Nature and Society in Akira Kurosawa's Throne of Blood

Abstract

It is important for Western audiences to establish a proper context for the films of Akira Kurosawa. He has often been called the `most Western' of Japanese film directors (and is certainly the best known of them in Europe and America), but though he freely admits influence from Western directors and painters and has based several of his films on major Western texts, he insists that his borrowings have always been adapted to the modes and aesthetics of traditional Japanese thought: so much so, in fact, he says, that `I feel that among Japanese directors today I must be the most Japanese' (Yakir, 57). And in none of his work is recognition of a specific cultural context more important than in his two samurai adaptations of Shakespearean tragedy: Kumonoso-jo, his 1957 black-and-white version of Macbeth, obscurely titled Throne of Blood in English though 'The Castle of the Spider's Web' (or `Cobweb Castle') is its more literal and pertinent translation; and Ran—meaning `Chaos'—his 1983 adaptation of King Lear in cinemascope and colour.