Transposing narratives: How does Akira Kurosawa translate Shakespeare so well?
Undoubtedly, Akira Kurosawa was one of the most remarkable film directors to come out of Japan. Throughout his excellent career, he directed and was involved in all production aspects for several masterpiece movies, including Rashomon, Ikiru, Seven Samurai and Yojimbo.
If Kurosawa is one of the most notable narrative masters of Japan, then to put him up against some of the biggest names of the Western storytelling canon only seems fitting. If we look deep into that idea, we find a number of parallels between the Japanese director and one of the most important literary artists of all time, William Shakespeare.
Kurosawa had a deep fascination with Shakespeare and adapted three of his legendary plays into equally classic movies. The first arrived in 1957 with Throne of Blood, taking the medieval Scotland action and plot of Shakespeare’s Macbeth to feudal Japan with Toshiro Mifune and Isuzu Yamada in the lead roles, mirroring Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, respectively.
Throne of Blood is intoxicating and sees a young warrior kill his king at the suggestion of his bloodthirsty and ambitious wife, fulfilling the prophecy of an evil spirit in the process. Kurosawa’s subsequent Shakespeare adaptation arrived three years later in 1960’s The Bad Sleep Well.
However, The Bad Sleep Well is less of a direct Shakespeare in comparison to Throne of Blood and, instead, is rather loosely based on Hamlet. The Bad Sleep Well is a rare Kurosawan foray into the film noir genre. The plot sees a young man work his way into a high-ranking corporate position and a corrupt Japanese business to expose those who ordered his father’s death. There have been so many cinematic works that Hamlet has inspired, but perhaps Kurosawa’s feature is the most unique of all of them.
Finally, Kurosawa returned to his love for Shakespeare with one of his final efforts, the 1985 film Ran. As with Throne of Blood, the director transposes the plot of The Bard’s King Lear and takes it to Sengoku-period Japan. An ageing warlord decides to abdicate his throne but is faced with choosing a successor from his three competing sons. Interestingly, Kurosawa had only thought of his film being inspired by Shakespeare after he’d started writing it, showing that the English literary icon’s artistry ran deep within his psyche.
Each of Kurosawa’s Shakespearean moments has been critically lauded, but why exactly? For starters, Shakespeare’s narratives have been around for so long that they have become instantly recognisable in all parts of the world, particularly in Western audiences. There’s something universal about the themes of betrayal, revenge and family that can ring true through any alternate narrative. Still, with Kurosawa at the helm, his versions would always be excellent in their own right.
Going further into this, though, there’s something vital about delivering a Shakespearean play through a Japanese narrative. While The Bard’s stories are familiar, there’s also something otherworldly about them. They feel ancient, mythological somehow, with a language that is not entirely our own. In that sense, when Western audiences watch classic Japanese movies, particularly those set in ages gone by, there’s also something that feels so distant and, ultimately, so alluring.
To find these well-trodden characters in feudal Japan or, even better, in post-war corporate Japan, is to give them a new sense of life and a new meaning, which not only goes to show Kurosawa’s ingenuity but Shakespeare’s universal genius in the first place.
The philosopher and cultural theorist Slavoj Zizek supports these claims and admits that when we read Shakespeare, it’s not essential to understand every word as we might expect from a contemporary play, novel, or even film. We do not need to understand Shakespeare’s time to understand him; instead, we can read Shakespeare to appreciate his time.
And in that sense, we can gain more understanding of Shakespeare through narratives that are not necessarily direct productions of his works like those of Kurosawa. Or, as Zizek puts it, “You know what always fascinated me? How often, the best movie versions of a great work of art are the ones which transpose this work of art, the story, into a totally different cultural context. This is authentic multiculturalism.”
The theorist continued: “For example, Hamlet. Yeah, we all like Hamlet. The best cinema version of Hamlet that I know – it’s not Laurence Olivier or this or that – [it’s] Akira Kurosawa, a Japanese version of Hamlet set in a big company. Hamlet is a student played by Toshiro Mifune. He discovers his father was killed and blah, blah, blah. With the beautiful title, it’s a genius titled The Bad Sleep Well.”
Zizek’s apathy towards the end of his statement shows that, of course, we know the story of Hamlet all too well. Still, Kurosawa’s unique take on it, obtaining the action and delivering it in a film noir cinematic style, is what makes it so captivatingly genius. Through artists like Kurosawa, we can better understand the vitally essential works of Shakespeare more than we can with a direct production of a given play.
That’s not to say that any old director could deliver Shakespeare and have it work well, as history has shown that this has not been the case. Instead, it shows that with a genius director at the helm of a Shakespeare adaptation, new facets of understanding about the original plays can be uncovered and interrogated.
Kurosawa’s action, dialogue, visual prowess and editing techniques are second to none, as proven throughout his filmography. Only he could deliver such remarkable visions of feudal and post-war Japan, battling warlords, evil forest demons, and examinations of chaotic mental states of mind and revenge.
Steven Spielberg once claimed that Kurosawa is the “pictorial Shakespeare of our times”, and it’s easy to see why. Not only did he deliver three adaptive masterpieces, but many of his other works created the kind of historical mythology and classic narratives Shakespeare himself had done so many hundreds of years ago. The Japanese cinema icon is a Bard in his own right.
