Something Like an Autobiography

by Akira Kurosawa

  IT WAS IN the second or third term of my second year in school that I transferred to this school. Here everything was so entirely different from Morimura Gakuen that I was astounded. The schoolhouse itself was not painted white, but was an unadorned, humble wooden building rather in the style of a Meiji-era military barracks. At Morimura all the students had worn smart European-style uniforms with lapels; here they wore Japanese clothing with the wide trousers called hakama. At Morimura they had all worn “Landsel,” German-style leather knapsacks for their books; here they carried canvas bookbags. At Morimura they had worn leather shoes; here they wore wooden clogs.

  Above all, their faces were different. They should have been, because while at Morimura students had all let their hair grow long, here they had their hair shaved close. And yet I think that the Kuroda students may have been even more surprised by me than I was by them.

  Imagine someone like me suddenly appearing among a group that lives by purely Japanese customs: a haircut like a sheltered little sissy’s, a belted, double-breasted coat over short pants, red socks and low, buckled shoes. What’s more, I was still in a wide-eyed daze and had a face as white as a girl’s. I immediately became a laughingstock.

  They pulled my long hair, poked at my knapsack, rubbed snot on my clothes and made me cry a lot. I had always been a crybaby, but at this new school I immediately got a new nickname on account of it. They called me Konbeto-san (“Mr. Gumdrop”) after a popular song that had a verse something like this:

  Konbeto-san at our house,

  He’s so much trouble, so much trouble.

  He’s always in tears, in tears.

  Blubber blubber, blubber blubber.

  The idea was that the crybaby’s tears were as big as gumdrops. Even today I can’t recall that name, “Konbeto-san,” without a feeling of severe humiliation.

  But at the same time I entered the Kuroda Primary School, my older brother also arrived. He conquered them all straightaway with his genius, and there is no doubt in my mind that this “Konbeto-san” cried all the more because his brother did not lend his dignity to back him up. It took a full year for me to find a place for myself. At the end of that year I no longer cried in front of people, and no one called me “Konbeto-san” any more. I was now very respectably known as “Kurochan.” The changes that occurred during that year were in part natural. My intelligence began to bud and blossom, growing with such speed that I caught up with my peers. Spurring my remarkable progress there were three hidden forces.

  One of these hidden forces was my older brother. We lived near Omagari, which was the center of the Koishikawa district, and every morning I would walk along the banks of the Edogawa River with my brother on the way to school. Since I was in a lower grade, school ended earlier for me and I would have to make my way back home alone in the afternoon. But every morning I went side by side with him. Every morning my brother would deride me thoroughly. The vast number of different expressions he found to abuse me with was in itself amazing. He did this not in a loud or conspicuous way, but in a very soft voice that was barely audible even to me. None of the passers-by could hear him. If he had been loud, I could have shouted back, or cried and run away, or covered my ears with my hands. But he spoke in a subdued patter so that I could never retaliate while he was continually showering me with scathing insults.

  I thought of complaining to my mother and older sister about the way my brother was treating me, but I couldn’t do it. As soon as we got close to the school, my brother would say, “I know you’re a dirty little rotten sissy coward, so I know you’ll go straight to Mother and our sisters and tell them about me. Well, just you try it. I’ll despise you even more.” I found myself unable to lift a finger to stop his needling me like this.

  Nevertheless, this very same mean and nasty brother of mine always turned up at recess time when I needed him. Whenever I was being teased by the other children, he would appear from somewhere—I don’t know how he happened to be watching. He was the center of attention for the entire school, and those pestering me were younger than he, so without exception they would shrink back when he arrived on the scene. Not even bothering to look at them, he would command, “Akira, come here a minute.” Relieved, I would happily run up to him and say, “What is it?” but he’d only reply, “Nothing” and walk briskly away.

  As this same sequence of events occurred over and over again, my fogged brain began to think a little: My brother’s behavior on the way to school was different from his behavior in the schoolyard. Gradually his abuse on the way to school every morning became less hateful to me, and I began to listen in silent appreciation. Looking back on it now, I feel that this was the time when I began to grow from a baby-level intelligence toward the thinking capacity of a normal school-age child.

  There is one more incident I would like to relate about my brother. When I was still in my “Konbeto-san” period, my father suddenly decided to start taking us all to the Suifuryu practice pool, which was built out into the Arakawa River. At this time my brother was already wearing a white bathing cap with a black triangle pattern on it and swimming around the practice pool with a first-rate over-arm crawl stroke. I was put in the charge of the Suifuryu teacher, who was apparently a friend of my father.

  Because I was the youngest child, my father spoiled me. But how irritated he must have been to see me carrying on like a girl, playing patty-cake and cat’s cradle with my older sisters. He said if I learned to swim and got tanned by the sun—even if I just got a suntan without learning to swim—he would give me a reward. But I was afraid of the water, and I never entered the practice pool. It took many days of scolding by the swimming teacher for me even to get wet up to my navel.

  My older brother also accompanied me whenever we went to the pool, but as soon as we arrived, he would abandon me. He would swim straightaway to the diving raft out in the deepest part of the river, and he never came back till it was time to go home. I spent many a lonely and frightened day.

  Then one day, when I was finally learning how to kick my feet along with the other beginners, holding on to a log floating in the river, my brother appeared. He came rowing up to me in a boat and offered me a ride. Rejoicing, I reached out my hand and let him pull me up into the boat. As soon as I was on board, he began rowing vigorously out toward the middle of the river. Just when the flag and the reed blinds of the poolside hut began to look very small, he suddenly pushed me into the river.

  I flailed with all my strength to keep afloat and reach the boat with my brother in it. But as soon as I came close, he rowed away from me. After he repeated this action several times, my strength drained from me. When I could no longer see the boat or my brother and had already sunk below the surface, he grabbed me by my loincloth and pulled me up into the boat.

  Shaken and surprised, I found there was nothing wrong with me except that I had swallowed a little water. As I sat gasping and wide-eyed, my brother said, “So you can swim after all, Akira.” And sure enough, after that I wasn’t afraid of the water any more. I learned to swim, and I learned to love swimming.

  On the way home that day my brother bought me some shaved ice with sweet red-bean sauce. As we ate, he said, “Akira, it’s true that drowning people die smiling—you were.” It made me angry, but it had seemed that way to me, too. I remembered having felt a strangely peaceful sensation just before I went under.

  A second hidden force that aided my growth was that of the teacher in charge of Kuroda Primary School, Tachikawa Seiji. Some two years after I transfered to Kuroda, Mr. Tachikawa’s progressive educational principles came into direct conflict with the conservatism of the school principal, and my teacher resigned. He was subsequently invited to teach at Gyosei Primary School, where he was responsible for developing a great number of talented men.

  I will have more to say about Mr. Tachikawa, but I’d like to start with an incident that took place when I was still behind the others of my age in my intellectual development and very timid about it
. Mr. Tachikawa came to my aid and for the first time in my life enabled me to feel what is called confidence. It happened during art class.

  In the old days—in my day, that is—art education was terribly haphazard. Some tasteless picture would be the model, and it was simply a matter of copying it. The student drawings that mose closely resembled the original would always get the highest marks.

  But Mr. Tachikawa did nothing so foolish. He just said, “Draw whatever you like.” Everyone took out drawing paper and colored pencils and began. I too started to draw—I don’t remember what it was I attempted to draw, but I drew with all my might. I pressed so hard the pencils broke, and then I put saliva on my fingertips and smeared the colors around, eventually ending up with my hands a variety of hues.

  When we finished, Mr. Tachikawa took each student’s picture and put it up on the blackboard. He asked the class to express opinions freely on each in turn, and when it came to mine, the only response was raucous laughter. But Mr. Tachikawa turned a stern gaze on the laughing multitude and proceeded to praise my picture to the skies. I don’t remember exactly what he said. But I do seem to recall that he called special attention to the places where I had rubbed my spit-covered fingers on the colors. Then he took my picture and put three big concentric circles on it in bright red ink: the highest mark. That I remember perfectly.

  From that time on, even though I still hated school, I somehow found myself hurrying to school in anticipation on the days when we had art classes. That grade of three circles had led me to enjoy drawing pictures. I drew everything. And I became really good at drawing. At the same time my marks in other subjects suddenly began to improve. By the time Mr. Tachikawa left Kuroda, I was the president of my class, wearing a little gold badge with a purple ribbon on my chest.

  I have another unforgettable memory of Mr. Tachikawa during my time at Kuroda Primary School. One day—I think it was during handicrafts class—he came into the classroom carrying a huge roll of thick paper. When he opened it up and showed it to us, laid out flat, it was a map, with streets drawn on it. He then instructed us to build our own houses on these streets and make our own town. Everyone started in with great enthusiasm. Many ideas came forth, and we ended with not only each student’s own dream house, but with landscaping for tree-lined streets, ancient trees that had always been on the site and living fences of flowering vines. It was a lovely city, and it had been created by cleverly drawing out the individual personality of each child in the class. Upon completion of our project, our eyes shone, our faces glowed and we gazed proudly at our handiwork. I remember the feeling of that moment as if it were yesterday.

  In the early Taishō era (1912–1926), when I started school, the word “teacher” was synonymous with “scary person.” The fact that at such a time I encountered such free and innovative education with such creative impulse behind it—that I encountered a teacher like Mr. Tachikawa at such a time—I cherish among the rarest of blessings.

  There was a third hidden force that helped me grow. In my class as Kuroda there was another crybaby, a child who was worse than I. The very existence of this child was like having a mirror thrust in front of my face. I was forced to see myself objectively. I recognized that he was like me, and watching him and realizing how unacceptable his behavior was made me feel uneasy about myself. The child who resembled me and who afforded me the opportunity of seeing my own reflection, this perfect specimen of a crybaby, was named Uekusa Keinosuke, much later co-scriptwriter with me on several films. (Now, don’t get angry, Kei-chan. We’re both crybabies, aren’t we? Only now you’ve become a romantic crybaby and I’m a humanist crybaby.)

  Through some kind of strange fate, Uekusa and I were joined together from childhood to adolescence. We grew like two wisteria vines, clinging and twining around each other. The details of our life in this era can be found in a novel Uekusa wrote. But Uekusa has his viewpoint and I have mine. And because people want themselves to have been a certain way, they have a disturbing tendency to convince, themselves they really were that way. Perhaps if I wrote an account of my childhood with Uekusa to be compared with the account in his novel, we would come very close to the truth. Be that as it may, Uekusa was unable to describe his own childhood without writing about me, just as I can’t write about myself without talking about him.

  When I try to write about Uekusa and me when we were students at Kuroda Primary School, all I can remember is the two of us like tiny dots of human figures in an Oriental landscape painting. I see us standing beneath the wisteria arbor on the school grounds, the clusters of flowers waving in the wind. I see us walking up the slope of Hattorizaka, or up Kagurazaka hill. I see us under a huge Zelkova tree busily nailing up straw dolls to exorcise evil spirits during a shrine visit at the Hour of the Ox, between two and four a.m. In every instance the landscape comes to mind with glistening clarity, but the two boys remain nothing more than silhouettes.

  Whether this lack of distinctness is due to the passage of so much time, or whether it has something to do with my personality, I can’t tell. Whatever the cause, it requires a special effort for me to recall the detailed characteristics of these two boys. I have to do something equivalent to removing the wide-angle lens from the camera and replacing it with a telephoto lens, then looking once again through the viewfinder. And even this isn’t enough. I need to concentrate all my lights on these two boys and stop down the lens so as to record them clearly.

  Well, then, looking at Uekusa Keinosuke through my telephoto lens, I now see that, like me, he was someone who differed from the rest of the students at Kuroda Primary School. Even his clothes were different: he wore some kind of silk-like flowing material, and his hakama trousers weren’t the usual duck cloth, but a soft fabric. The overall impression was that of a stage actor’s child. He was like a miniature player of lover-boy roles, the kind you can knock over with one punch.

  Speaking of knocking him over with one punch, Uekusa the primary-school student was always falling down and crying. I remember him falling once on a stretch of bad road and ruining his fancy clothes. I accompanied him as he cried all the way home. Another time, at a track meet, he fell in a mud puddle and turned his sparkling white athletic outfit pitch black; I had to try to comfort him while he blubbered.

  The saying goes that birds of a feather flock together. Crybaby Uekusa and I felt something in common; we were drawn to each other, and soon we were playing together continually. Gradually I came to treat Uekusa the way my older brother had treated me.

  Our relations are very frankly described in the passage about the track meet in Uekusa’s novel. Once Uekusa, who always came in last in any race, for some inexplicable reason was running in second place. I rushed up behind and shouted, “Good! Good! Come on, come on!” Together we ran the last stretch and leaped across the finish line into the open arms of the beaming Mr. Tachikawa.

  When the meet was over, we took our prizes—colored pencils or paints or whatever—and went to see Uekusa’s mother on her sickbed. She cried tears of joy and kept thanking me on her son’s behalf. But, looking back on it all now, I am the one who should have been saying “Thank you,” because while this weakling Uekusa made me feel protective toward him, I somehow at the same time became someone the school bully could no longer push around.

  Mr. Tachikawa seems to have looked favorably on our friendship. He once called me in for consultation as the class president and asked me what I thought of appointing a vice president. Thinking this meant I had been doing a poor job as president, I fell into a dark silence. Mr. Tachikawa studied my expression and asked whom I would recommend. I named one of the best students in the class. Mr. Tachikawa said that he would prefer to try putting a less impressive student in that position. I stared at him in surprise. He went on to say with a big smile that if we put someone who was not very good in the job now, that person would be sure to shape up and prove worthy. Then, addressing me as my classmates did, he said, “So, Kuro-chan, what do you say to making Uekus
a vice president?” At this point I became painfully aware of the warmth of Mr. Tathikawa’s feeling toward us.

  Deeply moved, I stood staring at him. “Fine,” he announced, “it’s all settled, then.” He slapped me on the shoulder and with a grin told me to go and tell Uekusa’s mother straightaway; he knew she’d be happy. As he walked away, there seemed to be a kind of halo around his head.

  From this time on, Uekusa wore a silver badge with a red ribbon on his chest, and in both the classroom and the schoolyard he was always at my side. Recognition of him as vice president of the class was instantaneous. It was as if he had been planted in the flower pot of the class vice presidency and placed in full sun. He began to bloom. Mr. Tachikawa had referred to him as “not very good” in a way that may sound disparaging, but in reality I think he had observed the talent that lay dormant within Uekusa.

  Whirlwind

  IN TERMS OF intelligence, my brother and I were about ten years apart, but in reality our ages differed by only four years. So when I suddenly began to become less of a baby and more of a little boy, as I started the third grade in primary school, my brother was just entering middle school. At this point, an event no one could have imagined took place.

  As I have already mentioned, my brother was a brilliant student. When he was in the fifth grade, he placed third on the academic-ability examination given to all primary-school students in the city of Tokyo. When he was in the sixth grade, he placed first. However, when he took the entrance examination for the top-ranking state middle school, which would have sent him on to the First High School and eventually to Tokyo Imperial University, he failed.

  This incident was like a nightmare for the entire household, from my father on down. I remember the strange atmosphere that took hold at home. It was as if a sudden whirlwind had passed through, tearing things apart. My father sat staring vacantly into space, my mother wandered aimlessly around the house and my older sisters spoke softly among themselves and averted their gaze from my brother. Even I experienced a feeling of irrational rage and mortification over this event.