The Last Samurai (5 page)

I would like to tell him to let the film speak for itself. I am about to say this in the confidence that he cannot go wrong when I remember Mr. Richie’s comments on the final rice-planting scene. Mr. Richie is the author of
The Films of Akira Kurosawa
, and as I rely on this book for everything I know about the many films of Kurosawa which are not available on video I wish he had not said that the end showed the ingratitude of the farmers and a rice-planting scene as an element of hope. If the film does not speak for itself I will have to say something about the film which I would very much rather

I say to L that I read somewhere that in the Tokugawa period it was punishable by death for a non-samurai to carry a sword. I say that Mr. Richie says that shaving the head would normally be a mark of humiliation for a samurai. I say that the name of the actor with the moustache is Mifune Toshiro because I don’t want him to pick up my bad habit of putting the names in the Western order out of laziness and I write it down on a piece of paper for him so he will know it next time. I say that the name of the actor who plays the samurai is Shimura Takashi and I write down after a little thought the characters for Shimura and after a lot of thought the character for Takashi. I say that I have seen Kurosawa’s name spelled two ways, the characters for Kuro (black) and Akira (don’t know) are always the same, but I have seen two different characters used for Sawa. I write down both versions & I say that it seems more polite to use the form preferred by its bearer. He says which one is Kurosawa and I say he does not appear, he is the director and he says what’s a director and I say that it will be easier to explain when he has seen the film. It occurs to me that these pieces of information are flimsy defences against whatever it is that makes a man when told to toss a person from a plane do as told, which is too bad as L instantly wants to know more. He asks me to write down the names of all the other actors so he can look at them later. I say I will try to find them in the autobiography.

never existed; Roemer will be as momentous in his way as the plague that sent Newton home from Cambridge. But why shouldn’t he end badly? The business of getting a baby from womb to air is pretty well understood. Out it comes, a dribbling squall. Presently its talents come into the open; they are hunted down, and bludgeoned into insensibility. But Mozart was once a prodigious, prestidigious little monkey.

My father used to say with a mocking smile when things went wrong, which they for the most part did: Of all sad words of tongue or pen, The saddest are these, it might have been. If L comes to good not by some miracle but by doing the right thing rather than the wrong others may profit from his escape; if he comes to bad (as is not unlikely) his example may spare them.

The farmers look at each other. This is the man they need. They follow him out of town
.

So does Mifune
.

So does the aristocratic young man. He runs up to the samurai in the road and falls to his knees
.

L (reading subtitles): My name is Katsushiro Okamoto. Let me follow you

L: I am Kambei Shimada. I am only a ronin. What’s a ronin?

I: A masterless samurai.

L: I am not a samurai and I have no followers

L: Please take me

L: Stand up, or else we can’t talk properly

L: You are embarrassing me; I am not very skilful

Listen, I can’t teach you anything special

I’ve merely had a lot of fighting experience

Go away and forget about following me

It’s for your own good

L: I’m determined to follow you, whatever you say

L: I forbid you

I can’t afford to have any followers

Mifune runs up and stares at the samurai. Kambei: Onushi—samurai ka? Mifune (drawing himself up) : [incomprehensible shout]

L: Are you a samurai?

L: Of course!

Kambei and Katsushiro walk away. A farmer runs forward and falls to his knees
.

I tell L that in the autobiography Kurosawa has nothing but praise for the marvellous Mifune except possibly that he had a rather harsh way of talking which the microphones had trouble picking up. I say that it’s very charming the way the translators have translated the Japanese into Penguin.

L: What’s Penguin?

I: It’s what English translators translate into. Merely had a lot of fighting experience! Determined to follow you! As it happens most English speakers can understand Penguin even if they wouldn’t use it in daily life, but still.

L: Isn’t that what they say?

I: They
may
be speaking Penguin Japanese, we can only surmise. Kambei says
Tada kassen ni wa zuibun deta ga, tada
, just,
kassen
is battle or combat according to Halpern (but I wonder whether that isn’t just Penguin infiltrating the dictionary),
ni
in,
wa
topic particle,
zuibun
a lot,
deta
happened,
ga
another particle which we won’t go into now but which seems pretty common, it’s hard to believe
it
is giving the flavour of Penguin to the

L: When are you going to teach me Japanese?

I: I don’t know enough to teach you.

L: You could teach me what you know.

I: [NO NO NO NO] Well

L: Please

I: Well

L: Please

Voice of Sweet Reason: You’ve started so many other things I think you should work on them more before you start something new.

L: How much more?

I: Well

L: How much more?

The last thing I want is to be teaching a five-year-old a language I have not yet succeeded in teaching myself.

I: I’ll think about it.

I would like to strike a style to amaze. I think I am not likely to discover the brush of Cézanne; if I am to leave no other record I would like it to be a marvel. But I must write to be understood; how can formal perfection be saved? I see in my mind a page, I think of Cicero’s
De Natura Deorum
: across the top one Latin line, the rest English (or possibly German), identification of persons obscure after 2,000 years. Just so will this look if I explain every reference for 45th-century readers, readers who may, for all I know, know the name of a single 21st-century genius (the one now five years old). What I mean is that I see in my mind a page, across the top a line with the words Carling Black Label, the rest a solid mass of small type describing Carling Black Label the beer, Carling Black Label ads the glory of British advertising, Levi’s the jeans, stonewashed Levi’s ad parodied in classic ad for Carling Black Label, lyrics of I Heard It Through the Grapevine classic song sung by Marvin Gaye in classic jeans and classic beer ad, not to mention terrible deprivation of American audiences of the time able to export the jeans and import the beer but not to sample the glories of British advertising to which these gave rise. What I mean is that I have read books written 2,000 or even 2,500 years ago or 20 years ago and in 2,500 years they will need everything even Mozart explained and when once you start explaining there is no end to it.

HOW MUCH MORE?

HOW
MUCH
MORE?

HOW, MUCH, MORE?

I: Well if you read the
Odyssey
and Books 1–8 of the
Metamorphoses
and the whole
Kalilah wa Dimnah
and 30 of the
Thousand and One Nights
and I Samuel
and
the Book of Jonah
and
learn the cantillation and if you do 10 chapters in
Algebra Made Easy
then I will teach you as much as I can.

L: Then that’s what I’ll do.

I: All right.

L: I will.

I: Fine.

L: You’ll see.

I: I know.

L: Will you teach me the alphabet while I’m working on the rest?

I: It doesn’t have an alphabet. It has two sets of syllabaries of 46 symbols apiece, 1,945 characters of Chinese derivation in common use since the Second World War and up to 50,000 characters used before then. I know the syllabaries and 262 characters which I keep forgetting which is precisely why I am not really qualified to teach it to you.

L: Then why don’t you get a Japanese to teach me?

This is a wonderful idea. I could get a benevolent Japanese male to act as an uncle substitute for L! A benevolent Mifune lookalike to come and talk about stamp collecting or football or his car in a language which would conceal the diabolical tedium of the subject. But he would probably want some money.

I: I don’t think we can afford it.

I once read a book about an Australian girl who was given an English bulldog; a big truck was sent into town to collect the (as they thought) large animal, and brought back a baby bulldog that could be held in the palm of a hand. At the time I thought I would like a tiny bulldog of my own. Little did I know. L has read Ali Baba and Moses in the Bullrushes and Cicero’s
De Amicitia
and the
Iliad
which I started him on by accident, & he can play Straight No Chaser which he learned by listening to the tape & trying to copy it about 500 times—it is wonderful that he was able to do it and yet if you are trying to type 62 years of
Crewelwork Digest
onto computer in the same room it can sometimes be hard to feel a proper

For who was Mozart? Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–1791) was an Austrian composer of genius, taught music by his father Leopold from the age of five, and displayed in the courts of Europe playing the harpsichord blindfold and performing other tricks. He composed string quartets, symphonies, piano sonatas, a concerto for the glass organ and several operas including Don Giovanni and The Magic Flute. His sister Nannerl received identical training and was not a musical genius. I have heard it argued, and by a clever man too, that this proves that women are not capable of musical genius. How is it possible to argue this, you say, AND to know that a brother and sister may have no genes in common, without being committed to the unlikely theory that any man could be a Mozart with similar training? You say it, and I thought it; but the fact is that a clever man so seldom needs to think

What’s a syllabary?

A syllabary is a set of phonetic symbols each representing a syllable

he gets out of the habit.

What’s a syllable?

You know what a syllable is

No I don’t

A syllable is a phonetic element of a word containing a vowel, take the word ‘containing’ you could break it down to ‘con-tain-ing’ and have a symbol for each part. In Chinese each word is just one syllable long, a monosyllable. What would polysyllabic be?

With many syllables?

Exactement.

And oligosyllabic would be with few syllables

It would be, but it’s not used much, people seem to work in terms of an opposition between the one and the many

Duosyllabic

It would be better to say word of two syllables on grounds of euphony. In general if you are going to make up a word you should use the adverbial form of the number, which would give disyllabic except people often seem to use bi after mono, monogamy bigamy monoplane biplane. Usually Latin numbers go with words of Latin derivation, so unilateral bilateral multilateral bicameral multinational, and Greek numbers with words of Greek derivation, tetrahedron, tetralogy, pentagon

Trisyllabic

Yes

Tetrasyllabic

Yes

Pentasyllabic hexasyllabic heptasyllabic oktasyllabic enasyllabic dekasyllabic hendekasyllabic dodekasyllabic

Exactly

Treiskaidekasyllabic tessareskaidekasyllabic pentekaidekasyllabic hekkaidekasyllabic heptakaidekasyllabic

And who was Bernini? Gianlorenzo Bernini (1598–1680) was ‘the greatest genius of the Italian Baroque’, who moved to Rome at the age of seven and was taught by his father

EIKOSASYLLABIC

Pietro, a sculptor. Rudolf Wittkower (German art historian, refugee from the Nazis [where to begin?], author of
Art & Architecture in Italy 1600–1750
) compares him to Michelangelo ([1475–1564]),

enneakaieikosasyllabic

TRIAKONTASYLLABIC

painter, poet, sculptor of genius …) in his capacity for superhuman

oktokaitriakontasyllabic enneakaitriakontasyllabic

TESSARAKONTASYLLABIC