In Chris Marker's poetic commentary to A.K., his documentary on the making of Akira Kurosawa's Ran (1985), Hidetora Ichimonji, the film's tragic protagonist, looms evocatively as, "King Lear [and] yet [...] not King Lear, more like Lear's echo reverberating across those castle walls built by Kurosawa on Mount Fuji." (2) That Marker refrains from sounding the Shakespearean depths of Kurosawa's echoing of King Lear in no way minimizes the literal veracity of his statement. For one crucial aspect of Ran as film adaptation is that Kurosawa impregnates its image/sound interaction with Noh's resonant stillness that parallels in its paradoxism what Jan Kott calls King Lear's oxymoronic landscape where "sounds are present by their very absence: the silence is filled with them" (116). Just as Noh thrives on an interplay of sound and what Toru Takemitsu, Kurosawa's film composer, labels "that point of intense silence preceding it, called ma" (51), so does Ran imbue its visual action with an analogous sound/silence dialectic. Kurosawa re-imagines King Lear's oxymoronic edge by having sight and/or sound suspended or silenced through a Noh-inspired medley of "audible non-images" and "non-audible images" in his filmic diegesis. Kurosawa distills Kott's aural awareness of King Lear's absent presences to a Noh-like resounding silence. But this statement can be viewed in truer perspective if we analyze how Kurosawa develops Hidetora into a Noh Lear with a heart beating like that of a Shakespearean aural phantom.

Consider, for instance, the initial boar hunt sequence where Kurosawa leaves Hidetora suspended between drawing his arrow and actually shooting it, thereby transforming the arrow's unleashing into a non-event which never materializes in visual terms. What attests to the arrow's unseen flight, and its unerring trajectory to the heart, is what Kurosawa connotes by the sudden shriek of a Nohkan, or Noh flute. By combining the Nohkan's hishigi, or high pitches, which Richard Emmert rightly describes as "eerie and otherworldly" (29), with the ma's embodiment in the cessation of every sound effect except the horse's clopping, Kurosawa implicitly suggests that Hidetora has galloped into a nether realm whose unfathomable silence paradoxically deepens with its plangent shrieking. What Takemitsu's Nohkan score screams out is the piercing of Hidetora's heart. Hidetora shares, it seems, Lear's uncanny gift of hearing the unhearable. Echoing, in fact, the Shakespearean lament of reluctant births haunting Lear--"When we are born we cry that we are come / To this great stage of fools" (4.6.178-79) (3)--the Nohkan's scream heralds Hidetora's own coming hither, but as the beast that Gloucester sees in Goneril, "stick[ing] boarish fangs in [Lear's] anointed flesh" (3.7.57). Kathy M. Howlett's image of Hidetora "thrash[ing] wildly [through] the flapping canvas" (121) reinforces the Hidetora/boar identification that he himself justifiably suggests, knowing that he has magnified Lear's failings to such a ruthless extent that he becomes more sinning than sinned against. Significantly, unlike Lear who ironically transfixes his own heart by banishing Cordelia from it while warning Kent that "[t]he bow is bent...