6-17-02 7:04 AM Monday
Ebi no idaina saigo desu!

Don't we all feel really deep down inside us that there is a samurai warrior struggling to take over and discipline our poor sorry sick attempts at learning and living? Speak for myself? Okay, I will.

At varying times unaccountably my life’s passions run hot on this subject or that one over there. So, in my workplace at the end of the day at the end of the week, when I announce to my colleagues that I am going to spend the weekend watching Japanese movies, the head shaking begins. Sure, I say it just to provoke the response. Joe is in cloud cuckoo land again. Not really I reply to the collective ghostly smile, you should try it, a quick trip to Edo and times east.

Saturday morning, like Sanjuro Kuwabatake in Yojimbo, I throw a branch in the air at the crossroads of my movie shelves and it points to Ran, Akira Kurasowa's take on King Lear. That and the purchase of a newly minted DVD at the local Border’s. God bless the scope of the Criterion Collection. Anyone want my VHS copy? I watch the whole bloody business. Hidetora Ichimonji and his whole clan going to hell in a hand basket.

Which sent me, Sunday morning, scooping books by the pile, to find my complete works of Shakespeare. At last, volumes strewn willy-nilly on the floor, Faulkner’s Snopes leaning on Poul Anderson’s Flandry who sat on Nikos Kazantzakis’ Jesus, I came across one called the Signet Complete Classic Shakespeare and turned 1197 pages to King Lear, skipped the introduction and began.

Please do not get me wrong. I love adore, admire, dote upon, kiss the straw filled hems of Shakespeare, but Lear just leaves me confused. First of all, the guy is a dope! And possibly even more harsh in his judgments than my own father, who if he had split his kingdom in three would have left an 8' level, a non-functional DeWalt Radial Arm Saw and two very good steel shanked hammers. Somehow pop didn't feel the need to ask me and my brother about how we loved him before he passed on. Either he knew or he didn’t want to. I guess when you're rich and powerful and have a lot to leave to your progeny you get a little insecure. What? Lear didn’t know that Regan and Goneril (and what an unfortunate name that is. Won't find that on the Magee Women's Hospital Maternity Ward Bulletin Board as most popular name of the year) were sharper than a hounds tooth (I realize it’s serpent’s tooth, but forsooth serpents have fangs not teeth, and I can turn on a metaphor as good as old Will, and how much more sharp can you get than a snappy sport coat)? So, why was Cordelia his favorite anyhow and why couldn't he cut her some slack, although I'd have been more than a little ticked at her answer. I give you father the love you deserve and no more. Sheesh! I think all four were just a bad lot and happy that Shakespeare thought enough of us not to introduce the mother. She must have been a gem. Lear should have given the kingdoms to me. I’d have let him stay with a thousand knights. Just the kind of person I am.

Now to Kurasowa’s Hidetora (his sons were called Taro, Jiro and Saburo, but I’m okay with these monikers because the movie is drawn at least before the advent of the motorcycle and no matter how bad they sound, Count Dooku is worse) who fared no better and, to add just a more special oriental, yellow menace, touch, was cruel as well as stupid. How did these kingdoms exist with such morons at the helm? A lot of soldiers with fangs and hound’s teeth and big long swords or was it pikes, (I frequently fail at phallic symbolism) I guess. Please don’t make another mistake I love and revere the work of Akira Kurasowa, but it is hard to feel much empathy for his Lear who has blinded folk and killed parents and just plain acted kinda bad in his younger kingness. In the American version of the movie Lady Kaede who brought strife to the whole goddam Ichimongi family because Lear/Hidetora offed her family, would have been the heroine, instead of getting her head cut off in a splatter of blood against the wall.
There is probably a lesson here to be learned. Don’t watch Japanese movies on the weekend? How will Bill Gates or Larry Ellison handle their kingdoms when they grow old? Hand them off to virtual daughters who will then steal their intellectual property? Forbid them entry into their own west coast castles unless they have less than fifty programmers?

And my own kingdom (such as it is)? In three parts will consist of thousands of dusty books stacked in the basement and an overactive imagination. My kids can split each book in thirds and then talk to one another about the beginning middle and end. They already have the other part of my legacy. And Goneril, honey, it was your mother, not me. Yours truly, Joe Lear.
How honorably shrimp struggle as they choke to death! (Yep, the Japanese at the beginning thanks to http://www.muppetlabs.com/~netropic/japanese.html.)