Something Like an Autobiography (33 page)

But at some point in the writing of every script I feel like giving the whole thing up. From my many experiences of writing screenplays, however, I have learned something: If I hold fast in the face of this blankness and despair, adopting the tactic of Bodhidharma, the founder of the Zen sect, who glared at the wall that stood in his way until his legs became useless, a path will open up.

On this occasion, too, I made up my mind to endure it. Day after day I sat glaring in my mind’s eye at the puppet-like image of the doctor who refused to grow into a real character. After about five days Uekusa and I had a sudden revelation at just about the same moment. We both remembered a certain doctor. Before we had begun writing we had “script-scouted” as many black-market areas as we could find. In a slum in the port city of Yokohama we had come across an alcoholic doctor. This man fascinated us with his arrogant manner, and we took him with us to three or four bars to listen to his stories while we drank. It seems he operated without a physician’s license, and his patients were the streetwalkers of the slums. His talk about his illegal gynecology practice was so vulgar it nearly made us sick, but every so often he said something bitterly sarcastic about human nature that gleamed with aptness. He also interspersed his talk with peals of loud laughter, and in that raucous wide-open mouth there was a strange feeling of raw humanity. He was probably a rebellious young man ending his days in cynicism, but Uekusa and I remembered, looked at each other and simultaneously felt, “This is it!” Once we had recalled this alcoholic doctor, it seemed altogether strange to us that we hadn’t thought of him sooner.

The marionette-like young doctor who was the picture of humanitarianism was blown to bits. At last the “Drunken Angel” came on stage. The character immediately took on life and breath and began to move. He was a man past his mid-fifties, an alcoholic doctor with his own clinic. Turning his back on fame and fortune, he settled among the common people. As a physician, he went after tangible results with extreme obstinacy, and this stubborn character of his won him popularity. He always had a straggly three-day beard, his hair was always a mess and he would always retort in a dangerously blunt
fashion to those who spoke to him arrogantly, but behind this careless exterior he harbored an honest and superior heart.

Taking this newly formed doctor character, we put him in a clinic on the opposite bank of the garbage sump from the black market. With him living in his clinic and the yakuza controlling the territory across the pond, a superb balance came into play. To make the drama unfold, all we had to do was wait for the two men to come in contact with each other.

Uekusa and I made the gangster and the doctor collide head on in the very first scene of the film. The gangster is injured in a gang war and goes to see the alcoholic doctor to have the bullet removed. As he takes care of the bullet hole, the doctor finds that the gangster also has a hole in his lung, resulting from tuberculosis. It is the tuberculosis germ that proves a binding tie for the two men. From that point on, all that was necessary to set the drama in motion was for the two of them to disagree and oppose each other on what should be done about it, and tuberculosis would act as pivot. Once things got rolling on the script with this structure, we finished it in virtually one sitting.

Our speed at writing does not necessarily mean everything went perfectly smoothly between Uekusa and me, however. I’m not sure what the cause was. Perhaps it was that Uekusa, in the course of associating with our gangster role-model in order to study him, became too deeply involved with him. Perhaps he was simply overcome by his natural feeling of sympathy for the weak, the wounded and those who live in the shadows of life. In any event, he began to object to my attitude of opposition to the yakuza system.

Uekusa’s dissatisfactions hinged on the argument that the failures and perversions in the yakuza personality were not the sole responsibility of the individual. This may well be true. But even if the society that gave birth to them must assume a part, or even the greater share, of the responsibility for the existence of yakuza, I still can’t approve of their behavior. In the very same human society that gave birth to such evil, there are also good people who are living honest, decent lives. I can’t excuse those who make their living by threatening and destroying the lives of these good people. Nor do I accept the criticism that opposition to people like yakuza is merely the egoism of someone speaking from a position of strength. Granting that there is some truth to the theory that defects in society give rise to the emergence of criminals, I still maintain that those who use this theory as a defense of criminality are overlooking the fact that there are many people in this defective society who survive without resorting to crime. The argument to the contrary is pure sophistry.

Uekusa claims that he and I are fundamentally different in character, but I think we are fundamentally the same. It is only on the surface that we differ. He says I have never known regret, desperation or defeat; that I was born strong. He describes himself as someone who was born weak, who has always lived in the vale of tears with pain, moaning and bitterness in his heart. But this viewpoint I find shallow. In order to combat the pain that life brings, I wear the mask of a strong person, while Uekusa, in order to indulge in the pain that life brings, wears the mask of a weak person. He is only wearing a mask. But this is what happens on the surface; superficially we differ, but underneath we are essentially the same type of weak person.

The reason I have brought up these personal differences between Uekusa and me here is not because I am trying to attack him. Nor is it because I am trying to defend myself. It is simply that I felt this was an opportunity to make myself understood. I am not a special person. I am not especially strong; I am not especially gifted. I simply do not like to show my weakness, and I hate to lose, so I am a person who tries hard. That’s all there is to me.

After we finished writing
Drunken Angel
, Uekusa disappeared again. But our separation at this point was not caused by that terrible gap, that unbridgeable gulf that Uekusa claims he found between our fundamental natures. Nothing so serious as that. That’s only his excuse. What in fact occurred was that he became restless and took up his strange old habit of wandering once again.

Proof that our fundamental differences are not differences at all lies in the fact that when I was gathering reference material to write this thing resembling an autobiography, Uekusa came and spent an evening talking to me with visible enjoyment. He enjoyed it so much, in fact, that he came back to talk again, forgot the time and ended up spending the night. In other words, Uekusa and I are just very good friends from our days of battling on stilts: we are fighting friends.

IT’S NOT POSSIBLE
for me to talk about
Drunken Angel
, which was released in 1948, without devoting some attention to the actor Mifune Toshiro. In June of 1946, in order to get into the spirit of postwar
activity, Toho conducted open auditions to recruit new contract actors. Using the headline “Wanted: New Faces,” they got a tremendous number of applicants.

On the day of the interviews and screen tests I was in the middle of the shooting of
No Regrets for Our Youth
, so I couldn’t participate in the judging. But during lunch break I stepped off the set and was immediately accosted by actress Takamine Hideko, who had been the star of Yamamoto Kajirō’s
Horses
when I was chief assistant director. “There’s one who’s really fantastic. But he’s something of a roughneck, so he just barely passed. Won’t you come have a look?” I bolted my lunch and went to the studio where the tests were being given. I opened the door and stopped dead in amazement.

A young man was reeling around the room in a violent frenzy. It was as frightening as watching a wounded or trapped savage beast trying to break loose. I stood transfixed. But it turned out that this young man was not really in a rage, but had drawn “anger” as the emotion he had to express in his screen test. He was acting. When he finished his performance, he regained his chair with an exhausted demeanor, flopped down and began to glare menacingly at the judges. Now, I knew very well that this kind of behavior was a cover for shyness, but the jury seemed to be interpreting it as disrespect.

I found this young man strangely attractive, and concern over the judges’ decision began to distract me from my work. I returned to my set and wrapped up the shooting early. Then I proceeded to look in on the room where the jury were deliberating. Despite Yama-san’s strong recommendation of the young man, the voting was against him. Suddenly I heard myself shouting, “Please wait a minute.”

The jury was made up of two groups: movie-industry specialists (directors, cinematographers, producers and actors) and representatives of the labor union. The two groups were equally represented. At that time the union was gaining in strength daily, and union representatives appeared wherever something was happening. Because of them, all decisions had to be made by voting, but I felt that for them to voice their opinions on the selection of actors was really going too far. Even the expression “going too far” doesn’t do justice to the suppressed anger boiling in me. I called for a time out.

I said that in order to judge the quality of an actor and predict his future capacities you need the talents and experience of an expert. In the selection of an actor it isn’t right to equate the vote of an expert and the vote of a complete outsider. It’s like appraising a gemstone—you wouldn’t give a greengrocer’s appraisal the same weight you would a jeweler’s. In evaluating an actor, an expert’s vote should have
at least three if not five times the weight of an amateur’s. I emphasized that I wanted a recount of the votes with more appropriate weight assigned to the experts’ opinions.

The jury was thrown into an uproar. “It’s anti-democratic, it’s monopoly by directors!” someone shouted. But all of the production people on the jury raised their hands in approval of my suggestion, and even some labor-union representatives nodded their assent. Finally Yama-san, who was head of the jury, said that as a movie director he would take responsibility for his opinion of the quality and potential of the young actor in question. With Yama-san’s pronouncement the young man squeaked through. He was, of course, Mifune Toshiro.

After joining the company, Mifune appeared in Sen-chan’s
To the End of the Silver Mountains
as the roughest and most violent of the three bank robbers who were the villains of the story. He played with amazing energy. Right after that he had the role of a gangster boss in Yama-san’s
New Age of Fools
, and here he played with an opposite kind of cruel refinement. I became deeply fascinated by the acting abilities Mifune showed in these two films, and decided I wanted him to play the lead in
Drunken Angel
. I realize that many people think I discovered Mifune and taught him how to act. That is not the case. As can be seen from the sequence of events I have just described, it was Yama-san who discovered the raw material that was Mifune Toshiro. From that raw material it was Sen-chan and Yama-san who fashioned the actor Mifune Toshiro. All I did was see what they had done, take Mifune’s acting talent and show it off to its fullest in
Drunken Angel
.

Mifune had a kind of talent I had never encountered before in the Japanese film world. It was, above all, the speed with which he expressed himself that was astounding. The ordinary Japanese actor might need ten feet of film to get across an impression; Mifune needed only three feet. The speed of his movements was such that he said in a single action what took ordinary actors three separate movements to express. He put forth everything directly and boldly, and his sense of timing was the keenest I had ever seen in a Japanese actor. And yet with all his quickness he also had surprisingly fine sensibilities.

I know it sounds as if I am overpraising Mifune, but everything I am saying is true. If pressed to find a defect in him as an actor, I could say his voice is a little rough, and when it’s recorded through a microphone it has a tendency to become difficult to understand. Anyway, I’m a person who is rarely impressed by actors, but in the case of Mifune I was completely overwhelmed.

And yet a film director can rejoice over a marvelous asset only to
have it turn into a terrible burden. If I let Mifune in his role of the gangster become too attractive, the balance with his adversary, the doctor, played by Shimura Takashi, would be destroyed. If this should occur, the result would be a distortion of the film’s overall structure. Yet to suppress Mifune’s attractiveness at the blossoming point of his career because of the need for balance in the structure of my film would be a waste. And in fact Mifune’s attraction was something his innate and powerful personal qualities pushed unwittingly to the fore; there was no way to prevent him from emerging as too attractive on the screen other than keeping him off the screen. I was caught in a real dilemma. Mifune’s attractiveness gave me joy and pain at the same time.