings it back in futile defiance, but a second one sticks in his chest-armour, and then fusillades block his path whichever direction he tries to flee. The next shot looks back down from Washizu’s viewpoint at the army, whose legs are now bathed in fog the way the trunks of the advancing forest had been two minutes earlier. Near the start of the film we watched Washizu’s furious efforts through thickets of leafless foliage. Now we watch him through thickets of wooden arrowshafts, as if the wooden walls of the castle were sprouting a new set of branches to lock him in. These too are ghosts of a forest. As Asaji predicted after Washizu boasted of being entrusted with leading Great Lord Tsuzuki’s attack force, ‘the vanguard leader is vulnerable to arrows from every side’. As Washizu practically swims through little forests of arrows, his eyes and mouth wide open in terror, the only sounds are the whistling of arrows in flight and his inarticulate roaring (Kurosawa, perhaps jokingly, claimed that Mifune was truly terrified because the director had characteristically insisted on making the arrow-shots very realistic51). Washizu tries to climb once more towards the top of his castle, but an arrow buries itself into his back; we see the shock go through his body, with a close-up of his stunned face. For a moment the only sound is his involuntary grunt as he staggers back down. In a moment so horrific as to be almost comic, an arrow splats into Washizu’s neck and sits protruding from both sides.52 He performs a slow, awkward pirouette, and then continues forward almost robotically, with frozen, staring eyes and a frozen grimace that seem to ask how all this could have befallen him – how he could, from all his brave efforts and self-interested choices, somehow find himself here, in these impossible last moments. But his are surely not the only last moments haunted with those questions. As Kurosawa showed the moving forest in a kind of mesmerisingly graceful slow motion, he appears to have undercranked or otherwise distorted the frame speed as Washizu descends

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Washizu in mortal terror, as Mifune reportedly was at this moment; Kurosawa, planning the intense fusillade

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the castle stairs one final time, making the moment seem all the more ritualistic rather than realistic. These are the same techniques by which Kurosawa lent a surreal quality to the sword-slayings early in Seven Samurai, as if death were in some important way a disturbance in the nature of time itself, at least as experienced by human beings. Most viewers will identify with Washizu’s soldiers in backing away in terror from this spectacle, much as Washizu himself had backed away from the assassin’s helpless death throes. Washizu’s movements in this scene become a version of the Noh kyu ˉ dance that signals the agony of a spirit that cannot relinquish its worldly attachments, rather than the type that signals release.53 He is thus intensely human in his dying, but also dehumanised. He appears to be some kind of sacrificial animal that human society has killed as the scapegoat for its own pointless desires. In these final moments he begins to resemble a hedgehog (as the screenplay describes him54), a porcupine or even a wounded bird as the arrow feathers protrude

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from flaps of armour on his shoulders and back. His final doom has arrived as a combination of wood and feathers, just as branches and birds combined ominously to attack him a little earlier. With so many arrows projecting from his trunk, Washizu also resembles the centipede that was his tribal symbol – one more bitterly ironic literalisation of what he assumed was a metaphor, one more collapse of something uniquely human into the meaningless struggle and suffering of mere creaturely existence. Once again, the natural status that he sought to overcome with human glory, with the flag of his triumphs, takes its poetically just but depressingly unimaginative revenge. Washizu falls short in his heroic effort to fight on, not quite achieving (as the wonderful Kyuzo does in Seven Samurai) the last defiant drawing of his sword, which has its Shakespearean equivalent in the way Macbeth and multiple other tragic protagonists – Richard II, King Lear, Coriolanus, Othello – make one last stand against impossible odds to remind us why they were worthy of our attention to begin with, however deep their flaws. But Kurosawa apparently decided against giving Washizu the grand fatal plummet from his castle tower described in the screenplay.55 Instead, Washizu (like the character Mifune played in Seven Samurai) pitches forward into just another ungainly dead heap, ready to decay into another mound of bones and dirt – this one already sprouting – like those around the abode of the eternal Forest Spirit. This undignified collapse emphasises something the film has been implying all along: gravity itself is a hidden antagonist of the human appetite for glory. Long before finishing off the protagonist, it manifests itself in various laborious uphill rides and in characters (and castles) collapsing to the ground, from the first messenger onwards – maybe even earlier, since the film began with a tilting pan down a steep incline to gravestones flat in the ground, as if these lives too had just naturally, passively sunk down. In a culture where bowing is such an essential marker of hierarchy, gravity is a ubiquitous overlord – an agent for the blunt dominion of the physical

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world in general. As Washizu succumbs to what deep time imposes on all mortal bodies, and on all artificial constructs such as the castle as well as the armoured human self, the world seems to fall silent, and then we begin to hear again the roar of the wind – a sound Kurosawa exploits hauntingly in several of his films – that will eventually wipe everything here away. We reach a similar moral by a similar sequence in Macbeth, though without the systematic visual reinforcement. Washizu’s certainty that his enemies will have ‘no power against this castle’s legendary fortifications’ echoes Macbeth’s conviction that ‘Our castle’s strength/Will laugh a siege to scorn’ (5.5.2–3). When that hope collapses, Washizu finds, as Macbeth did, that ‘There is no flying

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hence nor tarrying here’ (5.5.47) and that many of his soldiers have turned against him (5.7.25–6). Macbeth is implicitly converted to a baited bear (5.7.1–2), as Washizu is converted into other animals. Nonetheless, Macbeth ‘will try the last’ and ‘die with harness on our back’ (5.8.32; 5.5.51), as Washizu does. Both versions end with a castle, but again Kurosawa’s interpretation is gloomier, because it refuses to compromise the primacy of natural time with Shakespeare’s concessions to human chronicle: Shakespeare has the witches show Macbeth a line of kings that ‘stretch out to th’crack of doom’ (4.1.116), and the final word of the play is the triumphant naming of Scone, the palace of Scottish coronations – a place of hopeful futurity. Kurosawa ends instead with the bare, bleak, worn marker saying only that the castle is gone, and no sign of anyone around to read it. Both versions reveal a more literal, pragmatic level behind the seeming supernatural signal of the moving forest: we will eventually hear that the trees were brought to provide the advancing army with camouflage and protection against arrows from the castle. But there may be an even simpler, more fundamentally material level behind that one. Untold ages ago, land was cleared for human habitation and agriculture, as we reshaped the world to suit and serve our needs. In Scotland, shipbuilding caused extensive deforestation during the reign of the historical Macbeth, and the initiation of iron-smelting rapidly accelerated that process at the time Shakespeare was writing the play.56 Someday, erosion and gravity will erase all our structures and wild vegetation will reclaim all that land. So the frame of Throne of Blood constitutes a lesson for the human race, conveyed by something like deep-time-lapse photography. It is a lesson that could bring us some peace, in a Zen Buddhist mode, but at the price of a kind of humility that does not come to us easily. Kurosawa places no blackout or wipe between the final view of the forest advancing and the renewed view of the castle consumed by dust and fog. That encroaching wilderness is a bridge to the lesson of the film’s opening sequence, all part of the same meaningless story,

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the same bad joke on human ambition, though it leaves a kind of beautifully bleak majesty in its wake. All that is left is the marker telling this story – a story of what is inevitably and forever gone: ‘Here stood Spider’s Web Castle’. We share in the futility: having reached the point where Washizu’s story ends, we are back where we started. Fade out. The end. It seems like an irrefutable and insurmountable truth. But people have never gone to Throne of Blood hoping to stare at an ink-painting of Mount Fuji for two hours. What happens between the beginning and the end of a film, or a life, or a species, or a universe – degrees of quality, beauty, pleasure, trust, affection, energy and meaning – still matters. Like the makers of many film classics, Kurosawa is enough of a traditional humanistic artist that he sends his audiences out of the movie theatre determined to live better.

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Notes 1 Bosley Crowther, ‘Throne of Blood’, New York Times, 23 November 1961. 2 ‘Cinema: Kurosawa’s Macbeth’, Time, 1 December 1961, p. 76. 3 Judith Buchanan, Shakespeare on Film (Oxford: Routledge, 2005), p. 73. 4 Noël Burch, To the Distant Observer: Form and Meaning in Japanese Cinema, rev. edn (London: Scolar Press, 1979), p. 310. 5 Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (New York: Penguin/Riverhead, 1999), p. 519. 6 Stuart Galbraith IV, The Emperor and the Wolf (New York: Faber, 2001), pp. 230–1. According to an essay by Linda Hoagland (whose subtitles I am using in this commentary unless otherwise specified) in the booklet accompanying the Criterion reissue of the film, ‘script supervisor Nogami Teruyo recalls that the director never consulted that text [Macbeth] while shaping his adaptation’; but I hope to show that cannot have been true. 7 Robert N. Watson, Shakespeare and the Hazards of Ambition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), pp. 83–141; also The Rest Is Silence: Death as Annihilation in the English Renaissance (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), pp. 133–55. 8 If the ‘armed Head … knows thy thought’, as the Weird Sisters tell Macbeth, perhaps it is not because that head symbolises rebellion, as audiences were likely to join him in assuming, but because it is a forevision of Macbeth’s own helmeted head which Macduff will cut off; so it is apt that this portent tells him, ‘beware Macduff’. The ‘bloody Child’ may be less a symbol of

Macbeth’s brutality against a next generation than a literal image of Macduff ‘from his mother’s womb/Untimely ripped’; no wonder this same portent tells Macbeth that ‘none of woman born’ can harm him. The ‘Child crowned with a tree in his hand’ may not only culminate the implication that nature will spring back against this unnatural monarch, but also preview Duncan’s son leading an army carrying branches; in retrospect, we may understand why this portent says ‘Macbeth shall never vanquished be until/Great Birnam Wood to high Dunsinane hill/Shall come against him’ (4.1.67–93). 9 Maurice Hindle, Studying Shakespeare on Film (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), p. 102. 10 Charles Bazerman, ‘Time in Play and Film: Macbeth and Throne of Blood’, Literature/Film Quarterly vol. 5 no. 4 (1977), pp. 333–8. 11 Peter S. Donaldson comments on this contrast in Shakespearean Films/Shakespearean Directors (Boston, MA: Unwin Hyman, 1990), p. 73. 12 Akira Kurosawa: Interviews, ed. Bert Cardullo (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2008), p. 65. 13 Richard N. Tucker, Japan: Film Image (London: Studio Vista, 1973); quoted in Joan Mellen, Seven Samurai (London: BFI, 2002), p. 64. 14 Quoted in Stephen Prince, The Warrior’s Camera (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), pp. 205–6. 15 Erin Suzuki, ‘Lost in Translation: Reconsidering Shakespeare’s Macbeth

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and Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood’, Literature/Film Quarterly vol. 34 no. 2 (2006), p. 94. 16 Prince, Warrior’s Camera, pp. 28 and 27. 17 Ibid., p. 249. 18 Suzuki, ‘Lost in Translation’, p. 101. 19 Akira Kurosawa, Something Like an Autobiography, trans. Audie E. Bock (New York: Vintage, 1983), p. 146. 20 Mellen comments on this difference in Seven Samurai, p. 62. 21 Kurosawa, Something Like, p. 183. 22 Watson, Hazards of Ambition, pp. 135–9; Rest Is Silence, pp. 134–5. 23 Suzuki, ‘Lost in Translation’, p. 96. 24 Cf. James Goodwin, Kurosawa and Intertextual Cinema (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), p. 177. 25 Goodwin notes how this technique serves ‘to foreshorten and compress visual perspective’ (ibid., pp. 173–4). 26 William Shakespeare, Macbeth, Act 5, scene 5, lines 18–20. All references to Macbeth will be based on the New Cambridge edition, ed. A. R. Braunmuller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), with their act, scene and line numbers in parentheses. 27 Akira Kurosawa, Seven Samurai and Other Screenplays (London: Faber and Faber, 1992), pp. 230 and 257. 28 Cardullo (ed.), Akira Kurosawa: Interviews, p. 66. 29 Goodwin, Intertextual Cinema, p. 178. 30 Prince, Warrior’s Camera, p. 263. 31 Anthony Davies, Filming Shakespeare’s Plays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 155; Buchanan, Shakespeare on Film, p. 75. 32 Galbraith, Emperor and the Wolf, p. 232.

33 Donald Richie, The Films of Akira Kurosawa (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), p. 115. 34 Ibid., p. 120. On similar grounds, I would dispute the claim of Davies – in an otherwise excellent analysis – that ‘Macbeth is a drama about the power of choice … Throne of Blood, on the other hand, is a drama about inevitable prophetic truth’ (p. 155). I believe that even Macbeth has less choice than it may appear: perhaps he can choose whether to kill Duncan, but not whether to stage a doomed rebellion against the natural order. It is this latter point that, I believe, inspires Kurosawa’s version, where only the broader prophecy about the doomed aspect of human desire is inevitable – a philosophical certainty hiding behind the psychological and political contingency of deciding to kill the Great Lord. 35 Buchanan, Shakespeare on Film, p. 76. 36 Jack J. Jorgens suggests this comparison in Shakespeare on Film (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977), p. 156. 37 Kurosawa, Something Like, p. 53. 38 Burch, Distant Observer, p. 313, provides an excellent close analysis of the permutations here. 39 Quoted by Richie, Films of Kurosawa, p. 123. 40 Ibid., p. 115. 41 Kurosawa, Seven Samurai and Other Screenplays, pp. 236–7. 42 This peculiarity of Shakespeare’s dramatic storytelling is well articulated in Stephen Greenblatt, Will in the World (New York: Norton, 2004).

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43 Quoted by Galbraith, Emperor and the Wolf, p. 234. 44 Keiko I. McDonald, ‘Noh into Film: Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood’, Journal of Film and Video vol. 39 (Winter, 1987), p. 38. 45 This assumption continues in Mark Thornton Burnett, ‘Akira Kurosawa’, in Welles, Kurosawa, Kozintsev, Zeffirelli: Great Shakespeareans: Volume XVII (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), p. 63, which describes Lady Asaji as ‘driven insane following the delivery of her still-born child’. 46 Goodwin notes this connection, as well as the idea that the location of Duncan’s castle in Forres could have encouraged Kurosawa to place the Great Lord’s castle in Spider’s Web Forest (Intertextual Cinema, p. 173). 47 Burnett, ‘Akira Kurosawa’, p. 63. 48 Davies, Filming Shakespeare’s Plays, p. 157. 49 Donaldson, Shakespearean Films/Directors, p. 72. Although I admire Donaldson’s lively intelligence, readers should not rely on his memories of Throne of Blood: at least four major observations in this chapter seem to be

based on erroneous recollections of the film’s particulars. 50 Kurosawa, Seven Samurai and Other Screenplays, p. 264. 51 Cardullo (ed.), Akira Kurosawa: Interviews, p. 107. 52 The ending of Sanjuro – Kurosawa’s lighter version of his tales of lonely samurai and corrupt authorities – parodies Throne of Blood by making Mifune the warrior absent to the leader’s left and thus delaying the banquet in his honour, and by a coup de grâce – an unaccountable (and reportedly partly accidental) gusher of blood Mifune draws from his rival – that outdoes the arrow through Washizu’s throat in being horrific almost to the point of comic. The death of Lady Kaede in Ran is also exceedingly bloody, but with no hint of this farcical note. 53 Cf. McDonald, ‘Noh into Film’, p. 37. 54 Kurosawa, Seven Samurai and Other Screenplays, p. 265. 55 Ibid. 56 Watson, Hazards of Ambition, p. 107, citing R. N. Millman, The Making of the Scottish Landscape (London: Batsford, 1975), pp. 48–9, 63, 86–7, 101.

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Credits Throne of Blood/ Kumonosu-jo ˉ Japan/1957 Director Akira Kurosawa Producers So ˉ jiro ˉ Motoki Akira Kurosawa Screenplay Hideo Ogu ˉni Shinobu Hashimoto Ryu ˉzo ˉ Kikushima Akira Kurosawa Director of Photography Asakazu Nakai Lighting Kyuichiro Kishida [aka Kuichiro ˉ Kishida] Art Director/Costume Designer Yoshiro ˉ Muraki Music Masaru Sato ˉ ©Toho Company Ltd. Production Company Toho Company Ltd. Production Supervisor Hiroshi Nezu Production Accountant Ikemichi Hashimoto Key Assistant Directors Mimachi Norase Horikawa Hiromichi

Assistant Directors Shoya Shimizu Yasuyoshi Tajitsu Ken Sano Yoshimitsu Sakano [aka Yoshimitsu Banno] Michio Yamamoto Script Supervisor Teruyo Nogami Camera Assistant Takao Saito ˉ Lighting Assistant Sho ˉ zo Hada Still Photographer Masao Fukuda Special Effects Supervisor Eiji Tsuburaya Special Effects Toho Special Effects Group Assistant Art Director Yoshifumi Honda Art Department Supervisor Ko ˉ hei Ezaki Property Master Ko ˉ ichi Hamamura Properties Kaneko Costumes Taiki Mori Kyoto Costume Co. Ltd. Make-up Artist Masanori Kobayashi Hairstylists Yoshiko Matsumoto Junjiro ˉ Yamada Sound Recordist Fumio Yanoguchi

Sound Assistant Masanao Uehara Sound Effects Ichiro ˉ Minawa Film Processing Toho Developing Negative Cutter Chozo Obata Horse-riding Instructors Ienori Kaneko Shigeru Endo uncredited Story Basis William Shakespeare’s play Macbeth Editor Akira Kurosawa CAST Toshiro ˉ Mifune General Taketoki Washizu Isuzu Yamada Lady Asaji Washizu, Taketoki’s wife Takashi Shimura Noriyasu Odagura Akira Kubo General Yoshiteru Miki Yo ˉichi Tachikawa Kunimaru Tsuzuki Minoru Chiaki Yoshiaki Miki Takamaru Sasaki Lord Kuniharu Tsuzuki Kokuten Ko ˉdo ˉ 1st military commander Kichijiro ˉ Ueda Washizu’s worker

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BFI FILM CLASSICS

Eiko Miyoshi old woman at castle Chieko Naniwa Forest Spirit Nakajiro ˉ Tomita 2nd military commander Yu ˉ Fujiki Sachio Sakai ˉ tomo Shin O Yoshio Tsuchiya ˉ mura Senkichi O Washizu samurai Yoshio Inaba 3rd military commander Takeo Oikawa 1st Miki party member Akira Tani Ikio Sawamura Washizu soldiers Yutaka Sada Washizu samurai Seijiro ˉ Onda 2nd Miki party member Shinpei Takagi Masao Masuda additional commanders Akifumi Inoue Asao Koike Kyoro ˉ Sakurai Kamayuki Tsubono servants Takeshi Kato ˉ guard killed by Washizu

Kin Takagi [aka Hitoshi Takagi] Michiya Higuchi Tsuzuki guards Shiro ˉ Tsuchiya Takeo Matsushita ˉ tomo Jun O commanders ˉ hashi Fuminori O samurai Isao Kimura Seiji Miyaguchi Nobuo Nakamura phantom samurai Gen Shimizu Mitsuo Asano Filmed from late May 1956 on location on Mount Fuji, in Gotemba and on the Izu peninsula (Shizuoka) and at Toho Studios (Tokyo, Japan). 35mm, black & white, 1.37:1, mono (Western Electric Recording). Japanese theatrical release by Toho Company Ltd. on 15 January 1957. Running time: 110 minutes/ 3,006 metres.

UK theatrical release by Curzon Film Distributors Ltd in January 1958. Certificate: A (no cuts). Running time: 105 minutes 0 seconds/ 9,450 feet. US theatrical release by Brandon Films, Inc. on 22 November 1961. Running time: 105 minutes. Japanese theatrical rerelease by Toho Company Ltd. on 2 February 1970. Running time: 110 minutes. UK theatrical re-release by BFI Collections on 4 January 2002. Certificate: 12 (no cuts). Running time: 109 minutes 32 seconds/ 9,857 feet + 11 frames. Credits compiled by Julian Grainger

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