Something Like an Autobiography (32 page)

Immediately afterward I threw myself into work on
Four Love Stories
. This was to be just one of four episodes, and I already had the story worked out in my head, so I scribbled it down in four days. At last I was free to sit down across a table from Uekusa and begin writing
One Wonderful Sunday
.

It had been twenty-five years since “Murasaki” Uekusa and Kurosawa “Shōnagon” had matched writing styles at the same work table. We were both now thirty-seven years old. But as we worked together I came to realize that although we both had changed in outward appearance, inside we remained virtually the same as we had been as children. Sitting face to face day after day, we found that the years vanished like a dream and these early middle-aged men became “Kei-chan” and “Kuro-chan” again. There are few people in this world who change as little as Keinosuke had. I don’t know if it’s the purity of his heart or just plain obstinacy. As weak as he is, he puts on a show of strength; as romantic as he is, he puts on a show of being a realist. He’s always doing things that make one feel uneasy. In sum, ever since primary school he’s been causing me problems.

Ten years before
One Wonderful Sunday
I had been sitting on top of the crane on the open set for
Tōjurō’s Love
. As I was giving directions to the crowd of extras we were filming, suddenly from the middle of the group a hand waved at the camera. One of the basic principles of filmmaking is that the actors must not look at the camera, so I leaped from my perch in a rage to give the fellow what for. When I got close, an odd character with an ill-fitting topknot on his head smiled at me. “Say, Kuro-chan!” I realized then it was Uekusa. Shocked, I asked him what he was doing, and he proudly replied that lately he’d been making lots of money as an extra. I was so busy on this film I didn’t have time for his pranks, so I gave him five yen and told him to go home. He took the money, but didn’t leave, as it turned out. Later he confessed to me that he had put on a masterless samurai’s costume with a deep straw hat to evade my gaze, and he had pocketed not only what I gave him but his full extra’s wages as well. When he told me this, I remembered there had been a strange samurai who persisted in wandering around the set in the wrong places and making trouble for me. Keinosuke remains worrisome.

This fellow Uekusa, perhaps because of the karma from some previous existence, one day suddenly vanishes from before my eyes and another day reappears just as suddenly. And during the periods he is absent from my field of vision he is doing the most amazing things. He took a job as foreman of a crew of gravel-pit laborers. He worked as an extra in the movies. He joined the parade of courtesans in the Yoshi-wara legal-prostitution quarter in Tokyo. And in between these exploits he found time to write superb plays and film scripts.

It may have been that the elusive Uekusa simply got tired of his perennial wanderings, but once he sat down to work on the script for
One Wonderful Sunday
he applied himself with extreme calm and
single-mindedness. His devotion may also have come from the fact that the subject matter of the film—impoverished lovers struggling along in defeated Japan—was perfect material for this man who was always attracted by underdogs and the shadowy side of life. In any event, the material was so well suited to him that our opinions on the script conflicted in very few instances.

But on the climax scene at the end we did have a minor difference. The poor couple are in an empty concert amphitheater and in their minds they hear Schubert’s “Unfinished Symphony.” Naturally, the movie’s sound track should have no music on it for this scene. The girl breaks the rules of filmmaking and turns to the screen audience to address them. “Please, everyone, if you feel sorry for us, please clap your hands. If you clap for us, I’m sure we’ll be able to hear the music.” The audience applauds, and the boy in the film picks up a conductor’s baton. As soon as he starts to wave it, the “Unfinished” comes in on the sound track.

My intention here was to elicit audience participation in the film by addressing them directly. When an audience goes to see a film, they are more or less participating in it anyway, insofar as they become emotionally involved in the film and forget themselves. But this phenomenon takes place within people’s hearts, and it translates into action only to the extent of, for instance, spontaneous applause. What I wanted to do with this scene in
One Wonderful Sunday
was transform the audience into actual participants in the plot, to make them seem to affect the outcome of the film.

In response to my idea, Uekusa offered something else. He wanted to show the concert hall, which is empty at the beginning of the scene, giving forth the sound of applause after the girl makes her appeal. Then the camera would pick out, here and there in the darkness, couples who resemble our protagonists sitting in the amphitheater, and they would be revealed as the source of the applause. This seemed like the sort of device Uekusa would fabricate, and it was not without interest, but I refused to give in on my own plan. My reason was nothing so serious as the claim Uekusa makes that he and I are fundamentally different types of human beings. It was simply that I wanted to use my own idea to conduct a directorial experiment. The experiment proved to be a failure in Japan. The Japanese audience sat stock still, and because they couldn’t bring themselves to applaud, the whole thing was a failure. But in Paris it succeeded. Because the French audience responded with wild applause, the sound of the orchestra tuning up at the tail end of the clapping gave rise to the powerful and unusual emotion I had hoped for.)

There is one more thing about this scene in
One Wonderful Sunday
that I can’t forget. The hero of the story who waves the conductor’s baton for the “Unfinished Symphony” was played by Numasaki Isao, an actor who was remarkably unmusical. There are many varieties of insensitivity to music, but what Numasaki had was an imperviousness to strength or delicacy and softness, to the sharp, heavy or light qualities of sound. Even the film’s musical director, Hattori Tadashi, gave up on Numasaki. But of course we couldn’t leave it at that. Hattori and I took Numasaki, who stood completely stiff and waved his hands up and down like a toy soldier, and worked with him day after day to teach him how to conduct that symphony. Now, I am so lacking in dexterity that people say I look like a chimpanzee when I’m dialing the telephone, yet in the course of teaching Numasaki, Hattori gave me a grade of being “ready to conduct the first movement of Schubert’s “Unfinished Symphony,” so you can imagine how much effort I had to put into this.

The leads in
One Wonderful Sunday
were Numasaki and Nakakita Chieko, both of whom were still unknowns at the time. In order to do city location shooting, all we had to do was disguise the camera; no one recognized the actors’ faces. For these hidden-camera location sequences we put the camera in a box, which was in turn wrapped in a carrying cloth that had only a hole for the lens to poke through. This could then be hand-carried.

One day we planned a location shot in Tokyo’s Shinjuku Station. I set the camera bundle down on the platform and waited for the train to arrive. We were going to film Nakakita stepping off of it. But as I stood there an old man appeared from somewhere and planted himself right in front of the camera. I attempted to nudge him out of the way. But after I bumped him in the side, he frantically thrust his hand into his pocket and pulled out his wallet. He thought I was a pickpocket.

Another time we were filming with the hidden camera on the sidewalks of Shinjuku. But while we aimed at Numasaki and Nakakita walking toward the camera, a streetwalker appeared in front of them and began scratching her behind. The camera, of course, seemed focused on nothing else. There was no way that Numasaki and Nakakita would draw attention away from it. Numasaki wore a baggy suit and a military overcoat, and Nakakita an oversized raincoat and the kind of scarf you might see anywhere, so you certainly couldn’t say they stood out in a crowd. In fact, they blended in so well with the throngs of other couples in the same kind of drab attire that both the cameraman and I lost track of them any number of times. The story called for them to be the kind of young couple you might see anywhere in Japan
at that time, so in that sense they were perfect for the parts. And for that reason they seem to me, as I think about them today, to be like a couple I met by chance right after the war in Shinjuku, talked with and became friends with, rather than protagonists of a movie.

Several days after
One Wonderful Sunday
opened I received a postcard with the following message: “When the film
One Wonderful Sunday
ended, the lights came up in the movie theater. The audience all stood up to leave. But there was one old man who remained in his seat sobbing.…” I read on and found myself almost on the verge of shouting with joy. The old man who was crying turned out to have been Mr. Tachikawa, the primary-school teacher who had favored and educated me and Uekusa. Tachikawa Seiji’s postcard went on:

“When I saw the credit titles at the end that said ‘screenplay: Uekusa Keinosuke; director: Kurosawa Akira,’ the screen became blurry and I couldn’t read the rest very well.”

I called Uekusa right away and we decided to invite Mr. Tachikawa to the Toho studio dormitory for dinner. In times when food supplies were scarce, there we could at least be assured of getting something as nourishing as sukiyaki.

It had been twenty-five years since we had shared a meal with Mr. Tachikawa. We were saddened to see that he had become very small, and his teeth were so weak he couldn’t chew the sukiyaki beef very well. But when I started to get up to order something softer for him, he stopped me. It was enough of a feast for him, he said, just to be able to see our faces. We obeyed, moved by his emotion, and sat down again. As he gazed into our faces, he made little mumbling sounds of approval and nodded his head. And as I gazed back at him, my old teacher’s facial features became indistinct, and soon my blurred eyes couldn’t see him very well.

I WROTE MY
next script with Uekusa also. We stayed at an inn in the seaside hot-spring resort of Atami. From our room we could look out over the bay, and there I saw a strange-looking freighter sunk
offshore. It was a ship made of concrete, the product of Japanese war industries approaching defeat with no iron left for building warships. In the lingering heat of late summer, children used the concrete prow that jutted out of the water as a diving board from which they plunged into the glittering sea. Watching their play, it seemed to me this bay with the sunken concrete ship was a kind of parody of defeated Japan. This depressing image that we gazed at every day while writing the script developed into the sump in
Yoidore tenshi (Drunken Angel
, 1948).

The idea for
Drunken Angel
actually originated in a pre-existing film set. Right after the war Yama-san had made a film called
Shin baka jidai (The New Age of Fools)
, portraying the conditions we lived in during those chaotic times. The company had built a huge open set of a shopping street with a black market for this film, and later they came to me asking if I couldn’t use it to film something, too. Yama-san’s film had been about the black markets that sprang up everywhere like bamboo shoots after a rain in post-war Japan. Included in this phenomenon—and in his film—were the yakuza gangsters who put down roots in the black-market environment. I wanted to pursue these figures even more intensely than Yama-san had—I wanted to take a scalpel and dissect the yakuza.

Exactly what sort of people are they? What is the code of obligation that supports their organization? What is the individual psychological make-up of the gang members, and what is the violence of which they are so proud?

To investigate these questions, I decided to set my film in a black-market district and make the hero a gangster who has charge of that particular territory. In order to bring his personality into high relief, I decided to pit another character against him. At first I thought I would make this antagonist a young humanist doctor who was just setting up his practice in the area. But no matter how hard Uekusa and I worked at it, we couldn’t bring this idealized doctor to life—he was so perfect that he had no vitality. The gangster figure, on the other hand, had become almost real enough to breathe; his every move reeked of flesh and blood. This immediacy arose from the fact that he was based on a real-life model, whom Uekusa was meeting with regularly. Uekusa was, in fact, becoming so immersed in the gangsters’ way of life, so absorbed in and sympathetic toward the underworld, that he and I later quarreled over it.

As background to the characterizations, we decided to create an unsightly drainage pond where people threw their garbage. It became the symbol of the disease that was eating away at the whole neighborhood,
and it grew clearer day by day in our minds. We despaired all the more that our second protagonist, the young physician setting up his practice, remained a lifeless marionette and refused to move of his own accord. Every day Uekusa and I sat glaring at each other, surrounded by piles of crumpled and torn paper with scribbles on it. I was beginning to think we would never find a way out; I was even thinking of scrapping the whole project.