Something Like an Autobiography (6 page)

Usually the fencing instruction was given by one of the regular teachers who was especially well versed in kendō. But sometimes a fencing master who ran his own school would appear with an assistant to polish and correct what had been taught. They would pick out the most promising students to be given lessons, and occasionally the master and his assistant would use real swords and demonstrate the basic techniques of their school’s style.

The fencing master who came to Kuroda Primary School was named Ochiai Magosaburo. (Or it may have been Matasaburō. In any case, it was a typically swordsman-like name that I can’t remember
correctly now.) He was an imposing and exceptionally strong man, and when he demonstrated his swordplay style with his assistant, his power was awesome. The students gathered to watch all held their breath.

I was one of those singled out as meriting closer attention by the master. He offered me a personal lesson, and I suddenly became enthusiastic. I squared off with him, raised my bamboo sword over my head and shouted
“O-men!”
(“To the face!” or “En garde!”). But as I charged toward him, I felt a sensation of lifting off the ground, my feet kicking in the air, while a deft movement of Ochiai Magosaburo’s muscular arm grasped me at his shoulder height. I had been taken completely by surprise. My respect for this swordsman naturally rose beyond measure.

I went straight to my father and begged him to enter me in Ochiai’s fencing school. He was overjoyed. I don’t know if my interest had occasioned a resurgence of the samurai blood in my father’s veins or the reawakening of his military-academy teacher’s spirit, but, whichever it was, the effect was remarkable.

This happened at about the time that my brother, for whom my father had cherished great expectations, began to go astray. My father had spoiled me up until this time, but now he seemed to transfer his hopes from my brother to me and began to treat me with great attention and strictness.

My father was more than agreeable to my devoting myself to kendō, and insisted that I take calligraphy lessons as well. Moreover, I was instructed to be sure to pay my respects at the Hachiman shrine on my way back from my morning kendō lesson at the Ochiai school, in order to develop the proper spirit. The Ochiai school was far away. From my house to Kuroda Primary School was far enough to fatigue a child’s legs, but to the Ochiai school was more than five times as far.

Fortunately, the particular Hachiman shrine my father ordered me to visit every morning was next to Kuroda Primary School and more or less on the route from the fencing school. But, following my father’s orders, I had to go to the Ochiai school in the morning, visit the Hachiman shrine on my way back from the fencing lesson, return home to eat breakfast and then go off to Kuroda Primary School. After school, I had to go to the calligraphy teacher’s house, which luckily happened to be on the way from school to my house. And then I was to go to Mr. Tachikawa’s home.

The latter trip was my own choice. Mr. Tachikawa had left Kuroda Primary School, but Uekusa and I continued to visit him at his
home. We passed many a fulfilling day in the atmosphere of free education and respect for individuality he created, and the warm hospitality his wife provided. No matter what my other duties, I was unable to forgo these precious hours.

In order to carry out this daily program, I had to leave home before dawn in the morning, returning after sunset at night. It occurred to me to try to evade the shrine visits, but my father prevented that. Telling me it would provide a record of my piety, he gave me a little diary in which I was to receive the imprint of the shrine seal every morning.

There was no way out. My innocent request for kendō lessons had brought me a load of unexpected tasks. But I had asked for it, so there was nothing I could do. My father accompanied me to the Ochiai fencing school when I applied for admission, and, beginning the very next morning, I followed this rigorous daily schedule for several years, until I graduated from Kuroda Primary School. The only surcease came on Sundays and during summer vacation.

My father did not permit me to wear tabi socks with my wooden clogs, even in winter. So in the cold season my feet were pitifully chapped and frostbitten. It was my mother who attempted to rescue me with hot foot baths and medication.

My mother was a typical woman of the Meiji era, Japan’s age of swift modernization, during which women were still expected to make extreme sacrifices so that their fathers, husbands, brothers or sons could advance. Beyond that, she was the wife of a military man. (Years later when I read the historical novelist Yamamoto Shugoro’s
Nihon fudoki
[
An Account of the Duties of Japanese Women
], I recognized my mother in these impossibly heroic creatures, and I was deeply moved.) In such a way as to escape my father’s notice, she would listen to all my complaints. Writing about her like this makes it sound as if I am trying to set her up as a model for some moral tale. But that is not the case. She simply had such a gentle soul that she did these things naturally.

In the first place, I believe that things were the opposite of what they appeared on the surface. My father was actually the sentimentalist, and my mother the realist. During the war years, when I visited my parents in Akita Prefecture, to which they had been evacuated, I had to part with them under conditions that meant we might never meet again. I was on a lonely road that stretched off into the distance from the front gate of the house. I kept looking back over my shoulder at my parents standing there to see me off. It was my mother who
immediately turned and hurried back into the house. My father kept standing there perfectly still, looking in my direction, until he appeared as small as a bean.

During the war there was a popular song called “Father, You Were Strong” (“Chichi yo, anata wa tsuyokatta”), but I want to say “Mother,
You
Were Strong.” My mother’s strength lay particularly in her endurance. I remember an amazing example. It happened when she was deep-frying tempura in the kitchen one day. The oil in the pot caught fire. Before it could ignite anything else, she proceeded to pick up the pot with both hands—while her eyebrows and eyelashes were singed to crinkled wisps—walk calmly across the tatami-mat room, properly put on her clogs at the garden door and carry the flaming pot out to the center of the garden to set it down.

Afterward the doctor arrived, used pincers to peel away the blackened skin and applied medication to her charred hands. I could hardly bear to watch. But my mother’s facial expression never betrayed the slightest tremor. Nearly a month passed before she was able to grasp something in her bandaged hands. Holding them in front of her chest, she never uttered a word about pain; she just sat quietly. No matter how I might try, I could never do the same.

I seem to have strayed off the subject; let me return briefly to the Ochiai fencing school, kendō and myself. From the time I began my daily attendance at the Ochiai school, I assumed all the affectations of a boy fencer. I was a child, so this was predictable behavior. After all, I had read about all the great swordsmen from Tsukahara Bokuden (1489–1571) to Araki Mataemon (1599–1637) in books from Mr. Tachikawa’s library.

My apparel at the time was the Kuroda Primary School outfit, rather than that of the Morimura Gakuen, as suited a prospective samurai swordsman: a splash-pattern kimono over duck-cloth hakama trousers, heavy wooden clogs. To get a better picture, try imagining Fujita Susumu in the role of Sugata Sanshirō in my first film. Then shrink him to one third as tall and half as wide and have him carrying a bamboo sword in the sash tied around his kendō outfit. That will give you the idea.

Every morning while the eastern sky was still dark, I set out by the light of the streetlamps on the street that followed the Edogawa River, my wooden clogs scraping along the road. I passed Kozakurabashi bridge, Ishikiribashi bridge, and after crossing Ishikiribashi to the street with the trolley tracks, just about the time I reached Hattoribashi bridge I would pass the first trolley of the day going in the
opposite direction. I crossed the Edogawabashi bridge. My journey to this point took about thirty minutes.

From there I walked another fifteen minutes or so in the direction of Otowa, turned left and slowly climbed the hill toward Mejiro. In about another twenty minutes I could hear the drum announcing the start of morning lessons at the Ochiai fencing school. Forcing myself to hurry, in another fifteen minutes I arrived at the school. From the time I left home, walking without taking so much as a glance aside, it took an hour and twenty minutes.

Lessons at the Ochiai school began with meditation. All of the disciples of Ochiai Magoemon (what was his name?) gathered together and sat down on the floor in formal position, facing the shelf for the Shinto deities, which was lit by votive candles. We began by concentrating our strength in the pits of our stomachs and banishing all worldly thoughts.

The room in which we sat had a hard, cold board floor. In order to withstand the winter temperatures, especially when dressed in nothing more than a single layer of fencing costume, you
had
to concentrate all your strength in your stomach. It was cold enough to make your teeth chatter, so there was hardly any leftover space for an idle worldly thought to pop into your head. In winter all we thought about was getting warm as quickly as possible, but in good weather it took a tremendous concentration of energy to banish those mental obstructions. At the end of the sitting, the parrying-and-thrusting practice began.

We separated according to the rank of our skills and spent thirty minutes in prearranged combat. Then we took formal sitting position again to give thanks to the fencing master, and the morning lesson was over. On cold winter days, by this time our bodies would be giving off steam. But after leaving the fencing school and setting off toward the shrine, my footsteps became heavy.

With my stomach empty and breakfast the only thing on my mind, I would push on to the shrine so as to get home faster. On clear days it was about this time that the first rays of sunshine would strike the top of the gingko tree in the shrine compound. Standing in front of the worship hall, I would ring the “alligator mouth” gong (a hollow metal bell of a wide, flattish shape rung by shaking the clapper-studded braided cloth rope with which it is hung high above the collection box on the exterior of the main shrine building). After clapping my hands in prayer, I would go to the priest’s house in one corner of the compound and stand in the entry way, shouting out, “Good morning!” The
priest, his kimono, his hakama and his face all white, would come out. Without saying a word, he would take the little diary I held out in front of him and next to the date he would stamp it with the shrine seal. Whenever I saw him, his cheeks were puffed up and his jaws were working, so I guess I always caught him eating his breakfast.

Then I descended the shrine’s stone steps and, passing in front of the Kuroda Primary School, to which I had to return immediately, I headed for home and my own breakfast. From the foot of Ishikiribashi bridge, as I approached my house along the Edogawa River, the morning sun at last came up and shone full in my face. Every time the sun shone on me in the morning, I couldn’t help thinking that from that moment on my day would begin to be like that of an ordinary child. But it wasn’t out of discontent that this feeling came to me; it was a sense of self-sufficiency and satisfaction.

And indeed from then on my ordinary child’s day began. It followed the usual schedule of breakfast, going to school all day and returning home in the afternoon. But, compared to the teaching of Mr. Tachikawa, the instruction I now received at school seemed deficient. The hours in the classroom struck me as dry and tasteless, a painful exercise to be endured. I did not get along well with the new teacher who took over our class. Until my graduation, it was as if we were continuously engaged in a contest of wills. He seemed to be completely opposed to every aspect of Mr. Tachikawa’s educational philosophy, and he was forever making sarcastic comments about his predecessor’s teaching methods. He’d say, “Mr. Tachikawa probably would have said this,” or “Mr. Tachikawa probably would have done that,” and his face always bore a contemptuous smile as he spoke.

Every time he did this, I would give the foot of my friend Uekusa, sitting next to me, a good kick. Uekusa would respond with a quick grin. Something like this even occurred:

It was during art class. We were to paint a still-life of a white vase full of cosmos flowers that decorated the classroom. I wanted to capture the volume of the vase, so I emphasized its shaded areas with a thick purple. I showed the light leaves of the cosmos as masses of green smoke, and the pink and white blossoms as scattered splashes.

The new teacher took my picture and put it up on the side of the board we called the pin-up board. Here the best examples of students’ calligraphy or compositions or pictures were put up as a model for the rest of us to follow. The teacher called out, “Kurosawa, stand up.” I was very pleased, thinking I was about to be praised again, and I stood up proudly. But the new teacher, pointing at my picture, gave me a thorough dressing down.

“What’s the matter with the shading on this vase—where do you see any dark purple? What is this green here that looks like a cloud? If you think that looks like the leaves of cosmos flowers, you’re crazy.” There were too many barbs and too much venom in his words. His accusations were full of ill will. I stood like a stick, feeling the color draining from my face. What was this all about?

After school was over that day, Uekusa came running up behind me as I nursed my wounds in silence on the way down the Hattorizaka slope. “Kuro-chan, that was mean, wasn’t it? It was too mean! It was awful! It was unforgivable!” He kept repeating these things all the way home.

I think this was the first time I ever experienced the savagery that lies in the human heart. I could never find pleasure studying under this teacher. But I acquired a determination to work so hard that this teacher would never be able to criticize me again.