Something Like an Autobiography

by Akira Kurosawa

  When someone is told over and over again that he’s no good at something, he loses more and more confidence and eventually does become poor at it. Conversely, if he’s told he’s good at something, his confidence builds and he actually becomes better at it. While a person is born with strengths and weaknesses as part of his heredity, they can be greatly altered by later influences.

  However, this kind of defense now serves no purpose, and my only reason for bringing it up is to say that it was then that the path I would take in life became clear to me. It was the path of literature and art. And the point at which these two would diverge was still a long way off.

  The Gleam of Fireflies

  GRADUATION DAY was at hand. Primary-school graduation ceremonies in those days followed a prescribed order—conventional, well mannered and sentimental. First the school principal made a hackneyed address of encouragement and blessing for the future of the graduates, then one of the guests delivered a perfunctory message of greeting, to which a representative of the graduating class made a formal response. Then the graduates sang with organ accompaniment:

  “We sing thanks for our teacher’s kindness,

  We have honored and revered …”

  The fifth-year students followed this with:

  “After the years, met daily as brothers and sisters,

  You go on …”

  And at the end all together sang:

  “In the gleam of fireflies.”

  At this point all the girls would start sobbing. And in the midst of that, as valedictorian representing the graduating boys, I had to give my formal response.

  Our teacher had written my speech himself, handed it to me and told me to make a clean copy and “give a fine delivery” of it. This speech met all the requirements as to content, but it read like strung-together excerpts from an ethics text book. I knew that I would never be able to put any feeling into it. The rhetoric praising the teacher’s unselfish devotion to his students was particularly flowery, and I couldn’t help glancing up at his face as I read through it for the first time, standing in front of him.

  As I mentioned earlier, this teacher and I lost no love between us. How could he make me say these nauseating things about his great kindness and our sadness at parting with him? And what kind of person was this who could write all these laudatory phrases about himself? My flesh crawled with revulsion, but I took his draft and carried it home with me.

  Assuming that this was the custom and there was nothing I could do about it, I sat down and set about copying the speech onto good paper. My brother looked over my shoulder as I worked. His eyes raced over the page I was completing. “Show me that,” he demanded. He took the teacher’s draft and read it standing next to me. As soon as he finished, he crumpled it into a little ball and threw it across the room. “Akira, don’t read that thing,” he commanded. I was dumfounded. He went on, “You need a speech; I’ll write you one. You read mine.”

  I thought that was a wonderful idea, but I knew the teacher would demand to see my clean copy of the speech he had written. I’d never get away with it, I explained to my brother. He replied, “Well, then, finish copying his speech and show it to him. Then for the ceremony you just slip mine inside it and go up there and read it.”

  My brother wrote an extremely acrimonious speech. He attacked the conservatism and inflexibility of primary-school education. He lashed out with sarcasm at the teachers who honored and upheld this system. We graduates had been living in a nightmare until now, he said; throwing off the chains would let us have happy dreams for the first time. For that day and age, it was a revolutionary address. It refreshed my spirit.

  Unfortunately, I couldn’t muster the courage to read it. If I had, it occurs to me now, I’m sure it would have caused a scene like the one just before the curtain falls at the end of Gogol’s The Public Prosecutor. Out there in the audience was my father, looking properly majestic in his frock coat. And the teacher had made me read my clean copy of his speech aloud to him for his final approval before I went up to the podium. Yet I did have my brother’s speech hidden in the breast of my kimono. It wouldn’t have been impossible for me to slip it out and read it.

  When we arrived home after the graduation ceremony, my father said, “Akira, that was a fine speech you gave today.” My brother probably understood what had happened when he heard this. He looked at me with a quick, sarcastic grin. I was ashamed. I am a coward.

  It was in this fashion that I graduated from Kuroda Primary School.

  Keika Middle School

  WHEN I ENTERED Keika Middle School, its campus was situated, along with Keika Commerce School (which Uekusa attended), in the Ochanomizu district of Tokyo. It remains there today, sandwiched between the Juntendo Hospital and a broad street. In my time the landscape of Ochanomizu, which means “water for tea”—as witness the Keika school song, “Behold the valley of tea …” and so forth—was considered comparable in beauty to some of China’s famous scenic places, although that was a slight exaggeration.

  A passage in the class report of my 1927 graduating class describes both the Ochanomizu topography and me at the time I was in my first and second years of middle school. Since it was written by a friend from that time, I’d like to quote from it.

  The Ochanomizu embankment was overgrown with lush wild grasses that gave off a fragrance I can’t forget. That canal side has something ineffably nostalgic about it. When classes finally ended, I would find liberation through the Keika Middle School gates (actually a small gate resembling a rear entrance), cross the wide avenue where the city trolley stopped at Hongō Motomachi, wait for a chance and slip past the “No Trespassing” sign into the thick vegetation of the embankment and disappear. From that point on I was safely out of sight, so I’d pick my way very carefully down the steep slope. Reaching a place that was level enough so there was no danger of slipping and falling, I’d throw down my schoolbag as a pillow and stretch out on the grass.

  Going on down to the water’s edge, there was a flat area just wide enough for a single person to walk on. I would travel along this until I got close to the Suidōbashi area and then scramble back up the bank and onto the street.…

  The only reason I did all this was that I didn’t want to go straight home from school. A friend of the same mind was Kurosawa Akira. He and I climbed down the bank two or three times together. Once we stumbled on a pair of snakes mating in a clump of grass. Coiled together, they seemed to be standing up, and scared us badly.

  Kurosawa Akira was poor at all subjects but composition and painting. His work was often published in the school magazine. One of these published paintings, a still-life of some fruit, as I recall, left an impression on me that still lingers. The actual painting itself was no doubt even more inspiring. I hear that because he was so talented our dashing young teacher Iwamatsu Gorō showed him special attention.

  Kurosawa’s ability in physical education was zero. When he went to the chinning bar, he’d hang there with both feet planted on the sand from start to finish. It made me very anxious. Kurosawa’s voice was also very girlish. I remember a strangely bittersweet feeling as I climbed down the bank and lay down shoulder to shoulder staring up at the sky next to this tall, pale youth.

  Reading this, I get the distinct impression that I still had certain effeminate qualities at this age. The only comfort I can find in it is that while my Konbeto-san period was just sweet and indulgent, at least by this time I’d become “bittersweet,” so I guess I had grown up a little.

  In any event, the self I see when I think about my past and the Kurosawa Akira that others remember are so different that I am uncomfortably surprised. From the time I adopted the affectations of a boy swordsman I imagined myself to be robustly masculine. What could have happened to cause the writer of the above excerpt to refer to my physical capacities as “zero”? I feel moved to voice an objection.

  That I had no strength whatsoever in my arms and simply hung there on the bar is the truth. That I
couldn’t pull myself up is the truth. But it is not true that I had zero physical capacities. I did very well in all the sports that don’t require very much strength in the arms. In kendō swordsmanship, which I have discussed above, I reached the top rank. In baseball I pitched, and the catchers were afraid of the balls I threw; when I wasn’t pitching, I played shortstop, and I was renowned for my ability to snap up the infield grounders. In swimming I learned two Japanese-style strokes and later mastered the newly imported Australian crawl. I have never been a fast swimmer, but even at my present age I have no trouble swimming. In golf, as I have mentioned, I’m very bad at putting, but I haven’t given up the game.

  However, it shouldn’t surprise me that to my classmates I appeared to have no physical capacities. Our physical-education class at Keika Middle School was led by a former army officer, and he put great emphasis on athletics that required strength in the arms. He had a ruddy face, so we called him Beefsteak behind his back.

  Once Beefsteak played a trick on me. I was hanging from the bar as usual, and he tried to push me up over it. I was not pleased to feel myself being forced, so I let go of the bar and fell with all my weight on top of Beefsteak, making him collapse on the sand. Covered with a layer of sand from head to foot, Mr. Beefsteak looked like a breaded cutlet.

  At the end of that term I set a new school record by getting a zero in physical education. It was the first time in the history of Keika Middle School.

  But something else happened to me in Mr. Beefsteak’s class. We were doing running high jumps, and those who missed the bar were out—it was a competition to see who’d be left as the bar was moved higher. When my turn came, I started running and all my classmates burst out laughing. It was a laugh that expected me as a matter of course to knock down the bar that was directly ahead of me. But I sailed right over it. Everyone looked puzzled.

  The bar rose with each round; the number of contenders dropped and those on the sidelines increased. But among those challenging that bar, I remained a participant after numerous jumps. The onlookers became strangely silent. And the impossible happened: I alone was left to face the bar. Beefsteak and my classmates all stared in disbelief.

  How could this have happened? What did I look like as I ran for that bar? When I first started, every time I went over the bar I heard snickering, so I must have shown a very bizarre form. As I think about this incident now, I still can’t understand it. Was it a dream? Did the wishes of the boy who was repeatedly laughed at in physical-education class finally invent success for himself in a dream?

  No, it wasn’t a dream. I really did keep jumping over that bar. And finally I alone was left and continued to do it many more times. Some angel may have felt sorry for the boy with the zero in gym and lent him her wings for a moment.

  A Long Red Brick Wall

  IN WRITING ABOUT my memories of middle school I can’t leave out the brick wall surrounding the armory. Every day I walked to and from school along this wall. At first I didn’t walk, though. I took a streetcar from the stop at Omagari, near my house in Koishikawa Gokencho. At Iidabashi station I transferred to the tram for Hongō Motomachi and walked from there. But I did this only a few times. Something very strange happened to me on that streetcar, and afterward I didn’t like riding it any more. Even though it was my own fault, it was frightening.

  The morning tram was always full. Clumps of people always overflowed from the entrance where the conductor’s stand was and hung precariously from the side of the car. One day I too was hanging there on the way from Omagari to Iidabashi, when suddenly I decided that everything in life was stupid, boring and futile. I let go of the hand rail.

  I was pinned between two university students who were also hanging on the outside of the car. If this had not been the case, I would have plunged to the ground. Even so, I had only one foot on the running board, so I did start to fall backward.

  One of the university students let out a yell and freed one hand to grab me by the strap of the schoolbag on my shoulder. I rode the rest of the way to Iidabashi suspended from the hand of this student like a fish on a line. Holding very still, for this entire interval I stared into the eyes of the pale, horror-stricken young man.

  When we arrived at Iidabashi and descended from the tram, the two students caught their breath. “What happened to you?” they asked. Since I myself didn’t understand what had happened, I just bowed my head quickly and headed for the stop where I had to catch my next streetcar. “Are you all right?” they persisted, and it looked as if they were going to follow me. I ran, caught up with the tram for Ochanomizu and jumped on just as it began to move. Turning and looking back over my shoulder, I saw the two students staring after me in amazement. No wonder; I can’t help being amazed at myself.

  After that, I avoided taking the streetcar. And I was used to walking from my primary-school days with the long trek to the Ochiai fencing school. Moreover, if I saved my streetcar fare, I could satisfy the new craving I developed around that time: I could buy books.

  I left my house in the morning and walked along the Edogawa River to the foot of the Iidabashi bridge. From there I took the street the tram followed and turned right. Proceeding a little farther, on the left side I came to the long red brick wall of the armory. The wall seemed to go on endlessly. At the point where it was interrupted stood Korakuen, the garden of Count Mito’s Tokyo mansion. Following that on the right after a while came the Suidōbashi intersection. On the far left corner stood a huge hinoki cypress gate like that of a nobleman’s residence. From that corner a gentle slope led up toward Ochanomizu, and this was the route I followed every day. And as I walked to and from school, I was reading the entire time.

  Along this path I read Japanese novelists Higuchi Ichiyō (1872–1896), Kunikida Doppo (1871–1908); Natsume Soseki (1867–1916) and the Russian Ivan Turgenev. I read books borrowed from my brother and sisters as well as books I bought myself. Whether I understood it or not, I read everything I could get my hands on.

  At that stage of my life I didn’t understand very much about people, but I did understand descriptions of nature. One passage of Turgenev I read over and over again, from the beginning of The Rendezvous where the scenery is described: “The seasons could be determined from nothing more than the sound of the leaves on the trees in the forest.”

  Because I understood and enjoyed reading descriptions of natural settings so much at this time, I was influenced by them. Later I wrote a composition that my grammar teacher Ohara Yōichi praised as the best since the founding of Keika Middle School. But when I read it over now, it’s precious and pretentious enough to make me blush.

  As I think back, I wonder why I didn’t write about that long red wall I walked along as if being carried on a stream, on my left in the morning and my right in the afternoon. That wall protected me from the wind in the wintertime, but in summer it made me suffer with the heat it reflected from the blazing sun. It’s too bad. When I try to write about that wall today, I cannot do it. And when the Great Kanto Earthquake came, the wall fell down; not a single brick of it remains.

  September 1, 1923

  IT HAD BEEN a dark day for me, because it was the day after summer vacation ended. For most students it was a day full of enthusiasm for the resumption of school. Not for me. It was also the day of the ceremony opening the second term, an event I always found disgusting.

  When the convocation ended, I set out for Maruzen, Japan’s largest foreign bookstore, in the downtown Kyōbashi district. My oldest sister had asked me to pick up a Western-language book for her. But when I got there, the store hadn’t opened yet. More disgusted than ever, I headed for home again, intending to try once more in the afternoon.

  Two hours later the Maruzen Building would be destroyed and the horrifying photograph of its ruins sent around the world to show the kind of devastation wrought by the Great Kanto Earthquake. I can’t help wondering what would have become of me if the bookstore had been open that morning. I probably wouldn’t ha
ve spent two hours looking for my sister’s book, so it’s unlikely I would have been crushed by the toppling Maruzen Building. But how could I have escaped the terrible fire that engulfed and destroyed central Tokyo in the wake of the earthquake?

  The day of the Great Earthquake had dawned cloudless. The sweltering heat of summer still lingered on to make everyone uncomfortable, but the clarity of that blue sky unmistakably foretold autumn. And then about eleven o’clock, without a stir of warning, a violent wind sprang up. It blew my little handmade bird-shaped weathervane right off the roof. I don’t know what relationship this wind may have had to the earthquake, but I remember climbing up onto the roof to put the weathervane back, looking up at the sky and thinking, “How strange!”

  Just before the historic tremor, I was back home from Kyōbashi, in the street in front of my house with a friend from the neighborhood. Across the way was a pawnshop. We were crouching in the shadow of its storehouse and throwing pebbles at a red Korean cow that was tethered by the gate of my house. This cow belonged to our nextdoor neighbor, who used it to pull the cart in which he carried feed for his pig farm in Higashi Nakano, then a rural suburb of Tokyo. The night before, he had for some reason left it tied up in the narrow alleyway between our houses, and it had lowed noisily throughout the entire night. As a result, I had not been able to sleep well and was hurling stones at the cursed beast with all my might.

  At that point I heard a rumbling sound from beneath the ground. I was wearing my high wooden clogs, and in order to hit the cow I was moving my body, so I didn’t feel the earth move. What I noticed was that my friend who had been squatting next to me suddenly stood bolt upright. As I looked up at him, I saw that behind him the wall of the storehouse was crumbling and falling—toward us. I stood up in a hurry, too.