A little while later the landlord’s daughter appeared with a bowl of rice gruel for me. Until I got well again, she came three times a day every day with a bowl of rice gruel. I no longer have any recollection of what she looked like. But I shall never forget her kindness.
During the course of my illness, my ties with the members of the proletarian newspaper staff were completely severed. We had been very wary of grapevine-style arrests, so we made sure none of us knew each other’s addresses. When we met outside, we decided the time and place of our next meeting on the spot. There was no way for me to find them after missing a meeting.
I suppose that if I had really wanted to find them again, I could have done so. But, still weak and dazed from my illness, I simply couldn’t muster the spirit. To put it more precisely, I used the fact that I could not contact them as an excuse to extricate myself from this painful illegal political movement. It was not a case of the leftist movement’s fever dying down; it was a case of my own leftist fever not having been a very serious one.
Freshly recovered from my illness, I walked on legs that were still wobbly along a path I had worn well as a lower classman in middle school, from Suidōbashi to Ochanomizu. I crossed Ochanomizu and went toward Hijiribashi bridge. Across Hijiribashi I went down the hill to the left and, turning the corner at Sudacho, I came to the Cinema Palace movie theater. I had seen my brother’s name in the Cinema Palace newspaper advertisements. If I climbed back up the winding path on the hill I had just come down, I would be at his home.
As I have been writing this, a poem by Nakamura Kusadato suddenly comes to mind:
Coming down the winding trail,
The springtime voice of the crying calf.
An Alleyway in the Floating World
AT A CORNER on the way from Ushigome-Kagurazaka to the stockade, there is a little alleyway that remains just as it was in the feudal era. In that alley, although the doors had been replaced with glass, there were three divided tenements that in every other respect remained as they had been centuries ago. My brother lived in one of these with a woman and her mother. When I recovered from my illness and was able to leave my room, it was to this tenement that I moved.
My appearance backstage at the Cinema Palace Theater that first day had startled my brother. He stared at me with frank amazement on his face and asked, “Akira, what’s wrong? Are you ill?” I shook my head and replied, “No, I’m just a little tired.” My brother looked again and shrugged. “I wouldn’t call it a little. Come on to my place.”
And so it was that I came to impose on my brother’s hospitality. About a month later I moved to a room nearby, but even after that I spent every waking moment at my brother’s. My father had been told that I was staying with my brother from the time I first left home; now that lie became the truth.
The tenement and the alley where my brother lived were like the places the rakugo storytellers have set their tales in for generations. There was no running water, but only a well where people drew their water. The residents were all the most traditional of born-and-bred “Edokko,” the original Tokyoites. My brother’s role in this setting was like that of a masterless samurai, like the late-seventeenth-century battle scarred warrior Horibe Yasuhei of the war romances. He was looked upon with awe and respect.
The way these tenements were divided up, each had a two-mat entry (about four by four feet) and a six-mat room in the rear with the kitchen and toilet along the back of it. The space was tiny. At first I couldn’t understand why my brother, with his income, would live in a place like this. But as the days went by, I began to appreciate the special qualities of this life-style.
Some of the people who lived in this neighborhood were construction workers, carpenters, plasterers and the like. But the majority of the residents had no visible means of support and no definable profession. Yet somehow they shared and depended on each other to such a degree that what should have been a terribly difficult life became surprisingly optimistic and, at every opportunity, downright humorous. Even the small children made wisecracks.
Adults’ conversation went something like this: “So this morning I’m lying out on the stoop in the sun. Right before my eyes, a rolled-up mattress comes flying out of my next-door neighbor’s. And my neighbor himself comes rolling out of the middle of the mattress. You know, his wife is really ruthless with the housecleaning.” The reply to this man was, “No, I’d say she’s especially considerate. She wraps him up so he won’t get hurt.”
In houses as cramped as these there were still those who made tiny rooms in the attics and rented them. In one such rented attic room was a young man who made his living selling fish. Every morning he would get up before the crack of dawn and carry his tin box to the riverbank, where he bought his goods. He worked furiously for an entire month, and then at the end of the month he put on his finest clothes and went out to buy a prostitute—as if that made it all worthwhile.
For me this existence was as interesting as living among the characters of late-eighteenth-century fiction in stories of Sanba and Kyoden. I learned a lot. The old men who lived in the neighborhood had jobs like taking care of the footwear at the storytellers’ halls on Kagurazaka or doing menial work around the movie theaters. As part of their privileges they had passes to their establishments and rented these out at very low rates to their neighbors. I availed myself of these cheap passes and spent every day and every evening I lived in the area going to the movies or listening to the storytellers.
At that time Kagurazaka boasted two movie theaters, the Ushigomekan for foreign pictures and the Bunmeikan for Japanese films. There were three storytellers’ halls, the Kagurazaka Enbujo and two others whose names I have forgotten. I didn’t see films only at the two Kagurazaka theaters, though. My brother introduced me to friends at other theaters, so I saw movies to my heart’s content. But the reason I was able to savor the art of the storytellers so fully is that I had the experience of living in the tenement near Kagurazaka. I had no idea what role these popular arts of storytelling and singing would play in my future; I just enjoyed them without thinking about it.
Besides the acts of well-known artists, I also had a chance to watch the performances of clowns and comedians who rented the storytellers’ halls to put on their own shows. I still remember one of these acts called “The Fool’s Sunset.” It was a pantomime of a fool standing and staring at the sunset sky and the birds flying home to roost. It seemed very simple, but the artistry of the man evoking the winsomeness and pathos of the scene filled me with admiration.
Around this time the talkies first appeared in the movie theaters, and some of them remained imprinted on my memory: All Quiet on the Western Front by Lewis Milestone, The Last Company by Curtis Bernhardt, Westfront 1918 by G. W. Pabst, Hell’s Heroes by William Wyler, Sous les toits de Paris by René Clair, The Blue Angel by Josef von Sternberg, The Front Page by Milestone, Street Scene by King Vidor, Morocco and Shanghai Express by von Sternberg, City Lights by Charles Chaplin, The Threepenny Opera by Pabst and Der Kongress tanzt by Erik Charell.
As the talkies came in they spelled the end of the silent-film era. As the silent films went out, so did the need for the narrators, and my brother’s livelihood was struck a terrible blow. At first all seemed well because by this time my brother was chief narrator at a first-run movie house, the Taikatsukan in Asakusa, where he had his own following. The change was very gradual, and coincided with my discovery that the bright, cheerful humor of tenement life I enjoyed so much harbored in its shadows a dark reality. This is probably true of human life everywhere—a light exterior hides a dark underside. But I was seeing it for the first time, and I was forced to think about it.
Ugly things happened here, as they did everywhere else. An old man raped his little granddaughter. A woman caused a great disturbance throughout the tenements with her suicide threats every night. One night, after trying to hang herself and being laughed at by everyone in the neighborhood, she quietly jumped into the well and drown
ed. And there were the stories of battered stepchildren, just as in the fairy tales, stories that would make you very sad. I will relate only one of them here.
Why would a stepmother be cruel to her stepchild? That her behavior toward a child would be motivated by her hatred for her husband’s previous wife doesn’t make sense. The only explanation for this kind of crime is ignorance. But ignorance is a kind of insanity in the human animal. People who delight in torturing defenseless children or tiny creatures are in reality insane. The terrible thing is that people who are madmen in private may wear a totally bland and innocent expression in public.
There is an old story told in senryŭ verse about the stepchild who is sent to buy moxa for the cruel stepmother to burn on the innocent child’s skin. The description of the face of the little child who is sent to buy the instrument of its own torture was made yet more poignant for me by this incident. One day while I was at my brother’s place, the woman who lived next door came in sobbing piteously. She was crying in a way that was unbearable for me to watch, both hands clutched to her breast and shuddering convulsively. When I asked the reason, she said her next-door neighbor was torturing her stepchild again. She had heard a little girl’s terrible cries and finally couldn’t stand it any more. She looked in through her neighbor’s kitchen window and saw the child tied to a post, with her stepmother burning a large amount of moxa on her bared abdomen. She was about to describe the scene further to me when she glanced outside and suddenly closed her mouth.
A woman wearing light makeup was passing by. She bowed to us with a pleasant smile and walked on toward the main street. The woman from next door who had been sobbing her heart out now looked at the retreating figure and swore. “Until two minutes ago she looked like a raging demoness, and now she’s sweet as a lamb. Witch!”
So the woman who had just passed by was the stepmother who had been torturing the little girl. I couldn’t believe it to look at her, but the next-door neighbor immediately turned to me and began pleading, “Akira, please. Please go help that child while she’s out.” At a loss for words, half believing and half doubting, I found myself following her.
Looking in through the window of the rooms next to hers, sure enough I saw the child tied to a post with a man’s kimono sash. The window was open, so, like a thief, I climbed into a stranger’s house. I rushed to untie the sash that bound the girl to the post. But she glared at me with furious eyes. “What do you think you’re doing? No one asked for your help!” I stared at her in surprise. “If I’m not tied up when she comes back, she’ll torture me again.” I felt as if I had been slapped in the face. Even if she was untied, she couldn’t escape from the environment that bound her to that post. For her, other people’s sympathy was of no value at all. Pity was only a source of more trouble. “Hurry and tie me up again,” she said with so much ferocity I thought she might bite me. I did as she told me. It served me right.
A Story I Don’t Want to Tell
AFTER TELLING a story that makes me feel bad, I may as well go on and write about something I had not wanted to face again. It concerns my brother’s death. It is very painful to write about, but if I don’t discuss it, I can’t go on.
After I had caught a glimpse of the dark side of life in the tenements, I suddenly had the urge to return to my parents’ home. It had now become clear that all foreign movies would henceforth be talkies, and theaters that showed them decided as a universal policy that they no longer needed narrators. The narrators were to be fired en masse, and, hearing this, they went on strike. My brother, as leader of the strikers, had a very difficult time. It would not have been right for me to continue to impose on him. I went home.
My parents, who knew nothing at all of the life I had led for the past several years, welcomed me as if I had been away on a long sketching excursion. My father seemed to want to know all about what kind of painting I had been studying, so I had no choice but to keep quiet about the truth and tell a lot of appropriate lies. Seeing how much hope my father still cherished for my prospects as an artist, I felt like starting over in painting. I began sketching again.
I wanted to paint in oils. But the entire household was being supported by my older sister, who had married a teacher from Morimura Gakuen. I couldn’t bring myself to ask for paint and canvases. I sketched.
In the midst of this, one day we heard of my brother’s attempted suicide. I believe the cause was his painful position as leader of the narrators’ strike, which had failed. My brother seemed to be resigned to the fact that narrators would no longer be needed when film technology progressed to the point of including sound. Since he knew it was a losing battle, the fact that he had to accept the leadership of the strike must have been indescribably painful for him.
My brother’s attempt to end the suffering of his life cast gloom over the household once again. I desperately wanted to find some happy event to distract everyone. I hit upon the idea of having my brother marry the woman he had been living with. I had sponged off her for nearly a year, had found nothing objectionable in her character and had come to behave with her as if she really were my sister-in-law. I felt that bringing about the formalization of their relationship was a natural role for me to play.
My mother, father and older sister expressed no objections to my idea. But the odd thing was that I couldn’t get a straight answer out of my brother. I attributed his reticence to the simple fact that he was out of work.
Then one day my mother said to me, “I wonder if Heigo is all right.” “What do you mean?” I asked. She explained her misgivings: “Hasn’t Heigo always said he would die before he reached the age of thirty?” What she said was true. My brother had always said that. He claimed that when human beings lived past thirty, all they did was become uglier and meaner, so he had no intention of doing so. He was a great devotee of Russian literature, hailing Mikhail Artsybashev’s The Last Line as the best book in the world, and he had always kept a copy of it close at hand. But I had always found my brother’s espousal of the hero Naumov’s creed of a “weird death” to be nothing more than an excess of emotion—certainly not the presage of his own death it turned out to be. So when my mother expressed her concern to me, I laughed it away, saying, “People who talk about dying don’t die.”
I had made light of my brother’s words, but a few months after I had assuaged my mother’s fears in this way, my brother was dead. Just as he had promised, he died without reaching the age of thirty. At twenty-seven he committed suicide.
He had treated me to dinner three days before his suicide. But, strangely enough, much as I try, I can’t remember where it was. It may be that his death was such a shock to me that, although I remember with extreme clarity everything about our last words to each other, I remember nothing of what came before or after.
We said our goodbyes at Shin Okubo Station. We were in a taxi. As my brother got out to go up the steps to the train station, he told me to take the cab all the way home. But when the car started up again, he came back down the steps and motioned the driver to stop. I got out of the cab and walked over to him, saying, “What is it?” He looked at me very hard for a moment and then said, “Nothing. You can go now.” He turned and went back up the stairs.
The next time I saw him he was covered with a bloody sheet. He had taken his life in a detached cottage of an inn at a hot spring on the Izu Peninsula. At the entrance to the room I found myself unable to move. A relative who had come with my father and me to recover the body said to me in an angry voice, “Akira, what are you doing?” What was I doing? I was looking at my dead brother. I was looking at the body of my brother, who had had the same blood as I flowing in his veins, who had made that blood flow out of his body, and whom I esteemed and who for me was irreplaceable. He was dead. What was I doing? Damnation!
“Akira, give me a hand,” my father said very softly. Then, with great effort, he began to wrap my brother’s body in the sheet. The sight of my father puffing and straining touched me deeply, and at last
I was able to step into the room.
When we put my brother’s corpse into the car we had come in from Tokyo, the body let out a deep groan. His legs, folded against his chest, must have pushed the air out through his mouth. The driver of the car began to shudder, but he managed to put the body through the crematorium and turn him to ashes. He drove like a madman all the way back to Tokyo and took a lot of strange side roads.
My stoical mother endured the incident of my brother’s suicide in complete silence without shedding a single tear. Although I knew she did not bear the slightest grudge against me, I couldn’t help feeling accused by her silence. I had to apologize to her for treating my brother’s words so lightly when she had come to me for consultation. But all she said was, “What do you mean, Akira?” The relative who had said “What are you doing?” when I was paralyzed at the sight of my brother’s corpse had not been able to intimidate me, but I could not forgive myself for what I had said to my mother. And how terrible the results had been for my brother. What a fool I am!
Negative and Positive
WHAT IF …? I still wonder sometimes. If my brother had not committed suicide, would he have entered the film world as I have done? He had a great knowledge of films and more than enough talent to understand filmmaking, and he had many appreciative friends in the film world. He was still young, so I’m sure he could have made a name for himself if he had wanted to.
But probably no one could have changed my brother’s mind once it was made up. He was overwhelmed by that first defeat when as a superior student he failed the entrance examination for the First Middle School. At that point he developed a wise but pessimistic philosophy of life that saw all human effort as vanity, a dance upon the grave. When he encountered the hero expounding this philosophy in The Last Line, he probably clung all the more steadfastly to it. Moreover, my brother, so fastidious in all things, was not the sort of person to be wishy-washy about any statement he had once made. He must have seen himself as already sullied by worldly affairs and on his way to becoming the kind of ugly person he despised.
Something Like an Autobiography Page 12