You Think That's Bad

by Jim Shepard

They also liked that Honda had no patience for storylines that dawdled. They’d handed a first attempt at the script to the mystery writer Kayama and what he’d produced was far too tame, involving a nondescript dolphinlike creature that attacked only fishing boats and only to feed its insatiable hunger. Most of the story had involved the poor thing swimming this way and that in search of food.

  Honda had clear-cut Kayama’s script, demanding something terrible enough to evoke both the fire raids on Tokyo and the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He’d served three tours of duty as an infantryman, had been a prisoner of war in China, been repatriated near Hiroshima, and then had wandered the devastation three months after the surrender.

  He thought much like Tsuburaya did: that the director, like a department head, had to include in his leadership the responsibility to protect the artisans under his umbrella. And, of course, to recruit those artisans. And where were they to be found? They had to have the right sensibility toward beauty, sufficient technical training and scientific knowledge, and a strong will, passion, and creative talent.

  Honda claimed he drew his belief in himself from the soil of his life experience. His mother had also died when he was small, and his father soon afterward. He’d been left unable to attend school and had taught himself to read while carrying firewood for his neighbors. He knew that encountering the unfamiliar might involve many errors before a solution was found, and he had an intuition that seemed to draw on an extraordinary visual resourcefulness. When he loved something, he’d exclaim, “Oh, this is spring water!” Again like Tsuburaya, he knew that the craftsman worked with and for his world, but ultimately went his own way, not seeking praise. When Eagles of the Pacific premiered, Honda was on a little lake, fishing. Because the objects themselves were one’s best signature.

  As a young man, Tsuburaya had been struck by how different the Japanese hand was from the big, untrained hands of the other races. Masano had a calligrapher’s hands, long-fingered and tapering, and he’d been seduced by their dexterity and sensitivity when watching her set out her simple gifts for him in the hospital. The daughter of a Kyoto engineering magnate, she was fond of movie stars and thanks to her father’s influence, was touring the studio when the camera crane Tsuburaya had invented collapsed and he crashed to the floor in front of her. The shattered lens shield had slightly cut her forehead but even so she cradled his face and neck while his assistants came running. She later claimed he’d reached up to touch her injury, but he had no memory of that. On the same afternoon she’d appeared in his hospital room, bearing her gifts, and remaining behind after everyone else had left. They’d married a year later, when she was nineteen.

  Their courtship had mostly taken the form of long-distance love notes, in which Tsuburaya found a courage of expression based on longing and the safety of isolation. All of us, he wrote later: when we make a little progress, we’re captivated by our cleverness.

  Their feelings were an act of faith, just as the sublimity of an artisan’s pot was a gift and not a calculation. They gave themselves over to those feelings the way lips kissed the thickness of a tea bowl’s rim.

  They honeymooned in the old Okinawa, which was now gone. Its capital had been a dream city, its narrow streets mossy and hushed, over which dark leaves threw down their shade. Eaves on the ancient red-tiled roofs featured heraldic animals fired from clay.

  But lately it seemed to him that their minds were bound by obsessions that deprived them of freedom. They each put in longer days, he in his innovations and his wife in her grieving. All the rituals that had solidified their happiness now reflected back its opposite. In Masano’s photo albums of her loss, baby girls on their thirty-third day were taken to the shrine in thanksgiving by their grandmothers, who prayed for their welfare. As always, the tinier the tot, the more brilliantly it was dressed. Some photographs of these celebrations were prominently displayed on the family altar. Or, in the event of the child’s death, on the grave.

  Tsuburaya’s experience was that one who was gone was forgotten, day by day. As his grandmother put it, “Destiny’s in heaven, and rice dumplings are on the shelf.”

  But Masano knew spilt water never returned to the tray. And if she forgot, she said, Tsuburaya reminded her by going on with his life. She said that in the face of her unhappiness, he was like a blind man peeping through a fence.

  “I’m sorry for my myopia,” he told her after the Obon had concluded, and after she’d followed some late-night tenderness with despair. He once again had come home nearly at dawn and she’d risen to meet him, backing him across the room with her beautiful hands.

  “I suppose it’s like that old saying that the lighthouse doesn’t shine on its own base,” she’d remarked some hours later, while each still smelled of the other’s touch.

  Before getting fired, Kayama suggested that the comic-book artist Abe should design the creature. Abe had been the illustrator for Kenya Boy, a series about an orphaned Japanese boy who was lost in Africa and continually had to fight off prehistoric monsters. Why Africa was overrun with prehistoric monsters was never explained. Abe produced a month’s worth of designs, each of which was less useful than the previous one. He was finally let go when he put forward a proposal that featured a giant frog’s body and a head shaped like a mushroom cloud. With no time to hire another designer, Honda and Tsuburaya decided to simply hybridize a dinosaur of their own conception. Various illustrations were pulled from libraries and children’s books and mixed and matched on the drafting table. Of course it would have a tyrannosaur’s head, but an Iguanodon’s body seemed an easier fit for a stuntman’s requirements, in terms of operating the suit. And Honda added a stegosaur’s back plates along the spine to ensure their creature would appear distinct from any recorded species.

  During the clay-rendering stage they had his staff experiment with scaly, warty, and alligator skin before settling on the last. And with that decided, one whole unit was turned over to the suit’s construction.

  The first version was framed in cloth-covered wire, over which rubber that had been melted in a steel drum was applied in layers. The result was immobile and weighed three hundred and fifty-five pounds. In the next attempt, the cloth itself was painted with the base coat, so only two layers of rubber were necessary, but the result was still a staggeringly heavy two hundred and twenty pounds. But after a month of further futility, they had to concede that rubber applied any less thickly would crack at the joints, so the second version would have to do.

  To minimize the length of time the poor stuntman would have to spend in the thing, another suit was produced and cut into two sections for shots requiring only part of the monster, waist-up or waist-down. For screen tests of the latter, Nakajima, the stuntman, galumphed around in his heavy suspenders like someone wearing clown pants or waders, his great rubber feet crushing the rough models they’d arranged around the stage.

  They chose Nakajima not only for his height and physical conditioning but also for his dogged determination. To prepare for his role, he’d taken a projector home with him and worn out Tsuburaya’s print of King Kong, and he told anyone who would listen that he’d spent two full weeks of evenings observing bears at the Ueno Zoo.

  Another unit had successfully produced a smaller-scale, hand-operated puppet of the head that could spray a stream of mist from its jaws, for close-ups of the creature’s radioactive breath.

  “So is your monster ready to go?” Masano asked the night before shooting was set to commence, out of the dark, when Tsuburaya had thought she was asleep.

  “I think he is, yes,” Tsuburaya answered, surprising even himself.

  One of the first recitations that he remembered from primary school involved the five terrors, in ascending order: “earthquake, storm, flood, fire, father.” It surprised no one that “father” was judged the most dangerous. As preoccupied as their fathers were, when it came to their sons they still found time for disappointment and punishment. And waiting to see that disappointment coal
esce on his father’s face, during those rare occasions in which Tsuburaya spent time with him: those were some of his unhappiest memories.

  His academic performance was always adequate but his father was particularly unhappy about his refusal to moderate the time he devoted after school to airplane building, and in the event of a harsh report on this from his grandmother, his father gave him the option of having his most recent model-building efforts reduced to kindling or having his hand burned. Like many before him, his father believed in the deterrent effect of burning rolled wormwood fibers on the clenched fist of a misbehaving boy. Once lit, the fibers lifted off from their own convection currents after a moment or two, but even so always left behind a white scar.

  Afterwards his father treated the burn himself, with a cooling paste, and talked about the lessons his own father had taught him. He always began with the maxim that with either good acts or bad, the dust thus amassed would make a mountain. He had other favorites as well. When addressing elders or the opposite sex, the mouth was the entrance to calamity. Hard work in school had its usefulness, because what seemed stupid now might prove useful later. We should love our children with a stick. And it was always better not to say than to say.

  His father reminded him that in the old days a child like Tsuburaya would be made to swallow a small salamander alive as a cure for nervous weakness. One rainy morning in a park, when his father thought he’d been too peevish, he held one up to Tsuburaya’s mouth and said that a childhood classmate of his had reported he could feel it moving about his stomach for some minutes afterward.

  Yet Tsuburaya also remembered him taking them on the hottest days for shaved ice with grape, strawberry, or lemon syrup, the syrup never getting down as far as the red beans at the base of the paper cone. He remembered a delivery in a downpour in which they sat in their wagon watching farmers in a field in the distance, in their raincoats woven from rushes looking like so many porcupines while they squatted to rest. He remembered insect festivals in the evenings when the autumn grasses bloomed and the singing insects they’d gathered in their tiny cages were, at an agreed-upon stroke, all freed, and how they waited—himself, his grandmother, Ichiro, and his father—for that moment when the cicadas would get their bearings, puzzle out their freedom, and let loose their rejoicing in song.

  For the first day of principal photography, the visual-effects team was divided into its three units, one for location photography to shoot the plates for the process and composite shots, one for the lab work, and one for the miniatures. Tsuburaya called Hajime that morning to let him know that he could join the unit. Hajime was so excited, he claimed, that he ran all the way to the studio when the streetcar was late.

  “Why didn’t you take a cab?” Honda asked once he arrived. “You’re sweating on our work,” he added, when Hajime only grinned for an answer.

  Tsuburaya told him that he had three minutes to get the film casings loaded, and the boy disappeared to cool himself off as best he could at the sinks in the washroom before returning with his hair askew and in a borrowed shirt.

  It turned out that before they’d even gotten through a half a day, another stuntman, Tezuka, was needed to spell Nakajima, so exhausting was the part. The suit was stifling in the August heat even without the studio lights, but with them it was a roasting pan. Added to that were the fumes from the burning kerosene rags intended to simulate Tokyo’s fires. Under the searing lights Nakajima was barely able to breathe or see, and could only spend a maximum of fifteen minutes in the suit before being too overcome to continue. Each time he stepped out of it, the supporting technicians drained the legs as if pouring water out of a boot. One measured a cup and a half of sweat from each leg.

  The second half of the first day’s schedule involved the destruction of the National Diet. Tezuka fainted and broke his jaw on the top of the parliament building as he fell, so they were back to Nakajima again. While awaiting his recovery, they repaired the damage to the building.

  Upon Nakajima’s return, everything went off in one shot. While he maneuvered his way down the row of buildings, crew members at Tsuburaya’s signal heaved on the cable that ran up through a pulley in the rafters and worked the tail. When it crashed into the side of the National Diet, another technician detonated the pyrotechnics and plastic and wooden parts rained down on everyone in the studio. Honda said it looked even better through the eyepiece than they might have hoped. And they all felt at once exultation and disquiet. While the men extinguishing the fires sprayed everything down, the fastenings were undone and the top part of the creature was peeled from poor Nakajima’s head and shoulders. While he was given some water it hung before him like a sack.

  Tanaka came by to see the last part of the shot and reported that Mori had taken to calling what they were doing “suitmation.”

  “How’d the boy work out?” he asked Honda, half-teasing.

  “I haven’t heard any complaints,” Honda told him in response. And Hajime pretended to be too absorbed in sealing the rush canisters to have heard what they said.

  Masano was asleep when Tsuburaya was finally dropped off after the first day of shooting, and asleep when he left the next morning. Toward the end of the second day, an assistant informed him during a break that she’d telephoned to let him know that Hajime would be joining them for dinner that night.

  His son was lugging film cans to the processing wagon while Tsuburaya read the note. “You’re dining with us tonight?” he called to him.

  “That’s what I’m told,” Hajime answered.

  They rode home together. It was still bright out and the dining table was flooded with a quiet white light from the paper windows. Masano collected Imari porcelain and had set out for the occasion her most prized bowls and cups.

  Seeming even more grim than usual, she asked how their days had been. Tsuburaya told her his had gone well. Hajime smiled like a guest in someone else’s home, and Akira seemed beside himself with joy at his brother’s unexpected presence, though even he seemed to register the tension. For appetizers there were a number of variations on raw radishes, Hajime’s favorite, including some involving three kinds of flavored salts. Masano had begun believing more and more fiercely in the purifying usefulness of salt.

  There was a silence while they ate, except for Akira smacking his lips. When they finished, Masano cleared the table and served, for dessert, more radishes, pickled and sugared. She asked if they had anything to tell her.

  “Do you have anything to tell your mother?” Tsuburaya asked the older boy.

  Hajime seemed to give it some knit-browed thought. “It’s nice to see you?” he finally offered.

  She sat back with her arms folded and watched them exchange looks. “I’ve tried to give our son some direction; a little instruction,” she finally remarked. “But you know what that’s like. It’s like praying into a horse’s ear.”

  “I’ve taken Hajime on as my camera assistant,” Tsuburaya told her.

  “Yes, I thought that might be the situation,” she answered, and even Akira acknowledged the extent of her anger by hunching his shoulders. “The Personnel Department called, needing information,” she added.

  He’d provided their oldest son with a job, and a good one, Tsuburaya reminded her. That seemed cause for celebration, and not complaint.

  “As you say, I have no cause for complaint,” Masano told him. But something in her shoulders once she’d turned away left him so dismayed that he found he no longer had the heart to argue. They sat facing each other like mirror images of defeat.

  “Thank you for this excellent meal,” Hajime told her.

  “Thank you for coming,” Masano answered. Tsuburaya put his hand atop hers, at the table, and she let him leave it there.

  But she didn’t speak to him again until later that night, when he threw off his covers in the heat. She said then that as a young woman she’d felt anxious about seeming awkward when she tried to express herself. And that until she’d met him, she’d feared it
had something to do with being too self-centered. And that their letters—their feelings—had helped her understand that something else was possible.

  “Remember how thrilled we’d be when we saw my name in the credits?” Tsuburaya asked her.

  “I read some of those letters today,” she told him. In the dark he couldn’t see her face. “They’re such strange things. So full of connection.”

  “Hajime can work for Toho and remain a loving son,” he told her.

  “I need to sleep now,” she explained, after a pause. And after another pause, she did.

  He departed earlier than usual for the studio the next day, and at his driver’s horn-blowing, he raised his head from his work to find his car in a great migration of bicycles ridden by delivery boys, bakery boys, and messenger boys, some of them negotiating astonishing loads: glaziers’ boys balancing great panes of glass, soba boys shouldering pyramids of boxed soups, peddlers’ boys with pickle barrels, all weaving along at high speed. When a toddler in a tram window reached out to touch one, the cyclist veered away down a side street.

  Honda greeted him that morning with Ifukube’s score, which he played for everyone on the upright piano. No surprises there. Ifukube had spent the war composing nationalist marches, and what he’d presented to Honda was a mishmash of some of his favorites. Apparently he hadn’t even looked at the rushes. “Close your eyes and you’re back on the home front,” Tanaka called acidly from the hallway while Honda was playing it.

  That afternoon two full sequences were filmed. After Honda approved the second, he asked if Tsuburaya had come up with anything to conceal the wires for the attacking jets. Tsuburaya showed him on the Moviola the little test he’d conducted, and Honda was stupefied and overjoyed: what had Tsuburaya done? Where had the wires gone? Tsuburaya explained that he’d hung and flown the models upside down, then had inverted the image. The wires were still there, but no one noticed them below the aircraft instead of above. Honda wanted to call some others in and make a fuss about it, but Tsuburaya reminded him that if time and budget were the main walls around the moviemaker, it was his job to help punch through them. “So we can get on to other things,” Honda agreed. And Tsuburaya could imagine Masano’s response, had she heard.