Something Like an Autobiography (10 page)

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.

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.

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.

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.”