Throne of Blood – Titled Kumonosu-Joˉ ( ), Which Would Be Better Translated As ‘Spider’S Web Castle’ – Was Not Immediately Noticed in Japan

Home , Bosley Crowther, Throne of Blood

Contents

Acknowledgments 6

Introduction 7

A Guided Tour through the Spider’s Web 16

Notes 90

Credits 93

T H R O N E O F B L O O D 7

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-joˉ ( ), 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, samurai- themed, 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

T H R O N E O F B L O O D 9 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

T H R O N E O F B L O O D 1 1 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 gekokujoˉ: 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 late- Renaissance 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 mid- Shoˉwa period when ‘Meiji ideals of public dedication and self- sacrificing 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, Toshiroˉ 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 Bashoˉ – 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’: