Something Like an Autobiography (9 page)

They were mostly American and European movies. There was a theater on Kagurazaka hill called the Ushigomekan that showed nothing but foreign films. Here I saw a lot of action serials and William S. Hart movies. Among the serials I remember especially
The Tiger’s Footprints, Hurricane Hutch, The Iron Claw
and
The Midnight Man
.

The William S. Hart movies had a masculine touch like that of later films directed by John Ford, and more of them seemed to be set in Alaska than in the Wild West. An image remains emblazoned in my mind of William S. Hart’s face. He holds up a pistol in each hand, his leather armbands decorated with gold, and he wears a broad-brimmed hat as he sits astride his horse. Or he rides through the snowy Alaskan woods wearing a fur hat and fur clothing. What remains of these films in my heart is that reliable manly spirit and the smell of male sweat.

It’s possible that I had already seen some Chaplin films, but since I don’t remember doing Chaplin imitations at this age, it may not have been until later. Something else that may have taken place around this time or a little later remains an indelible movie memory. It happened when my oldest sister took me to the Asakusa district of Tokyo to see a movie about an expedition to the South Pole.

The leader of the sled dogs falls ill, and the exploration party has to leave him behind and drive on with the rest of the team. But the lead dog follows them, staggering, on the verge of death, and resumes his place at the head of the team. Seeing the faltering legs of this lead dog, I felt as if my heart would break. His eyelids were stuck together with pus; his tongue hung lolling from his mouth as he panted in pain for breath. It was a pathetic, gruesome and noble face. My eyes overflowed so with tears that I could hardly see.

On the blurry screen, one of the expedition members led the dog away across a slope. Finally he must have killed the beast, because a rifle report sounded loudly enough to frighten the other dogs and make them jump out of line. I burst out crying. My sister tried to comfort me, but it was no use. She gave up and took me out of the movie theater. But I kept on crying. I cried in the streetcar all the way home; I cried after I got inside the house. Even when my sister said she’d never take me to the movies again, I kept on crying. To this day I can’t forget that dog’s face, and whenever I think of it, I am overcome with reverence.

At this time of my life I did not have a great deal of enthusiasm for Japanese movies, in comparison with foreign pictures. But my interests were still those of a child.

My father didn’t just take us to the movies. He quite often took us to listen to storytellers in the music halls around Kagurazaka. The ones I remember are Kosan, Kokatsu and Enyu. Enyu was probably too subtle for my childish mind to find entertaining. I enjoyed Kokatsu’s introductions, but Kosan, who was called a master of the storytelling art, was one I really liked. I can’t forget two of his routines,
Yonaki udon (Nighttime Noodles)
and
Uma no dengaku (The Horse in Miso Sauce)
. Kosan would pantomime the noodle vendor pulling his cart and lifting his voice in a whining refrain, and I remember how quickly I was swept into the mood of a frosty winter evening.

I never heard anyone but Kosan tell the
Horse in Miso Sauce
story. A pack-horse driver stops at a roadside teahouse to have some saké. He leaves his horse, which is carrying a load of miso salted-bean paste, tethered outside. But while he drinks, the horse gets loose and wanders off, and he sets out to look for it. As he asks everyone he comes across, his speech becomes sloppier and more hurried. Finally he asks a drunk by the road if he has “seen my horse with miso on it.” The drunk replies, “What? I’ve never even heard of horse cooked that way, much less seen it.” Then the pack-horse driver goes off down the tree-lined road, a dry wind blowing as he continues his search. I practically shuddered at the feeling of dusk on my skin, and I thought it was wonderful.

I liked the stories I heard the masters tell in the storytelling halls, but I liked the tenpura on buckwheat noodles we had on the way home even better. The flavor of this tenpura-soba on a cold night remains especially memorable. Even in recent years when I am coming home from abroad, as the plane nears the Tokyo airport I always think, “Ah, now for some tenpura-soba.”

But lately tenpura-soba doesn’t taste like it used to. And I miss something else. The old noodle shops used to pour out the day’s broth in front of the entrance in order to dry the bonito flakes used to make it; they could be reused. When you walked past, the flakes gave off a familiar fragrance. I remember this with great nostalgia. This is not to say that noodle shops never pour out the broth in front any more, but if they do, the smell is completely different.

IT WAS NEARING
graduation time. I was going down the steep street called Hattorizaka in front of our school on a “Taishō skate.” It was like a giant skateboard or a scooter, with one wheel in front and two in the back. You put your right foot on it, grabbed the handle and pushed with your left foot. I was careening down the hill, holding my breath, when the front wheel hit the metal cover of a gas main. I felt myself somersaulting through the air.

When I woke up, I was stretched out in the police box at the bottom of Hattorizaka hill. My right knee was badly hurt, and for some time I was virtually crippled and had to stay home from school. (My right knee is still bad to this day. Trying to protect it, I seem to do the opposite—I am constantly bumping it on things and hurting it. This knee is the reason I’m no good at putting in golf. It’s painful for me to bend over, so I can’t anticipate the undulations of the putting green very well. Otherwise I would no doubt be an expert putter.)

Around the time my knee healed, I went with my father to a public bathhouse. There we met an elderly gentleman with white hair and a white beard. My father seemed to know him, and exchanged greetings with him. The old man looked at me in my nakedness and asked, “Your son?” My father nodded. “He seems to be pretty weak. I’ve opened a fencing school near here—send him over.” When I asked my father later who that man had been, he explained he was the grandson of Chiba Shŭsaku.

Chiba Shŭsaku was a famous fencer of the late feudal age who had had a school at Otama-ga-ike and left behind many a tale of his prowess. Hearing that this man’s grandson’s school was in our immediate area, I was greedy for fencing lessons and began going there right away. But the white-haired, white-bearded person who was called the grandson of Chiba Shŭsaku did nothing but occupy the highest-ranking position at the school. Never once did he deign to give me a lesson.

The man who did give the lessons was the assistant to the master,
and he had a shout that went “Chō, chō, yatta! Chō, yatta!” like a folk-dance refrain. Somehow this shout prevented me from respecting him very much. On top of that, the students were all neighborhood children who approached fencing as if it were a game of tag, and it was all very silly.

Just as I was feeling all these frustrations, the head of the fencing school was hit by an automobile, still a rarity at the time. For me, this was like hearing that the famous feudal swordsman Miyamoto Musashi had been kicked by his own horse. All the respect I had for the grandson of Chiba Shŭsaku disappeared completely.

Perhaps as a reaction to my experience with the Chiba school, I made up my mind to take lessons at the fencing school run by Takano Sazaburo, who had taken a whole generation by storm with his art. But my resolve proved to be no more than that of a “three-day monk.” I knew his reputation, but the reality of the violence of Takano’s lessons surpassed even my imagination.

In the thrust-and-parry practice I called out “O-men!” and struck. The same instant I was thrown flying against the wainscot, and darkness descended before my eyes, interspersed with scatters of stars resembling a fireworks display. Like these stars, my confidence in my kendō ability—or rather my pride in it—went plummeting through an empty sky.

A hundred proverbs and tag phrases come to mind. “The world is not an indulgent place.” “There is always something higher.” “The frog in his well.” “Looking at the ceiling through a hollow reed.” Once thrown against the wall, I gained a bitter understanding of how presumptuous I had been to ridicule my previous fencing master for being hit by an automobile. My long, smug “goblin’s nose” was summarily broken off, never to grow back again. But prior to my graduation from primary school it was not only kendō that shattered the pride of my goblin’s nose.

I had hoped to attend Fourth Middle School. I failed the entrance examination. But my case was different from my brother’s when he failed the exam to enter First Middle School. It was an event that aroused no surprise. Even my record at Kuroda Primary School was something you would have to call representative of a frog in his well. I had applied myself only in the subjects I liked, such as grammar, history, composition, art and penmanship. In these areas no one could surpass me. But I couldn’t make myself like science and arithmetic, and only very reluctantly put enough energy into these subjects to stay a shade above disgrace. The result was obvious. Attempting to
deal with the questions on science and arithmetic in the Fourth Middle School examination, I was at a complete loss.

I still have the same strengths and weaknesses. It seems I am of a literary rather than a scientific turn. An example is the fact that I can’t write numbers properly. They end up looking like the decorative ancient cursive syllabary. Learning to drive a car is out of the question; I am incapable of operating an ordinary still camera or even putting fluid in a cigarette lighter. My son tells me that when I use the telephone it’s as if a chimpanzee were trying to place a call.

When someone is told over and over again that he’s no good at something, he loses more and more confidence and eventually does become poor at it. Conversely, if he’s told he’s good at something, his confidence builds and he actually becomes better at it. While a person is born with strengths and weaknesses as part of his heredity, they can be greatly altered by later influences.

However, this kind of defense now serves no purpose, and my only reason for bringing it up is to say that it was then that the path I would take in life became clear to me. It was the path of literature and art. And the point at which these two would diverge was still a long way off.

GRADUATION DAY
was at hand. Primary-school graduation ceremonies in those days followed a prescribed order—conventional, well mannered and sentimental. First the school principal made a hackneyed address of encouragement and blessing for the future of the graduates, then one of the guests delivered a perfunctory message of greeting, to which a representative of the graduating class made a formal response. Then the graduates sang with organ accompaniment:

The fifth-year students followed this with:

And at the end all together sang:

At this point all the girls would start sobbing. And in the midst of that, as valedictorian representing the graduating boys, I had to give my formal response.

Our teacher had written my speech himself, handed it to me and told me to make a clean copy and “give a fine delivery” of it. This speech met all the requirements as to content, but it read like strung-together excerpts from an ethics text book. I knew that I would never be able to put any feeling into it. The rhetoric praising the teacher’s unselfish devotion to his students was particularly flowery, and I couldn’t help glancing up at his face as I read through it for the first time, standing in front of him.

As I mentioned earlier, this teacher and I lost no love between us. How could he make me say these nauseating things about his great kindness and our sadness at parting with him? And what kind of person was this who could write all these laudatory phrases about himself? My flesh crawled with revulsion, but I took his draft and carried it home with me.