Just finished watching the movie again (the Criterion DVD, so I'm sure it's uncut) and although I'm sure I remember Asajj/Lady MacBeth comitting suicide in the end of this film, I couldn't see any sign of it on my recent viewing.
Have I simply missed some small detail (an off-screen scream, or something like that) or did I simply imagine Asajj having died, when I saw the film a few months before?
Asaji goes mad at the end, trying desperately to wash off blood from her hands, that simply won't go away. Blood that she only sees and no one else. (And with Washizu there, trying to convince her otherwise). We never see her committing suicide. (But I'm sure that would eventually happen).
shareIn Shakespere's play, Lady Macbeth's death also occurs off stage and the exact manner of her death is never revealed.
Based on some of the allusions and foreshadowing that appear before her death is announced, it is widely presumed that she committed suicide.
Kurosawa seems to have followed the play fairly closely, so I think it is reasonable to presume the same thing happened to Lady Asaji.
Actually, I believe in Macbeth that Lady Macbeth' suicide was clearly stated; that she threw herself off the wall of the castle in the middle of the night.
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No, screenmaster10, the previous poster who stated that the play never reveals the manner of Lady Macbeth's death is correct. You may perhaps be remembering the Orson Welles film of the play, in which Jeanette Nolan does indeed throw herself from the castle wall. But the specific cause of her death is never revealed by Shakespeare. It is simply announced by another character who tells Macbeth 'The Queen, my lord, is dead', and her demise is never mentioned again.
shareI was thinking the same thing about Asaji- That's what happens when there are so many adaptions of Shakespeare!
I wonder how Polanski's Macbeth ended...
We just watched this movie in my history class and we all asked the same question. My teacher said that in that time in Japan there were no mental hospitals so she probably would have been killed if she didn't kill herself first.
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Actually, her death is partially mentioned after that. In Malcolm's closing speech (V.viii), the last lines of the play, he comments that "this dead butcher and his fiendlike queen, Who, as 'tis thought, by self and violent hands took off her life.." You're right in that the only direct comment is made earlier by Seyton ("The Queen, my lord, is dead") but it is mentioned once more.
As far as throwing herself off the wall, you could also be thinking of Polanski's version of Macbeth where they find her broken body laying on the ground and Macbeth looks up, indicating she probably jumped from a window/balcony in the castle.
Lady Macbeth's suicide is transposed to another part of the movie. As Washizu and Miki enter Great Lord's castle, we hear the cry of women - his widow has killed herself rather than live in humiliation. We can suppose that Asaji would do the same.
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