SOURCE: "Are You Trying to Make Me Commit Suicide? Gender, Identity, and Spatial Arrangement in Kurosawa's Ran," in Literature and Film Quarterly, Vol. 24, No. 4, 1996, pp. 360-66.

[In the following essay, Howlett examines the actions of Lady Kaede from the film Ran within the framework of Japanese gender politics.]

In Ran Kurosawa explores the space of tenuous masculine constructions of identity within the cinematic frame and the powerfully subversive oppositional imaging of female identity. Apparently representative of the Jidai Geki genre, and glorifying the bravery of the ancient samurai and his masculine code, Ran exhibits what Stephen Prince has called a "negative inversion" of the samurai code and a bursting of the cinematic frame in which that code is represented. In the film the female emerges as the means by which the samurai sign-system is restructured and ultimately broken, and the experience of space becomes the locus of the...