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Abstract:

This talk addresses the general critical misconception that Akira Kurosawa’s Kumonosu-jo, a 1957 transcultural film adaptation of William Shakespeare’s Macbeth retitled Throne of Blood, subverts the tragedy’s oxymoronic intermeshing of its metaphysical preoccupation with predestination and self-determination. Hence, for instance, Joan Mellen’s odd claim that this Japanese film version sacrifices the play’s ambivalent interplay of free will and fate because “[a]mbivalence does not suit the Buddhist-Noh vision of the world Kurosawa has chosen for Throne of Blood”. But Kurosawa, it should be stressed, creates an oxymoronic metaphysical vision parallel to Shakespeare’s by filtering his transmutation of Macbeth through mugen or phantasmal Noh, a subgenre of Noh theatre developed from what Kunio Komparu describes as the latter’s predilection for “[t]he fusion of opposing concepts”. As Keiko I. McDonald astutely observes, in fact, Kurosawa pivots Kumonosu-jo on mugen Noh’s “meeting of two ‘realities’ […] a blend of natural and supernatural planes of existence”. It is indeed this blending blurring any clear-cut distinctions between predestined and premeditated human action that constitutes the cinematic backbone of Kurosawa’s revisioning of Macbeth’s existential predicament, that of having been fated to fall freely. What G. Wilson Knight claims about Macbeth, that “’Nothing is but what is not’: that is the text of the play” is equally applicable to Kurosawa’s film version. But this statement can be viewed in truer perspective if we consider Washizu’s (Macbeth’s) and Miki’s (Banquo’s) forest encounter with the mugen Noh hag who replaces Shakespeare’s three Weird Sisters.