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Akira Kurosawa’s Ran (1985), whose screenplay he wrote with Hideo Oguni and Masato Ide, tells the story of Hidetora Ichimonji (Tatsuya Nakadai), an aging Sengoku-era warlord who decides to step down as ruler and divide his kingdom between his three sons: Taro (Akira Terao), Jiro (Jinpachi Nezu) and Saburo (Daisuke Ryu). Taro, the eldest son, will receive the prestigious First Castle and become leader of the Ichimonji clan, while Jiro and Saburo will receive the Second and Third Castles and support their older brother. Hidetora also expects to retain the title of Great Lord. This inevitably leads to the true star of the film: chaos.

Ran’s story strongly resembles that of William Shakespeare’s King Lear, written between 1603 and 1606. Both tales of betrayal involve jaded rulers who relinquish their thrones and pass the touch down to their offspring, causing two of the children to turn against them, while the third supports them in their old age. Whereas Ran’s Hidetora has three sons, King Lear’s titular King of Britain has three daughters: Goneril, Regan and Cordelia. Hidetora’s jealous sons are also more ruthless than Lear’s opposing daughters. Not surprisingly given their status, both Ran and Lear suffer from a good old-fashioned case of overzealous pride, and both banish anyone that disagrees with them. In Ran the banished are Tango (Masayuki Yui) and Saburo; in King Lear they are the Earl of Kent and faithful daughter Cordelia. Also, in typical Shakespearian fashion, both tales end with the death of the entire family.

Kurosawa had previously adapted Shakespeare’s Macbeth with Throne of Blood (1957), where the filmmaker likewise transposes the plot of the English playwright’s tragedy to feudal Japan.

However, Kurosawa reportedly only realized the similarities between his then un-produced screenplay and Shakespeare’s tragedy during pre-production. Originally conceived by Kurosawa in the mid-1970s, Ran’s story was inspired by the Sengoka-era warlord Mōri Motonari of the Chūgoku region of Japan in the 16th century, a time plagued by social upheaval, political intrigue and near-constant military conflict. “I started out to make a film about Motonari Mori, the 16th-century warlord whose three sons are admired in Japan as paragons of filial virtue,” Kurosawa said, according to Akira Kurosawa: Interviews. “What might their story be like, I wondered, if the sons had not been so good? It was only after I was well into writing the script about these imaginary unfilial sons of the Mori clan that the similarities to Lear occurred to me. Since my story is set in medieval Japan, the protagonist’s children had to be men; to divide a realm among daughters would have been unthinkable.”

A parable regarding Montonari, his three sons and a lesson involving three arrows is believed to have inspired one of Ran’s early scenes. In that scene, Hidetora explains to his sons, “To break a single arrow is easy. Not so, three in a bundle together.” Unfortunately for the three siblings, who don’t take their father’s advice seriously, this scene also foreshadows the breakdown of their relationship and the chaos that ensues as a result of their aging father’s spontaneous decision.

The most obvious difference between Ran and King Lear lies in the dialogue—Ran has almost none, while Lear is revered as a high example of poetic and dramatic use of the English language. Anthony Davies, in “Exploring the relation of Kurosawa’s Ran to Shakespeare’s Lear,” writes, “Those who regarded the essence of a Shakespeare play as residing in the poetic language of the dialogue have maintained that the film did not belong in the same category as films which incorporated the Shakespearean dialogue in English or in direct translation. Frank Kermode maintained that the film was ‘an allusion’ not an adaptation, nor even a ‘Shakespeare film’ since the dialogue was not Shakespeare’s. Peter Brook regarded it as lying outside ‘the Shakespeare question’. J. Blumenthal in a celebrated essay championed it as ‘a masterpiece’ in its own right and applauded its liberation from ‘the dreaded literary media.’”

Davies himself futher summarizes how the two compare: “Central to the growth of Kurosawa’s interest in the narrative and dramatic structures of Shakespeare is the conflict between authority and challenge within the family. Kurosawa sets his films Kumonosu-Djo and Ran in 16th Century Japan, a more rigidly ritualised social context than is the social frame of King Lear. Dialogue is reduced to a bare minimum in Ran, but the images with which Kurosawa projects the inner world of the characters as well as the outer world of natural space carry their own searing poignancy. ... Like Shakespeare’s play, Ran is concerned with the relationship between humankind and animal…In both Shakespeare’s play and Kurosawa’s film there emerges a view of humankind in which the likelihood of descent into catastrophic darkness is counterpoised against only a glimmer of potential insight.”

To what extent Kurosawa took direct or conscious inspiration from Shakespeare is debatable, and the two works are as different as the mediums of film and theatre themselves. Yet on a deep, thematic level, it is hard to deny the spiritual resemblance between the two stories and the dark tragic power of both.