Something Like an Autobiography (37 page)

This was the impetus for
Skyandaru (Scandal
, 1950). Of course,
today all my fears have come true, and no one thinks anything of scandal sheets. In other words,
Scandal
proved to be as ineffectual a weapon against slander as a praying mantis against a hatchet. But I have not given up. I am still waiting for the day when someone emerges who is willing to take on this verbal gangsterism for a fight to the finish. In fact, I think I’d like to make another movie dealing with the subject.
Scandal
did not prove strong enough; I’d like to make a more powerful film.

The more I think about it, the milder a statement
Scandal
seems to have been. On top of that, while I was writing the script an entirely unexpected character began to take on more life than the main characters, and I ended up being led around by the nose by him. This fellow was the corrupt lawyer Hiruta (“Leech Field”). He comes to the defendants to sell out his client, the plaintiff, who is sincerely attempting to battle the verbal gangsters in court. From this point on, the film went in a direction I had not intended and turned into something quite different.

Characters in a film have their own existence. The filmmaker has no freedom. If he insists on his authority and is allowed to manipulate his characters like puppets, the film loses its vitality. From the moment this Hiruta appeared, the pen I was using to write the screenplay seemed almost bewitched. It wrote on, detailing Hiruta’s actions and words as if of its own accord. I had written many scripts, but this was the first time such a thing happened to me. I didn’t think about the circumstances in which Hiruta lived; the pen just glided on and described his poverty and shame. As this happened, the character of Hiruta quite naturally took over the film and nudged the hero aside. Even as I observed what was happening and knew it was wrong, I could do nothing to stop it.

About half a year after the release of
Scandal
I was on my way home from a movie theater in Shibuya, riding the Inokashira Line. Suddenly I had to keep myself from shouting out loud. As the train passed the first station outside of Shibuya, I had a flash of recollection: I had met this man Hiruta in real life. I had sat next to him while drinking in a little bar called the Komagata-ya right there at that railroad crossing in Kami-Izumi. It was an astounding thing to recall, and I couldn’t understand why it hadn’t come to me while I was working on
Scandal
. The human mind does strange things. This real-life Hiruta must have been hiding somewhere in a crease in my brain. Why had he chosen this moment to emerge?

I had gone to the Komagata-ya regularly when I was an assistant director. There was a pretty barmaid there named O-Shigechan, and
she understood us very well, won our affection and let us drink on credit. I used to go there with all the other assistant directors.

For some reason I had gone to the Komagata-ya alone one evening. We usually went upstairs to a dirty but comfortable room on the second floor, but to drink alone I sat down at the bar on the ground floor. It was on this occasion that Hiruta was sitting next to me. He was already quite drunk, and he persisted in talking to me. The bartender, O-Shigechan’s father, tried to keep the man from bothering me, but I nodded my head to let him know I didn’t mind. I drank on while listening to the stream of babble.

Behind the man’s appearance—he was approaching fifty—as well as in his manner of speaking there seemed to be something very bitter, something that tugged at the heart as he talked. He didn’t just ramble senselessly like an ordinary drunk. I wondered how many times he had repeated his story before he told it to me. He talked as if he had memorized his speech, and recited it fluently and casually. But in that casual air the sad content of his talk was all the more striking.

The subject of his refrain was his daughter. She was suffering from tuberculosis and was completely bedridden, and he repeated over and over again what a wonderful girl she was. She was “like an angel,” “like a shining star,” descriptions that under ordinary circumstances would sound sickeningly sweet. But I was strangely moved, and listened to him with an open heart.

He went on to say that, compared to his daughter, he himself was a totally worthless human being. He started to list the ways, giving examples, in which he had proved inferior to his daughter, but at this point O-Shigechan’s father seemed to have had all he could take. He put a covered glass dish in front of the man and said, “All right, that’s enough now. You’d better go home; your daughter’s waiting for you.” The man suddenly fell silent and sat staring at the glass dish. He didn’t move. Inside the covered dish was something that looked like the sort of food that would be given to someone with a high fever. Suddenly he stood up, grabbed the dish, tucked it carefully under his arm and rushed out the door.

O-Shigechan’s father apologized to me as I gazed at the door through which the man had disappeared. “He’s a problem. He comes in here every day and repeats those same things while he drinks the evening away.” I wondered what the man who had just rushed out said to his daughter when he came home every night. As I thought about what must be in his heart, I felt pain well up in my own.

That evening I drank and drank, but was unable to feel any release. I was sure I would never forget this man and his story. I did,
completely. But when I was writing the
Scandal
screenplay, his memory emerged unconsciously from my brain and made my pen dance on with peculiar strength. The character of Hiruta was written by that man I met in the Komagata-ya bar. He was not written by me.

DURING THAT TIME
the gate was growing larger and larger in my mind’s eye. I was location-scouting in the ancient capital of Kyoto for
Rashōmon
, my eleventh-century period film. The Daiei management was not very happy with the project. They said the content was difficult and the title had no appeal. They were reluctant to let the shooting begin. Day by day, as I waited, I walked around Kyoto and the still more ancient capital of Nara a few miles away, studying the classical architecture. The more I saw, the larger the image of the Rashōmon gate became in my mind.

At first I thought my gate should be about the size of the entrance gate to Toji Temple in Kyoto. Then it became as large as the Tengaimon gate in Nara, and finally as big as the main two-story gates of the Ninnaji and Todaiji temples in Nara. This image enlargement occurred not just because I had the opportunity to see real gates dating from that period, but because of what I was learning, from documents and relics, about the long-since-destroyed Rashōmon gate itself.

“Rashōmon” actually refers to the Rajomon gate; the name was changed in a Noh play written by Kanze Nobumitsu. “Rajo” indicates the outer precincts of the castle, so “Rajomon” means the main gate to the castle’s outer grounds. The gate for my film
Rashōmon
was the main gate to the outer precincts of the ancient capital—Kyoto was at that time called “Heian-Kyo.” If one entered the capital through the Rajomon gate and continued due north along the main thoroughfare of the metropolis, one came to the Shujakumon gate at the end of it, and the Toji and Saiji temples to the east and west, respectively. Considering this city plan, it would have been strange had the outer main gate not been the biggest gate of all. There is tangible evidence that it
in fact was: The blue roof tiles that survive from the original Rajomon gate show that it was large. But, no matter how much research we did, we couldn’t discover the actual dimensions of the vanished structure.

As a result, we had to construct the
Rashōmon
gate to the city based on what we could learn from looking at extant temple gates, knowing that the original was probably different. What we built as a set was gigantic. It was so immense that a complete roof would have buckled the support pillars. Using the artistic device of dilapidation as an excuse, we constructed only half a roof and were able to get away with our measurements. To be historically accurate, the imperial palace and the Shujakumon gate should have been visible looking north through our gate. But on the Daiei back lot such distances were out of the question, and even if we had been able to find the space, the budget would have made it impossible. We made do with a cut-out mountain to be seen through the gate. Even so, what we built was extraordinarily large for an open set.

When I took this project to Daiei, I told them the only sets I would need were the gate and the tribunal courtyard wall where all the survivors, participants and witnesses of the rape and murder that form the story of the film are questioned. Everything else, I promised them, would be shot on location. Based on this low-budget set estimate, Daiei happily took on the project.

Later Kawaguchi Matsutaro, at that time a Daiei executive, complained that they had really been fed a line. To be sure, only the gate set had to be built, but for the price of that one mammoth set they could have had over a hundred ordinary sets. But, to tell the truth, I hadn’t intended so big a set to begin with. It was while I was kept waiting all that time that my research deepened and my image of the gate swelled to its startling proportions.

When I had finished
Scandal
for the Shochiku studios, Daiei asked if I wouldn’t direct one more film for them. As I cast about for what to film, I suddenly remembered a script based on the short story “Yabu no naka” (“In a Grove”) by Akutagawa Ryunosuke. It had been written by Hashimoto Shinobu, who had been studying under director Itami Mansaku. It was a very well-written piece, but not long enough to make into a feature film. This Hashimoto had visited my home, and I talked with him for hours. He seemed to have substance, and I took a liking to him. He later wrote the screenplays for
Ikiru
(1952) and
Shichinin no samurai (Seven Samurai
, 1954) with me. The script I remembered was his Akutagawa adaptation called “Male-Female.”

Probably my subconscious told me it was not right to have put that
script aside; probably I was—without being aware of it—wondering all the while if I couldn’t do something with it. At that moment the memory of it jumped out of one of those creases in my brain and told me to give it a chance. At the same time I recalled that “In a Grove” is made up of three stories, and realized that if I added one more, the whole would be just the right length for a feature film. Then I rememered the Akutagawa story “Rashōmon.” Like “In a Grove,” it was set in the Heian period (794–1184). The film
Rashōmon
took shape in my mind.

Since the advent of the talkies in the 1930’s, I felt, we had misplaced and forgotten what was so wonderful about the old silent movies. I was aware of the esthetic loss as a constant irritation. I sensed a need to go back to the origins of the motion picture to find this peculiar beauty again; I had to go back into the past.

In particular, I believed that there was something to be learned from the spirit of the French avant-garde films of the 1920’s. Yet in Japan at this time we had no film library. I had to forage for old films, and try to remember the structure of those I had seen as a boy, ruminating over the esthetics that had made them special.

Rashōmon
would be my testing ground, the place where I could apply the ideas and wishes growing out of my silent-film research. To provide the symbolic background atmosphere, I decided to use the Akutagawa “In a Grove” story, which goes into the depths of the human heart as if with a surgeon’s scalpel, laying bare its dark complexities and bizarre twists. These strange impulses of the human heart would be expressed through the use of an elaborately fashioned play of light and shadow. In the film, people going astray in the thicket of their hearts would wander into a wider wilderness, so I moved the setting to a large forest. I selected the virgin forest of the mountains surrounding Nara, and the forest belonging to the Komyoji temple outside Kyoto.

There were only eight characters, but the story was both complex and deep. The script was done as straightforwardly and briefly as possible, so I felt I should be able to create a rich and expansive visual image in turning it into a film. Fortunately, I had as cinematographer a man I had long wanted to work with, Miyagawa Kazuo; I had Hayasaka to compose the music and Matsuyama as art director. The cast was Mifune Toshiro, Mori Masayuki, Kyo Machiko, Shimura Takashi, Chiaki Minoru, Ueda Kichijiro, Kato Daisuke and Honma Fumiko; all were actors whose temperaments I knew, and I could not have wished for a better line-up. Moreover, the story was supposed to take place in summer, and we had, ready to hand, the scintillating midsummer heat
of Kyoto and Nara. With all these conditions so neatly met, I could ask nothing more. All that was left was to begin the film.

However, one day just before the shooting was to start, the three assistant directors Daiei had assigned me came to see me at the inn where I was staying. I wondered what the problem could be. It turned out that they found the script baffling and wanted me to explain it to them. “Please read it again more carefully,” I told them. “If you read it diligently, you should be able to understand it because it was written with the intention of being comprehensible.” But they wouldn’t leave. “We believe we have read it carefully, and we still don’t understand it at all; that’s why we want you to explain it to us.” For their persistence I gave them this simple explanation: