Something Like an Autobiography (3 page)

The dimly lit place where I sat in a tub lodged between two boards was the room that served as both kitchen and bath in the house where my father was born. My mother had been about to give me a bath, but first she put me in the tub of hot water and went into the next room to take off her kimono. Suddenly she heard me start wailing at the top of my lungs. She rushed back and found me spilled out of the tub on the floor crying. The painfully bright, shiny thing over head, my mother explained, was probably a hanging oil lamp of the type still used when I was a baby.

This incident with the washtub is my very first memory of myself. Naturally, I do not recall being born. However, my oldest sister, now deceased, used to say, “You were a strange baby.” Apparently I emerged from my mother’s womb without uttering a sound, but with my hands firmly clasped together. When at last they were able to pry my hands apart, I had bruises on both palms.

I think this story may be a lie. It was probably made up to tease me because I was the youngest child. After all, if I really had been born such a grasping person, by now I would be a millionaire and surely would be riding around in nothing less than a Rolls-Royce.

After the washtub incident of my first year, I can now recall only a few other events from my babyhood, in a form resembling out-of-focus bits of film footage. All of them are things seen from my infant’s vantage point on my nurse’s shoulders.

One of them is something seen through a wire net. People dressed in white flail at a ball with a stick, run after it as it dances and flies through the air, and pick it up and throw it around. Later I understood that this was the view from behind the net of the baseball field at the gymnastics school where my father was a teacher. So I must say that my liking for baseball today is deep-rooted; apparently I’ve been watching it since babyhood.

Another memory from babyhood, also a sight viewed from my nurse’s back, comes to mind: a fire seen from a great distance. Between us and the fire stretches an expanse of dark water. My home was in the Ōmori district of Tokyo, so this was probably the Ōmori shore of Tokyo Bay, and since the fire appeared very far away, it must have taken place somewhere near Haneda (now the site of one of Tokyo’s international airports). I was frightened by this distant fire and cried. Even now I have a strong dislike of fires, and especially when I see the night sky reddened with flames I am overcome by fear.

One last memory of babyhood remains. In this case, too, I am on my nurse’s back, and from time to time we enter a small, dark room. Years later I would occasionally recall this frequent occurrence and wonder what it was. Then one day all at once, like Sherlock Holmes solving a mystery, I understood: my nurse, with me still on her back, was going to the toilet. What an insult!

Many years later my nurse came to see me. She looked up at this person who had reached nearly six feet and more than 150 pounds and just said, “My dear, how you’ve grown,” as she clasped me around the knees and broke into tears. I had been ready to reproach her for the indignities she had caused me to suffer in the past, but suddenly I was moved by this figure of an old woman I no longer recognized, and all I could do was stare vacantly down at her.

For some reason, my recollections of the years between the time I learned to walk and my entrance into nursery school are less distinct than those of my babyhood. There is only one scene I recall, but I remember it in vivid colors.

The location is a streetcar crossing. On the other side of the tracks and closed railway crossing gate are my father, mother and siblings. I stand alone on this side. Between my side and my family’s a white dog scampers back and forth across the tracks, wagging his tail. Then, after he has repeated this action several times and is just heading back in my direction, the train suddenly hurtles past. Right before my eyes the white dog tumbles down, split neatly in half. The body of the instantly killed beast was round and bright red, like a tuna sliced crossways for sashimi.

I have no recollection at all of anything subsequent to this awful spectacle. It probably threw me into such a shock that I lost consciousness. But later I have a vague memory of a great number of white dogs in succession being brought before me, carried in baskets, held in people’s arms, led on leashes. It seems that my father and mother were searching for a dog like the one that had been killed to give to me. According to my older sisters, I showed no gratitude for their efforts. On the contrary, whenever I was shown a white dog I would fly into a mad rage, crying and screaming, “No! No!”

Wouldn’t it have been better to bring me a black dog, perhaps, instead of a white one? Didn’t the white ones simply remind me of what had happened? In any event, for more than thirty years after this incident I was unable to eat sashimi or sushi made of fish with red flesh.

The clarity of my memory seems to improve in direct proportion to the intensity of shock I underwent. My next recollection is also a bloody one—a scene in which my brother is carried home with his head wrapped in blood-soaked bandages. He was four years older than I and, since I was not yet in school, he must have been in first or second grade. He had fallen from a high balance beam at the gymnastics school when he walked out on it and was blown off by the wind. He had come within a hairbreadth of losing his life. When the youngest of my older sisters saw him in his bloodied condition, I clearly recall her suddenly bursting out, “Let me die in his place!” It seems I come from a line that is overly emotional and deficient in reason. People have often praised us as sensitive and generous, but we appear to me to have a measure of sentimentality and absurdity in our blood.

It is a fact that I was enrolled in the nursery school attached to the Morimura Gakuen school, but I barely remember anything of what I did there. Just one thing I recall: we had to make a vegetable garden, and I planted peanuts. I think I did this because, having a weak digestive system at that age, I was never allowed to eat more than a few peanuts at a time. My plan was to grow a lot of my own. But I don’t remember reaping much of a peanut harvest.

I think it was around this time that I saw my first movie or “motion picture.” From our house in Ōmori we’d walk to Tachiaigawa Station, take the train that went toward Shinagawa and get off at a station called Aomono Yokocho, where there was a movie theater. On the balcony in the very center was one section that was carpeted, and here the whole family sat on the floor Japanese style to watch the show.

I don’t remember exactly what it was that I saw when I was in nursery school and what I saw in primary school. I just remember that there was a kind of slapstick comedy I found very interesting. And I remember a scene in which a man who has escaped from prison scales a tall building. He comes out onto the roof and jumps off into a dark canal below. This may have been the French crime-adventure film
Zigomar
, directed by Victorin Jasset and first released in Japan in November 1911.

Another scene I recall shows a boy and girl who have become friends on a ship. The ship is on the verge of sinking, and the boy is about to step into an already overfull lifeboat when he sees the girl still on the ship. He gives her his place in the lifeboat and stays behind on the ship, waving goodbye. This was apparently a film adaptation of the Italian novel
Il Cuore (The Heart)
.

But I much preferred comedy. One day when we went to the theater, they weren’t showing a comedy, and I cried and fretted about it. I remember my older sisters telling me I was being so stupid and disobedient that a policeman was coming to take me away. I was terrified.

However, my contact with the movies at this age has, I feel, no relation to my later becoming a film director. I simply enjoyed the varied and pleasant stimulation added to ordinary everyday life by watching the motion-picture screen. I relished laughing, getting scared, feeling sad and being moved to tears.

Looking back and reflecting on it, I think my father’s attitude toward films reinforced my own inclinations and encouraged me to become what I am today. He was a strict man of military background, but at a time when the idea of watching movies was hardly well received in educators’ circles, he took his whole family to the movies regularly. Later in more reactionary times he steadfastly maintained his conviction that going to the movies has an educational value; he never changed.

Another aspect of my father’s thinking that had an important effect on me was his attitude toward sports. After he left the army academy, he took a position at a gymnastics school, where he set up facilities not
only for traditional Japanese martial arts such as judo and kendō swordfighting, but for all kinds of athletics. He built Japan’s first swimming pool, and he worked to make baseball popular. He persevered in the promotion of all sports, and his ideas have stayed with me. When I was small, it seems that I was very weak and sickly. My father used to complain about this state of affairs in spite of the fact that “we had the yokozuna [champion sumo wrestler] Umegatani hold you in his arms when you were a baby so that you would grow strong.” Nevertheless, I am my father’s son. I, too, like both watching and participating in sports, and I approach sports in terms of single-minded devotion to a discipline. This is clearly my father’s influence.

SOMETHING STRANGE
happened one day after I had already become a film director. The Nichigeki Theater in Tokyo was showing a film by my contemporary Inagaki Hiroshi,
Wasurerareta kora
(
Forgotten Children
, 1949), which is about retarded children. In one scene a classroom full of children listens to the teacher while off to one side a solitary child sits at his desk amusing himself, oblivious of the others.

As I watched this scene, I gradually came to feel deeply moved and depressed. Soon I was very uneasy. I had seen that child somewhere. Who could it be?

Suddenly I rose from my seat in the theater and went out into the lobby, where I sat down heavily on a sofa. Feeling somehow faint, I stretched out and put my head down. A woman theater employee came up to me and asked if I was all right. I replied, “Oh, yes, it’s nothing,” and tried to stand up, but it made me dangerously queasy. Finally I had to ask her to call a taxi to take me home.

But what was it that made me so ill on that occasion? The answer is my own memory. Seeing
Wasurerareta kora
, I recalled a bad feeling—a feeling I did not really want to remember.

When I was in my first year at the primary school of Morimura Gakuen, for me school might as well have been called jail. As I sat quietly in my chair in the classroom with my head full of bitterly
painful thoughts, my only activity was to stare through the glass doors at the household servant who accompanied me to school. His worry evident, he would pace up and down the corridor outside.

I don’t like to think I was a retarded child, but it is a fact that I was slow. Because I understood nothing of what the teacher was saying, I just did whatever I wished to amuse myself. Finally my desk and chair were moved away from those of the other children, and I ended up getting special treatment.

As the teacher gave his lessons, he would look over at me from time to time and say, “Akira probably won’t understand this, but …” or “This will be impossible for Akira to solve, but …” The other children would turn to look at me and snicker when he did this, but no matter how bitter I felt, he was right. Whatever the subject, it was completely incomprehensible to me. I was pained and saddened.

During morning exercises, when told to stand at attention, I would inevitably fall down in a faint. For some reason, when I heard the command “Attention!” I would not only assume a stiff posture, but also hold my breath. Later I would find myself lying on a bed in the school medical office being peered at by the nurse.

I recall an athletic incident. It was a rainy day, so we were in the gymnasium playing dodge-ball. When the ball was thrown to me, I was unable to catch it. This must have been amusing to the others. The ball kept flying in my direction and hitting me. Sometimes it hurt, and since it was not amusing to me, I picked up the ball that hit me and threw it outside into the rain. “What are you doing?” the teacher shouted angrily at me. Now, of course, I understand perfectly well why he should have been annoyed, but at the time I could see nothing wrong about getting rid of this ball that tormented me.

So, for my first two years of primary school, life was a hellish punishment. It’s a terrible thing to make retarded children go to school simply because some rule says they should. Children come in many varieties. Some five-year-olds have the intelligence of a child of seven, and, conversely, there are seven-year-olds who have not surpassed the average child of five. Intelligence develops at differing rates. It’s a mistake to decree that a year’s progress must take place within exactly one year, no more and no less.

It seems I’m getting carried away. But when I was about seven, I was so isolated and school life was so miserable for me that it left a mark, and I have unconsciously slipped into writing from the viewpoint of such a child.