{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.035428968391802707, 'fraction_numerical': 0.011462313303230288, 'mean_word_length': 4.9137577002053385, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Kurosawa's Ran (1985) and King Lear: Towards a Conversation on Historical Responsibility

Adaptations have a way of speaking back to their sources, and a brilliant adaptation revises its source and provokes a conversation. This may not at first be apparent about Kurosawa’s Ran (1985), since, unlike other adaptations of King Lear, the film seeks neither to remain faithful Shakespeare’s language nor to provide “visual equivalents” in another medium (Parker 412). Indeed, the film is only loosely based on the Lear story and Kurosawa disavows having consciously set out to adapt the play (Grilli 1). When he became aware of the connection however, he also had questions about the play that he tried to work out in his film. The result in Ran (1985) is an ongoing conversation with King Lear, one that never becomes explicit but that informs his engagement with history. In commenting on King Lear, Kurosawa observes that “Shakespeare gives his characters no past,” without which “I have never understood the ferocity of the daughters’ response to Lear’s feeble attempts to shed his royal power” (Grilli 1). Indeed, the play seems more concerned to invite sympathy for Lear in the form of his question, “Is there any cause in nature for these hard hearts?” (3.6.34–35). Kurosawa, however, would locate the cause of hard hearts in the feudal landscape of sixteenth-century Japan, a time of clan warfare and power struggles within the military class. In Ran (1985), therefore, he undertakes to give Ichimonji Hidetora, Lear’s counterpart, a history: “I try to make clear that his power must rest upon a lifetime of bloodthirsty savagery” (Grilli 1). This lifetime of savagery spans five decades of fighting and treacherous domestic alliances. Specifically, Hidetora married his two older sons, Taro and Jiro, to daughters from rivals clans, Kaede and Sué. Then, taking advantage of their relaxed vigilance, he murdered the brides’ families in their castles. The film opens with a boar hunt that both symbolizes the savage world of hunters and hunted and ushers in marriage arrangements for the third son, Saburo, and a new generation is poised to inherit his violent legacy. A character with such a history could hardly claim to be “more sinned against than sinning” (King Lear 3.2.60), and there are further implications for the film as well. As Ann Thompson points out, compared with King Lear, “there is much greater emphasis [in Ran] on social networks and relationships: the personal is replaced by the domestic and the historical” (Thompson 8). I would suggest that the personal is not replaced but located within the family as the institution that mediates societal violence, and this mediation ensures that the personal is inevitably political and historical, even as the inheritance of land and power is inextricable from a legacy of socialized violence. When the personal