Something Like an Autobiography (15 page)

AS I FINISH
my stories about Akita Prefecture, there is one person I must write about. This person is my father’s older sister, who married into the Togashi family in the town of Omagari in Akita. This Togashi household were descendants of the border captain Togashi, who has Benkei read the subscription list in the famous Kabuki play
Kanjinchō
, upon which I based my 1945 film
The Men Who Tread on the Tiger’s Tail
.

The Togashi estate did not occupy a very big piece of land, but the house was an exceptionally large one and surrounded by a moat. Carved wooden sumo wrestlers supported the ridgepole, supposedly the work of the legendary early modern architect-sculptor Hidari Jingoro. Of course, any wood sculpture that looks like anything at all is attributed to Hidari Jingoro, so I can’t tell if these wrestlers were really his work or not. There is also supposed to be a short sword in the Togashi household that is the work of the master swordmaker of the thirteenth century, Okazaki Masamune, but I have not yet seen it. In any event, you could judge the social standing of the household by looking at the construction of the house. For me it was much more a case of sensing the social standing of the household by observing my aunt’s behavior.

My Aunt Togashi had a truly awe-inspiring presence, a majesty powerful enough to wither those around her. But she was affectionate toward me, and I in turn had a special liking for her. When she came to visit my father in Tokyo, he behaved with extreme courtesy. And we would often have eel for dinner. This dish was terribly expensive at
the time, so we hardly ever ate it. But my aunt always left half of her portion neatly untouched. Then, calling “Akira,” she gave it to me.

Whenever she went visiting, I accompanied her. She was at that time already very advanced in age, and she wore her white hair cut short around a face that still showed teeth blackened in the traditional way for married women of the feudal era. She looked something like one of the magical little old men of the Noh drama. When we went out, she wore a kimono overcoat and put her hands inside her sleeves as she walked. I don’t mean she had her arms folded together inside her sleeves in some lazy or sneaky fashion, but rather that she grasped the ends of the sleeves with her hands from the inside, and she pulled the sleeves out straight to the side as she walked. So she looked something like a chicken or a heron spreading its wings to take off in flight. Passers-by would always stare at her in surprise. I felt a little embarrassed as I accompanied her, but it was a special kind of feeling.

My aunt never talked while we walked along. But when we arrived at the house where she was going visiting, she would turn to me and hand me a fifty-sen piece wrapped in paper and say, “Saraba,” a northern dialect word for “goodbye.” At that time fifty sen was a huge amount of money for a child. But it wasn’t for the money that I enjoyed escorting my aunt. It was because that word “saraba” had a charm that sent shivers down my spine. In my aunt’s way of saying it there was a great store of implicit warmth and kindness.

Aunt Togashi should have lived, judging by her general physical condition, to be about a hundred and ten years old. But a stupid doctor had a theory about extending her life span even longer by making her eat strange things like pine wood and tree roots. Because of this she died without even reaching the age of ninety.

When she was on her deathbed, I went a little in advance of my father to be his representative in case she died before he got there. My aunt lay quietly as I sat near her pillow, and then she said to me, “Akira? Pain. Your father?” I explained that my father had been slightly detained and had sent me ahead, but that he was on his way. I left the room. But she called me back again and again to say, “Akira, has he come yet?” Finally my father arrived from Tokyo, and I was already on my way back. A few days later my aunt died.

For my part, I cannot forgive that doctor who made her eat those strange things. I’d like to stuff his mouth with pine needles.

ORDINARILY
, children are supposed to spend their childhood like saplings sheltered in a greenhouse. Even if on occasion some wind or rain of the real world slips in through the cracks, a child is not supposed to be weatherbeaten in earnest by the sleet and snow. I, too, spent such a sheltered childhood, and the only time I really experienced the wind of life was in the Great Kanto Earthquake. Events like the First World War and the Russian revolution and the transitions and upheavals in Japanese society during those years were things I only heard about, like the wind and rain outside my greenhouse. When I graduated from middle school, it was as if I had been planted outdoors for the first time. I began to feel the wind and rain of world events on my own skin.

In 1925, when I was in my fourth year at middle school, the first radio broadcasts in Japan began. Even if I didn’t want to hear about what was going on in society, I could not avoid it. As I mentioned earlier, this was about the time that military education was instituted in the schools, and the world became somehow hurried and cold. As I look back on my early years now, it seems the summer I spent in Akita was the last carefree time of my childhood.

But such observations may be pure sentimentality on my part. In my fourth and fifth years of middle school, when I was about sixteen, I was still fumbling around with a crystal radio set. On Sundays I would borrow my father’s pass (why he had this I don’t really know) and go to the Meguro racetrack, where I would spend the whole day looking at the horses I had loved from childhood. And my parents bought me a set of oil paints so I could go to the outskirts of Tokyo and paint the scenes of rural life I saw there. I had a pretty good time.

During these years my family moved from Koishikawa to Meguro, and from there to Ebisu, near Shibuya. Still in Tokyo, of course. Each time we moved, it was to a smaller, less well-built house. I did not understand that this meant my family’s economic situation was getting worse and worse. I still insisted that upon my graduation from middle school I intended to become a painter.

At that point I was forced to think about how I would actually
make a living in my chosen profession. My father, who had always loved calligraphy, was not without sympathy for my goals—he did not oppose me. But, as any parent in those days would have done, he said I would have to go to art school. As a lover of Cézanne and Van Gogh, I felt that such an academic approach would be a waste of time. Nor was I eager to take another entrance examination. Even though I felt that I had the ability to pass the practical painting test, I was rightly not confident of my command of academic course material. I took the entrance exam and failed.

Although it was a bitter thing to have to disappoint my father, I was thus enabled to pursue my studies freely, and I was sure there would be some other way to console him. The year after I finished middle school, at the age of eighteen, I had a painting accepted for the prestigious national Nitten exhibition. My father was happy. But after that I set out on a winding path beset by wind and snow.

THE YEAR
I turned eighteen, 1928, saw the mass arrest of Communist Party members in the “3–15 Incident” and the assassination of the Manchurian warlord Chang Tso-lin by Japanese Army officers. The following year brought the worldwide economic panic. As the winds of the Great Depression blew across a Japan shaken to the very foundations of her economy, proletarian movements sprang up everywhere, including the field of fine art. At the other extreme was an art movement that advocated escape from the painful realities of the hard times, something that was called, in a sort of pidgin, “eroguro nan-sensu” (“erotic-grotesque nonsense”).

In the midst of all this social upheaval it was impossible for me to sit quietly in front of my canvas. On top of that, the cost of canvas and painting supplies was so high that, considering the financial situation of my family, I could hardly ask them to buy me a full supply. Unable to throw myself completely into painting, I explored literature, theater, music and film.

Around that time there was a boom in the printing of “yen books,” so-called because each cost one yen, and the market was flooded with
collections of both Japanese literature and translations of foreign works. If you went to secondhand bookstores, you could find these books remaindered for fifty sen, sometimes even thirty sen, so even I could buy as many as I wanted. For someone like me who had no need to spend time in academic pursuits, there was more than enough time to spend in random reading. I read classics and contemporary, foreign and Japanese literature without discrimination. I read under the covers in bed at night, I read as I walked along the street.

I went to the theater to see Shinkokugeki, the “New National Drama” developed to take the place of Meiji-era Kabuki. It was with the greatest wonder in my eyes that I watched the performances at the playwright-director Osanai Kaoru’s Tsukiji Little Theater, the center of revolution in the theater.

A friend of mine who liked music had a phonograph and a record collection. At his house I listened mainly to classical recordings. I also went often to listen to composer-conductor Konoe Hidemaro’s New Symphony Orchestra rehearsals.

Naturally, as an aspiring painter, I went to see every kind of painting I could, both Japanese and Western. At that time art books and printed monographs on painters were not very common, but I bought what I could afford of what was available. What I couldn’t afford, I imprinted on my brain by looking at it over and over again in a bookstore. Most of the art books I bought at this time were lost along with all my other books in the air raids on Tokyo in the Pacific War. But a few of them are still in my possession. Their spines are broken and frayed, their covers and pages mixed up, and they are covered with fingerprints—some of them obviously made by paint-smeared fingers. And when I look at these books now, the same emotions I felt when I first studied them come rushing back.

I became fascinated by motion pictures, too. My older brother, who had left home and was moving from boardinghouse to boardinghouse, was addicted to Russian literature. But at the same time he wrote under various pen names for film programs. He wrote in particular about the art of the foreign cinema, which was much promoted following the First World War.

In matters of both film and literature I owe much to my brother’s discernment. I took special care to see every film my brother recommended. As far back as elementary school I walked all the way to Asakusa to see a movie he had said was good. I don’t remember what it was that I saw in Asakusa, but I do remember that it was at the Opera Theater. I remember waiting in line for discount tickets for the
late show, and I remember my brother getting a terrific scolding from my father when we got home.

I have tried making a list of the films that impressed me at that time, and the list runs to nearly a hundred titles.
^*

Even I am surprised at the number of films I saw during this time that have survived in the annals of cinema history. And I owe this to my brother.