Transposing the Apocalypse: Kurosawa’s The Idiot

Akira Kurosawa’s Th e Idiot (Hakuchi, 1951)1 is a problematic transposition of Dostoevsky’s novel into fi lm.2 Th e director’s attempt to reproduce his source text as closely as possible while simultaneously transferring the plot into post-World War II Hokkaido has generated a mixed critical reception. Although some commentators praise this relocation of Th e Idiot to a Japanese setting for its defamiliarizing eff ect,3 others view the recontextualization as unsuccessful due to Kurosawa’s inability to distance himself suffi ciently from Dostoevsky. Donald Richie, judging the fi lm to be “neither Dostoevsky nor Kurosawa,” argues that the director “did nothing at all toward adapting the characters to their Japanese milieu” (81). Stephen Prince, similarly, concludes that Kurosawa merely “translates” Dostoevsky’s novel, whereas he “transforms” Shakespeare and Maxim Gorky, respectively, in Th rone of Blood (his relatively loose transposition of Macbeth) and Th e Lower Depths (142). Even critics who appraise the fi lm negatively, however, note Kurosawa’s artistic and philosophical confl uence with Dostoevsky’s themes and central concerns.4 Prince cites, among other shared tendencies, their common interest in cataclysmic events (135-39). Th e fi lm, indeed, engages the novel largely through a focus on its apocalyptic elements: execution motifs, the use of weather as an agent of catastrophe, and an overall sense of inevitable disaster. Kurosawa’s representation of this material, however, diff ers from Dostoevsky’s in striking ways. He reconfi gures Th e Idiot in light of the Japanese defeat in World War II, thereby exploring the novel’s uncanny relevance for his society. In doing so, he turns an apocalyptic novel into a post-apocalyptic fi lm. In Bakhtinian terms, he transforms Dostoevsky’s chronotope, with its dynamic, frenzied depiction of onrushing catastrophe, into a frozen, static temporal and spatial representation of an exhausted postwar Japan. From this perspective, Kurosawa’s changes to the novel

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