Something Like an Autobiography (29 page)

My intention was to go straight to the bath pool, jump in and get warmed up. But the water was so hot I couldn’t stand it, so I scurried to add cold water to it. I picked up a tub of cold water, but as I did so I slipped on the icy floor of the bathroom, and the bucket flew up in the air and emptied the cold water over my head. I have never been so cold in my life. In fact, compared to Yama-san’s short story about heat, this experience of mine rivals it for cold.

As I struggled along, stark naked, shaking like a leaf, trying desperately to mix cold water into the bath, my crew started to come into the bath. I yelled at them with violently chattering teeth to give me a hand. When they saw how cold I was, they dipped up buckets of hot water from the bath, added a little cold water to these and poured them over my head. With this I came back to life and wondered why I hadn’t thought of doing that myself. When the human animal gets panicky, he becomes stupid.

The second funny thing that happened at the Hoppo location involved Higaki Gennosuke’s youngest brother, Genzaburo. He is meant to be half crazy, so I spent a great deal of effort on his costume and makeup. We put him in a tousled long black wig like those used in the Noh drama. He wore white makeup all over his face, and bright red lipstick. We put him in a white costume and had him carry the “bamboo grass of madness” that crazed characters in Noh plays hold.

The role of Genzaburo was played by Kono Akitake. One day his scenes were finished early, so we sent him on back alone. The location for these scenes was on a cliff covered with deep snow. I looked down from the top and saw about seven skiers coming up the road to the cliff. Suddenly they all stood stock still, staring up the road ahead of them, and then in a flash they turned back and skied at breakneck speed down the hill. Small wonder. In the heart of the mountains, where you rarely see a trace of other human beings, if you suddenly saw someone dressed like Genzaburo coming toward you, you would run, too.

Though I have no evil intentions, for some reason in my business I end up giving a lot of people a terrible fright. I met these skiers later at the inn, explained what we were doing and apologized.

On this location the climactic duel between Sanshirō and Tesshin took place in deep snow. They both had to be barefoot, so it was a real test of endurance. Even now, whenever Fujita Susumu (who played Sanshirō) sees my face, he begins to talk about his feet on that 1944 location. He goes on and on about how cold they were and how much
he holds it against me. Fujita had also had to jump into the lotus pond in the month of February for the first
Sugata Sanshirō
, so his resentments were really piled up. But I did not make him do these things because I dislike him. Considering that these films made him a star, I think he might go a little easier on me.

Sugata Sanshirō, Part II
was not a very good film. Among the reviews was one that said “Kurosawa seems to be somewhat full of himself.” On the contrary, I feel I was unable to put my full strength into it.

THE SAME MONTH
Sugata Sanshirō, Part II
came out in the movie theaters, I was married. To state it accurately, in 1945 at the age of thirty-five I married the actress Yaguchi Yoko (real name Kato Kiyo) in a ceremony at the wedding hall of the Meiji shrine in Tokyo. The official matchmakers for the ceremony were Yamamoto Kajirō and his wife.

My parents, who had been evacuated to Akita Prefecture, could not attend my wedding. The day after the ceremony took place, U.S. carrier-based planes launched a massive attack on Tokyo, and in the B-29 bomb raid the Meiji shrine became a raging conflagration. The result is that we don’t even have a photograph of our wedding. It was a thoroughly panicked event, our marriage, with the air-raid sirens howling throughout.

At that time if you made an official report of your intention to marry, the government gave you a ration of saké for the exchange of nuptial cups. I received this delivery and decided to taste it before the ceremony. It proved to be some kind of awful synthetic saké. But during the actual ceremony when I took a drink from my cup it wasn’t the synthetic saké; it was in fact delicious, and I wouldn’t have minded having a little more. Then at the reception held at my wife’s parents’ house, the only alcohol was a single bottle of medium-grade Suntory whiskey.

I’m afraid my wife will be very annoyed at me for writing about nothing but the liquor at our wedding. But I feel that, in order to
convey a true sense of what it was like to get married at that time, these things should be part of the description. In any event, you can imagine that if the wedding ceremony was like this, the events leading up to it were hardly romantic.

It all began with my parents’ evacuation to the country. Morita Nobuyoshi, who was then head of the Toho production division, saw that I was having a difficult time taking care of myself in my day-to-day life. He suggested that I give some thought to getting married. “But who?” I asked, and Morita immediately replied, “What about Miss Yaguchi?” “Well, that does make sense,” I thought to myself, but since she and I had done nothing but fight all the way through
The Most Beautiful
, I told Morita I thought she was a little too strong-willed. But he countered with a big grin, “But don’t you see that’s exactly what you need?” I had to admit he had a point, and I made up my mind to ask her hand in marriage.

My proposal went something like this: “It looks as if we are going to lose the war, and if it comes to the point of the Honorable Death of the Hundred Million, we all have to die anyway. It’s probably not a bad idea to find out what married life is like before that happens.”

The answer was that she would think about it. To ensure that things would go smoothly, I asked a very close friend to intercede with her on my behalf. I waited and waited and no reply came. I got fed up with trying to keep cool. Finally I went to her and demanded, “Yes or no?” like General Yamashita Tomoyuki demanding surrender as he occupied Singapore in 1942.

She promised that she would reply very shortly, but the next time we met she handed me a thick stack of letters. She told me to read them and said, “I can’t marry a person like this.” They were all letters from the man I had asked to plead my case with her. I read them and couldn’t believe my eyes. I was horrified.

All these letters contained were slanderous statements about me. The variety and caliber of the phrasing of these terrible things were positively ingenious. The fullness of the hatred for me expressed in these letters sickened me. This fellow, who had accepted the job of aiding me in my suit, had been doing his utmost to ruin my chances. And on top of that, he had frequently accompanied me to the Yaguchi home and sat at my side wearing an expression of sincerest concern and cooperation in my efforts to persuade Miss Yaguchi to marry me.

Apparently Miss Yaguchi’s mother had observed all this and said to her, “Which are you going to put your faith in, the man who slanders his friend or the man who trusts the person who slanders
him?” The result was that she and I were married. Even after we were married, this man felt no compunctions about coming to visit us. But my mother-in-law absolutely refused to let him in the house.

To this day I can’t understand it. I can’t think of any reason this fellow should have hated me so much. What dwells at the bottom of the human heart remains a mystery to me. Since that time I have observed many different kinds of people—swindlers, people who have killed or died for money, plagiarists—and they all look like normal people, so I am confused. In fact, more than “normal,” these people have very nice faces and say very nice things, so I am all the more confused.

My wife and I began our married life, and for her it must have been a devastating experience. She had given up her career as an actress in order to marry, but what she didn’t know was that my salary was less than one third of what hers had been. She had never dreamed that a director’s pay was so low, and our life became “like traveling in a burning horse cart.”

My fee for the
Sugata Sanshirō
script had been 100 yen (roughly $2,000), and the fee for directing the picture had also been 100 yen. After that, my fees for
The Most Beautiful
and
Sugata Sanshirō, Part II
had risen by 50 yen each. But I had drunk up the greater part of my pay on location, so we were in real trouble.

With
Sugata Sanshirō, Part II
I signed an official director’s contract with the company. I was to receive severance pay in compensation for my previous work as a regular company employee. But when I asked for this money, I was told that it was being put away for my future, and they refused to give it to me. I still have not received it. Maybe they are still keeping it for my future, or maybe they are planning to draw from it to help me repay the enormous debts I now owe to Toho.

At any rate, with no severance pay, I faced insurmountable financial difficulties at the outset of my married life. I had no choice but to go back to scriptwriting. I even forced myself to write three scripts at once. Probably the only reason I was able to do this was because I was still young, but I really reached the outer limits of exhaustion. The night I finished writing all three scripts I found tears streaming down my face as I drank my saké. There was nothing I could do to stop them.

IN THE EARLY
days of my marriage I suddenly realized that the wartime air raids were a real threat. We moved from the Ebisu area of Shibuya Ward out to Soshigaya in Setagaya Ward. The following day an air raid sent our Ebisu house up in flames. The war was hurtling Japan along the road to defeat at breakneck speed, and yet the Toho studios, employing the hands of people with empty stomachs, continued to show remarkable vitality in the production of motion pictures. But those who were not running around frantically trying to complete a picture were sitting on their heels in the central courtyard talking. They were so hungry it was painful for them to stand up.

Around this time I had written a script called
Dokkoi kono yari (The Lifted Spear)
for Okochi Denjiro and Enomoto Ken’ichi to star in. We were already in pre-production, but the last scene was going to require special attention. It was to show the Battle of Okehazama, where the feudal leader Oda Nobunaga defeated a northern Japanese clan in 1560. We needed to show Nobunaga and his generals spurring their horses forward into the final battle, so we set out for Yamagata Prefecture to select an appropriate location and horses.

But even Yamagata Prefecture, which had always been a breeding ground for horses and had provided us with great numbers of them, now had only old nags and sickly beasts. There wasn’t a single horse in the entire prefecture that could run. This discovery led to the shelving of the whole
Lifted Spear
project, and it was as if we had gone location-scouting only to ruin our film. In my disappointment, I decided at least to take the opportunity to visit my parents, who had been evacuated to Akita Prefecture. This would be the only thing I gained from the entire trip.

I arrived in the middle of the night at the house where my parents were. When I banged on the big front door, my older sister Taneyo, who had gone with my parents to help them, peeped through a crack in it and shouted, “It’s Akira!” Then she left me standing outside in the dark and ran to the kitchen to start cooking rice. I was baffled. It
turned out that her behavior was not at all laughable. The first thing she wanted to do for the younger brother who she knew was not getting enough to eat was to cook him a meal with real rice. I was almost moved to tears.

These few days I spent with my father were to be our last together. He had been evacuated from Tokyo after the release of
Sugata Sanshirō
, and had never seen my new bride. He wanted to hear all about her. Immediately after the war I myself became a father, but my own father was never to see his grandchild.

When I was ready to return to Tokyo, my father loaded me up with a huge backpack full of rice. Because I understood painfully well my father’s feeling of wanting to be sure that my pregnant wife at least had rice to eat, I allowed myself to be treated like a pack mule. The thing was so heavy that if I relaxed my muscles I fell over backward. In my topheavy condition I squeezed onto the train for Tokyo, which was already jammed with people like a sardine can.