Ran: Chaos on the 'Western' Frontier

Abstract

This article looks at the relationship between Akira Kurosawa's 'Ran', Shakespeare's 'King Lear' and genre cinema. Instead of seeking to prove 'Ran's debt to Shakespeare, debate centres on Kurosawa's inventive intertextualization, part of which involves his manipulation of the generic codes of Eastern and Western cinema. The article argues that - although widely regarded as part of the 'canon' of Shakespeare on screen and appropriated by a Shakespearean heritage of global proportions - Kurosawa's 'Ran' refuses to be consumed by Western academia. The film offers a social critique of patriarchal systems across a range of genres, from Japanese jidai-geki epic to Renaissance tragedy, to Hollywood western, linking the concerns embedded in Shakespeare's 'King Lear' with those of other historical eras, other nations, other mythologies.