An Analyzation of Akira Kurosawa’s The Bad Sleep Well and its Commentary on Western Influence in Japanese Culture
Among an extensive list of famous film auteurs, Akira Kurosawa is one whose legacy continues to prevail to this day. His films and innovative filming techniques continue to inspire remakes and adaptations of his films “like A Bug’s Life and Hoodwinked!, which took Seven Samurai and Rashomon as their respective inspiration” (Wild, 7) or “actual remakes such as At the Gate of the Ghost and The Last Princess, the former revisiting Rashomon, the latter another take on The Hidden Fortress” (Wild, 7). Kurosawa’s film career consisted of 30 films that were directed over a span of 57 years, and some of the most famous of his films are his three adaptations of Shakespeare plays— Ran, an adaptation of King Lear, Throne of Blood, an adaptation of MacBeth, and The Bad Sleep Well, an adaptation of Hamlet. Of these three different adaptations, The Bad Sleep Well was released in 1960 and is the least well-known and, arguably, the most controversially received of these Shakespearean adaptations. Reception of the film was mixed, particularly due to its ending, which many view as “a shapeless, anticlimactic ending” (Phipps). However, The Bad Sleep Well stands as not just a skillful and intriguing adaptation of a Shakespeare play, but also as an adept film that focuses on making intriguing commentary about a number of topics that were at the forefront of Japan in the 1950s and 60s. In this essay, I will discuss Kurosawa’s adaptation of Hamlet and how the differences between the film and the original play, directorial and artistic choices made by Kurosawa, and the references to Japanese zaibatsu groups throughout the film allow The Bad Sleep Well to give the viewer of the film a critical view of Japanese economics and Western influence on Japanese culture and economy.
I. A Brief Look at the Japanese Economy of the 1960s
Culturally and historically, the time period around the release of Kurosawa’s The Bad Sleep Well was wrought with a multitude of conflicts that were political, economical, and even international. This was a result of the Western influence— predominantly American, but also of several other Allied Countries, such as the United Kingdom— that existed within Japan in the years leading up to the filming and release of The Bad Sleep Well. After the end of World War II, the Allied occupation of Japan lasted for seven years, only ending after the San Francisco Peace Treaty (1) went into effect on April 28, 1952 and Japan’s sovereignty— with the exception of the Ryukyu Islands, which were occupied until 1972— was restored. However, during the time that Japan was occupied by the Allied forces, a myriad of social and economic reforms were put in place, all of which were reminiscent of Western ideals and programs. The new economic and social models that were implemented in Japan at this time were similar to the policies of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s “New Deal,” which was a series of programs, public works projects, regulations and financial reforms that were put in place in the U.S. to help the country recover from the Great Depression. Despite the end of occupation in Japan occurring several years before the release of Kurosawa’s The Bad Sleep Well, much of the Western influence that had been implemented within the country lingered for a very long time and continues to do so to this day. A particular facet of this influence is seen in the zaibatsu, an economic model in Japan that Borlik, the author of the chapter “Denmark Inc.” within Merchants, Barons, Sellers and Suits: The Changing Images of the Businessman through Literature— which focuses solely on film adaptations of Hamlet that operate in a business setting— cites as a key inspiration behind The Bad Sleep Well and its setting within the corporate world.
Borlik describes the zaibatsu as “family-run financial cliques and business conglomerates” (Borlik, 241). Zaibatsu is a term that translates literally to financial clique, and a multitude of zaibatsu families were prominent throughout The Empire of Japan. Through their use of both “Japan’s traditional feudal values[, namely bushido, (2)] with Western business practices” (3) (Borlik, 241), the zaibatsu helped to industrialize Japan in the nineteenth century. The size and prominence of these groups also allowed the zaibatsu control over key portions of Japan’s economy from the Meiji Period (4) to the end of World War II. The status of these groups was controversial at best: Militarists accused zaibatsu of placing profit over their own country, Leftists and the American occupational administration denounced them as money and power hungry and declared that their “appetite for plunder had propelled Japan into the war [referring to World War II]” (Borlik, 241). Along with all of these complaints, there was also the issue that the zaibatsu groups were monopolistic and nepotistic by nature, as they were family-run corporate conglomerations. Part of the economic reforms that were implemented by the Allied forces attempted to dissolve the zaibatsu families. The most prominent zaibatsu— Sumitomo (which was founded in 1615 and somewhat revitalized in the 1950s), Mitsui (founded in 1876, revitalized in 1959), Mitsubishi (founded in 1870 and revitalized in 1954), and Yasuda (1876-1945), which were also referred to as “The Big Four”— as well as twelve other fairly prominent zaibatsu were targeted by this reform for complete dissolution. Others were simply targeted for reorganization after dissolution. However, complete dissolution of the zaibatsu was never accomplished, as the U.S. government rescinded the dissolution orders with the goal of reindustrializing Japan in an attempt to make the country a force against communism in Asia. Many of the groups were then revitalized in later years and, even if they never re-emerged as exclusively family-run organizations, much of their employee loyalty and their bushido-infused culture remained relatively the same. As this revitalization of many of the zaibatsu families happened due to the Allied occupation and their backtracking on policies they forced on Japan, many of the zaibatsu coming back into prominence shortly before the 1960s involves heavy Western influence. At this time, the zaibatsu were the most prominent example of Western influence within the Japanese economy, both in their revitalization and their business model. In the years leading up to the making of Kurosawa’s The Bad Sleep Well, a number of political figures with close ties to the business community, and therefore zaibatsu, became largely in control of the government. For instance, from 1957-1960, the Prime Minister of Japan was Nobusuke Kishi. Kishi was a former official of the Ministry of Commerce and Industry as well as a former Class A War crime suspect due to his past associations as a former member of the Tojo Cabinet (5). This problematic combination of political and business influence was only increased by the fact that Kishi shared his power with the former Prime Minister Tanzan Ishibashi, who was also a conservative economic journalist. These alarmingly close ties of economics and politics caused even more political tension then what was already present in Japan. However, Japanese politics have had tension with Western influence since the Meiji period. Garon cites Western influence in this period as “form[ing] the primary impediment to party cabinets…, which was ironically based on Western constitutions of the eighteenth and nineteenth century” (Garon, 344). Due to the further increase of political tensions caused by the rising prominence of zaibatsu and, in general, economic influence within the government, the view of the businessman in Japan was at a low point by 1960, when The Bad Sleep Well was released.
Borlik points to this disillusioned view of the businessman being why “the disturbing merger of politics and business is particularly apparent in the film” (Borlik, 242). Several of the corrupt executives seen within The Bad Sleep Well oversee a government agency, referred to as the Public Corporation for the Development of Unused Land. The film itself also emphasizes the nepotism of zaibatsu groups within its first scene, wherein the viewer is shown the wedding of Nishi, The Bad Sleep Well’s equivalent of Hamlet and Iwabuchi’s secretary, and Yoshiko, Ophelia within The Bad Sleep Well and Iwabuchi’s daughter. It is at one point even stated that Nishi was only promoted to Iwabuchi’s secretary because of his relationship with Yoshiko. Shortly after, the viewer learns of Nishi’s status as a man who has infiltrated Public Corporation (the company of which Iwabuchi is Vice President) in order to gather evidence of the complicity of the corporation’s bosses in the death of his father. However, while The Bad Sleep Well does make a rather pointed commentary on the zaibatsu and the influence of economics in politics, Kurosawa also attempts to ensure that the businessmen within the film are not completely demonized. There is even a scene within the film in which Iwabuchi appears wearing an apron and a chef’s hat as he cooks for Yoshiko and Nishi. As he views Iwabuchi in this state, Nishi acknowledges that it is “hard to believe that he is really bad” (Kurosawa). Similarly, the film attempts to paint Nishi in a somewhat skeptical light, pointing to his actions of infiltrating the company and becoming one of the businessmen that he so despises as one of the ways in which Nishi, as he views it within the film, must become evil in order to defeat evil, stating “it’s hard to be evil, I must try to hate and grow more evil myself” (Kurosawa). However, the key difference that Kurosawa draws between Nishi and the men facing his vendetta is that Nishi feels regret and reflects on the consequences of his actions. Opposite of this, the businessmen in the film are unreflective and this fact is what paints them as immoral, more so than their actions against others. This view of repentance is similar to that of the original text of Hamlet, which debates the moral consequences of both murder and regret.
While a multitude of elements of The Bad Sleep Well focus on this struggle of politics and economics through the lens of the zaibatsu, many of Kurosawa’s key criticisms on Western culture within the film are centered within his selection of Hamlet as a text to adapt and the changes that were created between the original plot of Shakespeare’s play and Kurosawa’s film adaptation of it.
II. Kurosawa’s Adaptation of Hamlet: The Key Differences and Similarities
Kurosawa’s choice to adapt Hamlet in The Bad Sleep Well is an interesting decision that is marked largely by the multitude of differences that Kurosawa choses to place within his film. The primary difference between the two films is the vastly different ending of The Bad Sleep Well from its original version, of course, but the film and the play feature many other differences, such as how The Bad Sleep Well is set within the corporate world and the way in which Kurosawa combines different characters from Hamlet to create the characters that exist within The Bad Sleep Well. All of these methods of differing The Bad Sleep Well from Hamlet help to raise the question of why Kurosawa chose to adapt the plot of Hamlet for his film if there was so much of it he wished to change, a question that seems to point to Kurosawa’s dissatisfaction with Western society and how he attempts to demonstrate such through The Bad Sleep Well.
Throughout much of Hamlet, the reader is asked to rather unquestionably view Claudius as the villain of the story. Because of this view of Claudius as a mostly remorseless character, the main conflict of the play stems from Hamlet’s questions over how he can get revenge for his father and if killing Claudius is truly the morally ethical solution, despite the fact that Claudius seems to be immoral himself. Despite the fact that almost all of the characters of Hamlet, including Hamlet himself, are dead by the end of the play— many dying in the final scenes in which Hamlet and Laertes duel each other— the reader is able to identify that, in some sense, Hamlet truly accomplished his quest for revenge on behalf of his father. This ending is completely different within Kurosawa’s The Bad Sleep Well, leaving the film with a far different implication than the one offered by the original play.
In The Bad Sleep Well, Nishi repeatedly commits morally questionable actions in his own quest to achieve vengeance for his father and he has regrets about many of them. One of the darkest scenes within the movie features this, showing Nishi’s abduction of Shirai, an executive of the Public Corporation. Nishi abducts Shirai and takes him to the window from which Nishi’s father fell and gives him the ultimatum of choosing to jump out the window himself or drink a glass of whiskey that Nishi claims is poisoned. Shirai chooses to drink the whiskey and, while it is not truly poisoned, is driven mad by the ordeal that he was put through. It is after this scene that Nishi acknowledges the difficulty in hating evil, particularly as he has been forced to become evil himself in order to destroy evil. However, despite the many dark and gruesome scenes that take place within The Bad Sleep Well, the action that Nishi demonstrates the most regret for committing, throughout the film, is that of taking advantage of Yoshiko and marrying her in an attempt to expose her father’s crime. Nishi seems to hesitate at the thought of exacting revenge on Iwabuchi after both witnessing his parental, domestic side and acknowledging the fact that killing Iwabuchi would leave Yoshiko an orphan, just as Nishi is. This element of remorse and uneasy conscience is a key connection between The Bad Sleep Well and Hamlet, as it is something that Nishi and Hamlet both share. They are both aware of the moral consequences of their vendettas and are uncertain about how they should deal with these consequences.
However, one of the main differences between The Bad Sleep Well and Hamlet is that Nishi’s quest for vengeance fails, whereas Hamlet’s does not. In “The Moral Ambiguity of Kurosawa’s Early Thrillers,” Maxwell discusses how the corporate criminals not only win, in the end, but also “murder the protagonist of the film, Nishi… Kurosawa seems to be pointing out that the police… are powerless against the criminals who control big business and politics. This message is so contrary to the norms of action thriller (and, since the character of Nishi is partly based on Hamlet, to those of the Revenge Tragedy), that most viewers probably react to the film the way that Donald Richie does: ‘This truth is completely unpalatable, unsavory’ (146)” (Maxwell, 15). Maxwell points out that the point of this ending seems to be to prove the power of the Public Corporation and, by extension, that of zaibatsu groups.
There are many viewers of The Bad Sleep Well who have found the ending of the movie anticlimactic or disappointing after the tension that Kurosawa weaves throughout the earlier scenes of the movie. Critics largely view this dissatisfaction with the film’s ending as the main reason as to why it is the least popular of Kurosawa’s Shakespeare adaptation films. However, Ashizu points to a dissent in Western audiences that stems from a simple lack of understanding Japanese traditions. She cites the differences between religion and its support of revenge as a cause of this, discussing how Western religions contain no support of revenge, whereas Japanese feudal culture was based largely around the Edo shogunate (6) who established bushido as their warrior ethics, “which saw revenge as proof of loyal devotion and filial piety” (Ashizu, 90). Ashizu claims that this view on revenge, stemming from the origins of the Edo shogunate and bushido, creates a sense of sympathy for the revenger in Japanese culture that is stronger than elsewhere. This difference in viewing of the film between Japanese and Western culture is also seen in “the remarkably non-Western readiness” (Ashizu, 91) shown by several of Iwabuchi’s employees to commit suicide if it is the necessary method to protect their boss. This cultural difference is seen throughout many scenes within the movie, but can be seen especially within Nishi’s complicated inner conflict. His views are both feudal— through the way in which he views his revenge as satisfying, if a little appalling— and modern as well— seen in his motive for his revenge, which is not just a feudal blood revenge but also a wish to punish the executives of Public Corporation for “preying on people who are unable to fight back” (Kurosawa). While Nishi’s views conflict throughout the movie between both a more modern view of his vendetta and a feudal one, Kurosawa gives little insight throughout the film as to which of these views is the better one. However, the film does focus on the idea of corruption in Japan and exposing this corruption, which is where the true similarity of Nishi’s Japan and Hamlet’s Denmark arises, because, despite the many differences between the two settings, the main characters of both Hamlet and The Bad Sleep Well are isolated, searching desperately for a way to avenge their fathers, and are fighting against a system they don’t stand a chance against.
While many of Kurosawa’s intentions to make commentary on the 1960s economic status of Japan through the re-creation of zaibatsu groups in The Bad Sleep Well were previously discussed in the first section of this essay, Kurosawa’s idea of setting the story of Hamlet within the corporate world has further implications created by this decision to change the setting rather than simple logistical ones. As Ashizu discusses within her article, this decision of setting change creates an environment in The Bad Sleep Well that is not unlike the world of regency that Hamlet must navigate in the original play. The corporate setting of The Bad Sleep Well features many of the same concepts as Hamlet’s Denmark— a world fraught with politics that get in the way of the main character’s revenge, a multitude of complicated relationships to the other characters, and a world that is both high-powered, manipulative, and involved with the government. Somewhat surprisingly, while many details of the original play and the relationships between characters have been changed within The Bad Sleep Well, much of the core plot of Hamlet can still be seen throughout the film, despite all of the changes the adaptation contains.
Another key difference between the original Hamlet and Kurosawa’s adaptation is the way in which Kurosawa changes many of the original characters in Hamlet. While the array of characters within The Bad Sleep Well is large, not all of them can be equated with characters from Hamlet and many of the characters that are somewhat equivalent to those in Hamlet are an amalgamation of more than one of Hamlet’s characters. Yoshiko, for example, equates most clearly to Ophelia, as she is the character that Nishi marries at the beginning of the film and the one that he regrets having hurt throughout his vendetta. However, she is the daughter of Iwabuchi, who is the best equivalent to Claudius in the film and, in many ways— such as Yoshiko’s sympathetic feelings towards her father— this makes Yoshiko the only form of representation of the character of Gertrude within The Bad Sleep Well. Kurosawa condenses many of the main characters of Hamlet into a smaller cast within his film, somehow both streamlining the character archetypes and complicating them by blurring the lines between the original characters of Hamlet. This is an incredibly impactful choice for the adaptation to make as it changes many elements of Shakespeare’s original Hamlet by shifting around the characters’ roles. In this way, Kurosawa attempts to complicate the Western literature that he is using within The Bad Sleep Well, even if the text of Hamlet is what he chose to adapt to create the film. Through this method of adding in feudal Japanese values and changing character and plot to complicate the original plot of Hamlet, Kurosawa distances himself from Western culture despite utilizing it within The Bad Sleep Well.
III. Artistic and Directorial Choices within The Bad Sleep Well
At the time in which The Bad Sleep Well was filmed and created, Kurosawa had yet to establish much of his status as an influential and prominent auteur. While the film was released towards the middle years of Kurosawa’s film career, it is often viewed as existing among his earlier works. Despite this, many of Kurosawa’s common ideas within his films are prominent in The Bad Sleep Well. Kurosawa is known especially for featuring themes of Japanese art, a focus on visual composition, and a focus on historical Japanese culture in his films and The Bad Sleep Well is no exception to this. However, while many of these common elements of Kurosawa’s films exist in The Bad Sleep Well, there are also several fairly distinct artistic and directorial choices that Kurosawa made when creating The Bad Sleep Well, such as the name he selected for his main character, his choice to style the film as an American film noir, and even his use of diegetic and non-diegetic music throughout the film are all choices that further emphasize Kurosawa’s wish to distance Japanese culture from Western culture.
One of the most obvious artistic choices that Kurosawa makes with The Bad Sleep Well is his choice to rename all of the characters. In order to situate his adaptation of the play into Japanese culture, all of the characters— who are combinations of characters from Hamlet, rather than actual recreations of them, as mentioned in section II— are given Japanese names. However, this choice becomes a bit curious when one realizes that Nishi’s name literally means “west” in Japanese. Nishi as a character is already a representation of the conflict between Western values and Japanese values, modern values and feudal values. Kurosawa’s decision to name the character as he did only further emphasizes this conflict. Nishi’s name is now Japanese but, despite this change, it is still a representation of the West within the film. This emphasis on the conflict of Western and Japanese representations within the film further demonstrates Kurosawa’s intentions to demonstrate a friction between the two cultures.
In a similar fashion to Nishi’s name, Kurosawa’s decision to style The Bad Sleep Well as an American film noir also emphasizes the conflict between Western and Japanese culture and images. Ryle discusses the emphasis that the American film noir style provides for the text of Hamlet by analyzing the use of blood stains in Kurosawa’s films. Of The Bad Sleep Well, Ryle says, “an uncannily heightened cinematographic technique accompanies the three bloodstains [of Kurosawa’s Shakespeare adaptation films], each bound to incisive moments of charactological and narrative revelation, that recur in Kurosawa’s three Shakespeare films… in The Bad Sleep Well, the film reaches narrative closure with a shot of the murdered Nishi’s blood staining the seats of a smashed up car… This recurrence, unique in Kurosawa’s entire corpus of films, indicates his concern to replicate and rethink Shakespeare’s decisive marks” (Ryle, 811). This use of bloodstains that Ryle discusses points to the gruesomeness of The Bad Sleep Well and Kurosawa’s willingness to show his viewer’s gritty and realistic imagery. This is a style that is in line with that of the American film noir genre. While, in the instance that Ryle discusses, this stylistic choice seems to create a complementary relationship between The Bad Sleep Well and Hamlet, the choice to style the film in this genre still tends to emphasize the conflict between the two cultures that exist within the film. Much of The Bad Sleep Well focuses on emphasizing the conflict between feudal Japanese values and elements of current Japanese culture that exist due to Western influence. The use of the American film noir genre in The Bad Sleep Well, however, is one of the only instances in which this conflict is somewhat flipped. By the time that The Bad Sleep Well was released in the 1960s, the genre of American film noir was already slightly outdated in Hollywood, as its heyday had been in the 1940s and 50s. Similarly, Shakespeare’s text is outdated as well and Kurosawa is the one who updates both this medium and text to a modern Japanese setting by utilizing them within The Bad Sleep Well. This creates another dynamic of conflict, in which, the Western influence is, for once, something of the past. Interestingly, this conflict is one of the most subtle throughout the film but also one of the strongest, as it is the only form of conflict between Western culture and Japanese culture that exists throughout the entire film. Kurosawa’s use of filming style and genre are adept at creating tension between culture throughout the film, but are not the only ways that Kurosawa chooses to do so.
One of Kurosawa’s other main stylistic choices within the film is his use of diegetic and non-diegetic music. Kurosawa is fairly well-known for including Western music within his films. The Bad Sleep Well demonstrates instances of this, many of which are notably during important scenes and, often, diegetic music rather than non-diegetic music. For instance, the wedding march that is played in the first scene of the film is framed as if it is diegetic, as the viewer witness Nishi and Yoshiko make their way to their reception down a large hallway while the music plays. In a similar fashion, there is a jazz tune that Nishi hums quite often throughout the movie that, eventually, shifts from diegetic music (through Nishi’s humming) to non-diegetic music as Nishi’s death approaches. This shift in music from diegetic to non-diegetic is intriguing and a very skillful way to emphasize the impact of Nishi’s death within the world of the film. Much of the music used throughout this film is a representation of Western culture, the bridal march and the jazz tune that are used throughout the film are only two examples of such. However, the jazz song itself speaks of a more modern Western culture— as jazz is a fairly modern music style— rather than the music of feudal Japanese culture, once again placing the two cultures present in the film in conflict with each other as Nishi, a Japanese character, is constantly humming modern Western music. The use of this jazz music, specifically, seem to point to a form of Western culture within the film that is unaffected by any form of Japanese culture. Given Kurosawa’s appreciation of the arts, this is not necessarily surprising. Kurosawa was often known for including largely only Western music within his films, which is one of the reasons why people claimed that, as a film director, Kurosawa was not “Japanese enough.” However, the use of Western music within The Bad Sleep Well and its relation to Nishi, as he is present in scenes where there is diegetic music, particularly, points to another reason as to why Nishi’s character is representative of elements of the West within the film. While the music itself does not provide a conflict between Western and Japanese cultures, Nishi’s relation to the music does, as it pertains largely to Nishi’s own internal struggle between what Kurosawa displays as these two cultures within the film.
IV. Conclusion
While there are a number of varying opinions on The Bad Sleep Well, some declaring it a failure and others praising the film, there is much to be said about the content of the film and Kurosawa’s intentions behind it. The film itself is a masterful critique of the zaibatsu groups and the conflict of Western and Japanese culture under the guise of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. While Kurosawa is known for including many Western influences in his films— seen in art and music used within many of his films, as well as the use of the American film noir genre in The Bad Sleep Well— the influences of the West within The Bad Sleep Well are not intended to be praise for Western culture but, instead, a critical view of the influence that Western culture has had over Japan and its own culture throughout history. This commentary is only furthered by Kurosawa’s decision to critique the zaibatsu within this film, the changes that he makes to the original story of Hamlet— including the changes within the characters and their names and the major changes made to the end of the story in the adaptation— and the artistic and directorial choices that Kurosawa makes within The Bad Sleep Well, such as his use of the American film noir genre and diegetic and non-diegetic music. Through all of these methods, Kurosawa creates a friction between Western culture and Japanese culture and asks his viewer to look at the influence of Western culture on Japanese culture critically, all through the lens of Shakespeare’s Hamlet.
(1) The San Francisco Peace Treaty was written at the San Francisco Peace Conference on September 8, 1951. It was signed by representatives of 48 different nations and declared peace between Japan and several Allied nations when it went into effect on April 28, 1952. Due to this, it technically marked the end of World War II (Chen).
(2) Bushido refers to the code of honor and morals (which values honor above life) that was developed by Japanese samurai, quite literally translating to “samurai” (bushi) “way” (dō) (Merriam-Webster).
(3) The zaibatsu families’ business models were based on the idea of a vertical monopoly, wherein there is a holding company on top with a wholly owned banking subsidiary that provides finances and several industrial subsidiaries or subsidiary companies that dominate specific sectors of a market. Early and prominent examples of this business model are seen in 19th-20th century American monopolies, such as the Carnegie Steel company or Rockefeller’s Standard Oil company.
(4) A time period representing the first half of The Empire of Japan, occurring from October 23, 1868 to July 30, 1912 (Nussbaum).
(5) The Tojo Cabinet was the administration of Hideki Tojo, a Japanese politician and general of the Imperial Japanese Army. Hideki Tojo served as Japan’s Prime Minister and the President of the Imperial Rule Assistance Association, a political party created in 1940, for most of World War II (Yenne).
(6) Shogunate refers to a government ruled by the shogun, which was a title given to the chief military commander. It is a form of government mostly in line with a military dictatorship, although the hereditary line of Emperors still existed as figureheads in Japan.
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