In Akira Kurosawa's film, "Throne of Blood," an adaptation of Williams Shakespeare's "Macbeth," an old woman, who is possibly a witch or an evil spirit, waxes poetic on Fate's Five Calamities, which remain unnamed:
Strange is the world
Why should men
Receive life in this world?
Men's lives are as meaningless
As the lives of insects
The terrible folly
Of such suffering
A man lives but
As briefly as a flower
Destined all too soon
To decay into the stink of flesh
Humanity strives
All its days
To sear its own flesh
In the flames of base desire
Exposing itself
To Fate's Five Calamities
Heaping karma upon karma
All that awaits Man
At the end
Of his travails
Is the stench of rotting flesh
That will yet blossom into flower
Its foul odor rendered
Into sweet perfume
Oh, fascinating
The life of Man
Oh, fascinating
RSS