The Maruzen Bookstore after the earthquake.
Within the forty-year span between Kurosawa’s birth in Tokyo in 1910 and the making of Rashomon in 1950—the entire range of the only memoir he ever wrote—his city would twice be struck by overwhelming force and nearly vanish.
Just before noon on September 1, 1923, a massive earthquake began to split the ground across the Kanto plain, tearing apart vast swaths of Tokyo and Yokohama, the two cities most closely associated with a rapidly modernizing Japan. By the following night, the fissures and flames that raged through the Tokyo flatlands had taken well over 100,000 lives, severely damaging or laying waste to nearly one half of its buildings, many gutted by fire and reduced to ash.
Again, as the war in the Pacific was unfolding in its horrific final phase, American B-29 incendiary bombing missions were directed at Tokyo. The raids of March 9 and 10, 1945, were particularly intense. The firestorms in their wake incinerated over sixteen square miles near the city’s center. Upwards of 125,000 people were killed. Over two thirds of Tokyo’s residences were destroyed—one of them Kurosawa’s own.
The number of Tokyo’s dead, following each of these calamities, rivaled the death toll at Hiroshima.
In the reflections he wrote down nearly sixty years later, Kurosawa gives close attention to what he experienced the day of the earthquake and in the days after it. By 1923, the Kurosawa family had moved from Oimachi in Shinagawa, where Akira spent his childhood years, to a residence on higher ground in Koishikawa, north and west of the city’s center. The morning of September 1 was dark, Kurosawa once deadpanned, not for atmospheric reasons but because it was the first day after summer vacation, and he had to attend yet another boring new term ceremony at his middle school. He further recollects:
When the convocation ended, I set out for Maruzen, Japan’s largest foreign bookstore, in the downtown Kyobashi district. My oldest sister had asked me to pick up a Western-language book for her. But when I got there, the store hadn’t opened yet. More disgusted than ever, I headed for home again, intending to try once more in the afternoon.
It is widely reported that September 1 started out clear and cloudless, bright blue in the sky, though by late morning the wind was picking up at a fast accelerating rate. Kurosawa’s eldest sister, Haruyo, for whom he was running this errand, was herself a teacher. By the early 1930s she and her husband would become the financial bulwark for the entire Kurosawa clan, including Akira, who was still adrift at that time, earning a pittance as a commercial artist, drawing cartoons and magazine ads for random publications.
As for the Maruzen bookstore near Kyobashi, from the middle of the Meiji period (1868–1912) this cultural emporium had become a major point of contact between Western authors, Japanese writers, and the “literary youth” of the day, with whom Kurosawa would come self-consciously to identify. The Maruzen shelves sagged as wave upon wave of foreign works began pouring into the country via translations, primarily from English, French, German, and Russian language sources.
The late nineteenth century was indeed expansionary for Japan, as it hurtled toward a redefinition of itself as a modern nation-state, fueled by technological, military, and political renovations. The country would also radically extend its linguistic and cultural boundaries. Traditional canons of thought and taste, cultivated almost wholly within an East Asian field of reference for the entirety of Japanese history, were serially challenged and often displaced by Western ideas and ways of writing. Such dynamic change in the cultural sphere would have both liberating and life-threatening effects.
Several famous authors, such as Akutagawa Ryunosuke, who wrote the short story called “Rashomon,” which he had adapted from a medieval cautionary tale of the same name, would set scenes in some of their best-known works in this cathedral built to literary ambition. Here is the famous opening to Akutagawa’s posthumously published autobiographical fiction, titled The Life of a Stupid Man (1927), written just before he took a lethal dose of Veronal and exited the world a literary martyr:
1. The Era
He was upstairs in a bookstore. Twenty years old at the time, he had climbed a ladder set against a bookcase and was searching for the newly-arrived Western books: Maupassant, Baudelaire, Strindberg, Ibsen, Shaw, Tolstoy . . .
The sun threatened to set before long, but he went on reading book spines with undiminished intensity. Lined up before him was not so much an array of books as the fin de siècle itself. Nietzsche, Verlaine, the Goncourt brothers, Dostoevsky, Hauptmann, Flaubert . . .
He took stock of their names as he struggled with the impending gloom. The books began to sink into the somber shadows.
Had Maruzen been open when Kurosawa first arrived in Kyobashi on this truly fateful day, he himself may not have lived to tell any stories. In all likelihood he would have been inside that building when the earthquake struck at noon and brought it crashing down. Even were Kurosawa to have escaped the bookstore’s collapse, he would still have been in the vicinity of Kyobashi, among the hardest hit wards in the city and one that was nearly totally destroyed by the seismic ruptures and the ensuing conflagration.
Kurosawa never did purchase his sister’s book at Maruzen that day (neither the author nor the title has been identified), though he did have a significant encounter, not with one of the Dostoevsky novels that would later obsess him, but with a providential reprieve from certain death, resembling a famous experience ascribed to the Russian author’s life. As is widely recounted, Dostoevsky in his youth numbered social agitators and political malcontents among his friends and associates. He would be arrested eventually for his ties to the Petrashevsky circle of dissidents, imprisoned, and sentenced to death. But only as the firing squad began to take aim was the execution halted, as a horseman arrived bearing the czar’s late-breaking pardon to the condemned.
Such a sudden, staged reversal, whatever its lingering impact on Dostoevsky’s politics and religious views, seems profoundly to have shaped the dramatic arc of his fiction. How often are his fallen characters, including the murderous or suicidal among them, given a reprieve, a chance to convert and to rise up, like Lazarus, to face life anew. This was a dramatic arc that Kurosawa explored in Dostoevsky and built into the core of his greatest films, all of which turn on a near-death experience or on a life-changing conversion.
One after another, under the shadow of illness or moral darkness, Kurosawa’s film stories and their featured protagonists come to an impasse or an end. Their backs are thrown up against a wall. Until improbably, even miraculously, they find a way to break out and to start up again.
In his written reflections, set down nearly sixty years after the incident, Kurosawa devotes heightened stylistic attention to the sights and the drama that gather around the Great Earthquake of 1923. He vividly details specific scenes, such as his arrival back to his own neighborhood from Kyobashi, pausing momentarily to join a friend in throwing stones at the next-door neighbor’s tethered cow, who had lowed so furiously the previous night it caused him to lose sleep. Then the earth rumbles and starts to crack.
Viewers of Kurosawa’s first film, a martial arts vehicle set in the 1880s called Sanshiro Sugata (1943), will recall an evocative cameo role played by wooden clogs early on in that movie. Here is another such scene from the memoir:
What I noticed was that my friend who had been squatting next to me suddenly stood bolt upright. As I looked up at him, I saw that behind him the wall of the storehouse was crumbling and falling—toward us. I stood up in a hurry, too.
Because I was wearing high clogs, I couldn’t keep my balance on the rippling ground, so I took them off and carried one in each hand. Like someone on a boat in heavy seas, I lurched and ran to where my friend stood with his arms wrapped around a telephone pole for dear life. I did likewise. The pole was waving around crazily, too. In fact, it was snapping its wires into thousands of little pieces.
What follows is a description of the built structures immediately around him, which may remind us of the gate and its roof, half-stripped of tiles, which we face at our entry point to Rashomon:
Before our eyes, the two storehouses belonging to the pawnshop started shedding their skins. They shuddered and threw off their roof tiles and then let go of their thick walls. In an instant, they were skeletons of wooden frame. It wasn’t just the storehouses that were doing this either. The roof tiles of all the houses, as if they were being put through a sieve, suddenly danced and shook and slipped off. In the thick dust the roof beams lay revealed.
Racing home from there, Kurosawa could see that his family’s front gate also “had lost half of its roof,” and that the walkway leading to the entrance of his home “was blocked by a mountain of roof tiles that had fallen from the buildings on either side.” He couldn’t see the front door, and concluded that his family must be dead. Then, one by one, as if rising from a casket in a silent horror film, his parents and siblings emerge from this buried home to greet him. Kurosawa says he couldn’t cry, not because he didn’t feel the urge, but because of his brother, who was scolding him with a vengeance for walking around barefoot, like a disorderly slob, instead of wearing his wooden zori, no matter the uproar, as were all the other family members.
We note how Kurosawa singles out this older brother and configures his voice into one of the most searing scenes of his young life. Indeed, his brother will become the central figure in Kurosawa’s account of what he experienced the day of the earthquake and in the days following. The memoir at this point takes on an almost apocalyptic tone, echoing certain medieval Buddhist tales, like Kamo no Chomei’s An Account of My Hut, or like The Tale of the Heike—Kurosawa’s favorite Japanese classic—both of which document surviving in the aftermath of earthquake, fire, and war. Such literature gathers itself around Kyoto in the late twelfth century, as Kurosawa’s Rashomon itself does. The suddenness and the extraordinary scale of the transformations he witnessed are what Kurosawa stresses, along with the mud—conspicuous not only from the opening shots of Rashomon, but in most every black-and-white film he would make during the twenty-year Japanese postwar period:
The street where the streetcar ran on the other side of the Edogawa River was badly damaged, heaving with fissures. The river itself had raised its bottom and showed new islands of mud . . . the whole Edogawa district was veiled in a dancing, swirling dust whose grayness gave the sun a pallor like that during an eclipse. The people who stood to the left and the right of me in this scene looked for all the world like fugitives from hell, and the whole landscape took on a bizarre and eerie aspect. I stood holding on to one of the young cherry trees planted along the banks of the river, and I was still shaking as I gazed out over the scene, thinking, “This must be the end of the world.”
Above this stark, monochromatic sketch of the scene before him, Kurosawa sets “a billowing mushroom cloud” that will gradually spread across the eastern sky, itself filling up with smoke from the fires sweeping central Tokyo. As day gives way to night, the grayness and the pallor deepen. Electricity throughout the city has been cut. Any light, Kurosawa reports, comes from fires raging across low-lying parts of town, or from periodic explosions at the nearby armory, where munitions had been stored.
Then the fires had nothing more to burn. The city fell into a total darkness, so terrifying and threatening it drove people to monstrous acts. Besides what Kurosawa found extraordinary about the unrestrained forces of nature, here he locates another force of even more terrifying magnitude, what he calls “the extraordinary things that lie in human hearts.” He corroborates widespread accounts of vigilantes on the rampage, hunting down and massacring “foreigners.” It is estimated that over six thousand Koreans were killed at this time, along with Chinese and other foreigners spotted as “subversives,” also nationals known to be social agitators, like the anarchist Osugi Sakae and his partner, the radical feminist Ito Noe, who would be arrested and murdered in police custody.
Some of these thugs Kurosawa recognizes to be his neighbors, now turned “horrifying demagogues” because of rampant rumors and outright lies that outsiders were poisoning the well water or fomenting riots. The horror is laced with absurdity. One such mob excitedly points to white chalk writing on a wall beside a well, calling it Korean code for “poison.” Kurosawa knew otherwise, because the chalk graffiti was actually his.
Fear was tearing through the city, moving people “off course” from ordinary behavior. “Fear,” Kurosawa quotes from an old saying, “peoples the darkness with monsters.” Searching for family relatives in an area close to Ueno, Kurosawa encounters a club-wielding pack who surround his father. They had spotted his full beard and assumed he was himself a foreigner. “Idiots,” he hears his father shout, and the group backs off. All the while, his older brother had been standing calmly to one side, a knowing, sarcastic look on his face. As if no act committed by a human being, however horrifying, would ever catch him by surprise.
Days later, once the ground was still and the last of the fires were being extinguished, Kurosawa went downtown again, led there by this same brother, whose given name is Heigo. Born in 1906, he is four years older than Akira. He is and will remain the inescapable force in Kurosawa’s life. “Let’s go look at the ruins,” Heigo urges, seeming restless, even ghoulishly eager to see for himself all that the earthquake and the fires had wrought. What at first seemed to Kurosawa like a thrilling school excursion (no boring convocation ceremony, this) quickly gives way to a darker reckoning. By that time, though, it is too late to turn back. Writing his memoir many decades later, Kurosawa recognizes that this morbid adventure he had been lured into by his brother had been nothing less than “an expedition to conquer fear.”
Others were out there, too, salvaging what they could from the rubble, some looking frantically, by then mostly in vain, for survivors. A number of literati were on the scene to survey the ruins as a catastrophe they might write about. They included Akutagawa Ryunosuke, the author of the stories on which Kurosawa’s Rashomon would be based, whose life, art, and suicide trace uncanny parallels in the experiences and destiny of the brothers Kurosawa.
Just before dying, in a passage titled “Earthquake” (also from The Life of a Stupid Man), Akutagawa would give fictional voice to what remained with him from his own experience of that day:
The odor was something close to overripe apricots. Catching a hint of it as he walked through the charred ruins, he found himself thinking thoughts such as these: The smell of corpses rotting in the sun is not as bad as I would have expected. When he stood before a pond where bodies were piled on bodies, however, he discovered that the old Chinese expression, “burning the nose,” was no mere sensory exaggeration of grief and horror. What especially moved him was the corpse of a child of twelve or thirteen. He felt something like envy as he looked at it, recalling such expressions as, “Those whom the gods love die young.”
Like Akutagawa, the brothers Kurosawa would walk through the charred remains of their lost city. Kurosawa notes the strange equanimity, even the pleasure that overtook Heigo amid the acrid wreckage and the misshapen, clustered dead. He wonders what lay behind his brother’s perverse insistence that Akira, just thirteen at the time, square up and face such wrenching scenes:
I failed to understand my brother’s intentions and could only resent his forcing me to look at these awful sights. The worst was when we stood on the bank of the red-dyed Sumida River and gazed at the throng of corpses pressed against its shores. I felt my knees give way as I started to faint, but my brother grabbed me by the collar and propped me up again. He repeated, “Look carefully, Akira.”
Drunken Angel
Even with eyes shut, Kurosawa says, the residue of that moment remained: “The scene had imprinted itself permanently on the backs of my eyelids.” What he had glimpsed outside in the sickeningly transformed city of his birth—bloated corpses bobbing in the fetid shallows—had been taken in (recall the defining image in Drunken Angel: a crater-sized cesspool filled with debris of all kinds, including a sandal and a doll that floats facedown on the noxious ooze). Even the Buddhist netherworld, Kurosawa now imagines, could not possibly contain lakes of blood as death-filled and horrific as the red-dyed river Sumida. He goes on:
I write that the Sumidagawa was dyed red, but it wasn’t a blood red. It was the same kind of light-brownish red as the rest of the landscape, a red muddied with white like the eye of a rotten fish. The corpses floating in the river were all swollen to the bursting point, and all had their anuses open like big fish mouths. Even babies still tied to their mothers’ backs looked like this. And all of them moved softly in unison on the waves of the river.
This is a world beyond color and ordinary, everyday perception. As Akira Lippit notes of the unnatural light and the draining of color after Hiroshima, everything fades toward monochrome amid the annihilation.
Then, as if the memoirist suddenly thought to look up and take a broad panning shot of what lay before him, the better to survey what if anything had survived, Kurosawa writes: “As far as the eye could see there was not a living soul. The only living things in this landscape were my brother and I. To me we seemed as small as two beans in all this vastness. Or else we, too, were dead and were standing at the gates of Hell.”
Kurosawa returned to his home that night, certain he would be unable to sleep. He awaited a procession of nightmares but instead slept soundly, which he thought so strange that he asked his brother about it. Kurosawa documents Heigo’s reply: “If you shut your eyes to a frightening sight, you end up being frightened. If you look at everything straight on, there is nothing to be afraid of.”
When Kurosawa looked out at the ruins of Tokyo again, after the firebombings of 1945, he did so without his brother. Over a decade earlier, Kurosawa Heigo had committed double suicide with a Ginza barmaid at a hot springs inn on the Izu Peninsula. It was an all too literary, melodramatic way to die. He had been the favorite son, the academic star of the family, who abruptly left school and home behind in defiance of what was expected of him. He had certain obsessions, including Russian literature and silent film, which he shared with Akira.
This older brother would leave school in his midteens and drift until he found entry-level work in the movie industry. He wrote chirashi, or occasional notes, for early film programs and magazines from the age of fifteen, then started his climb up the ranks. Shortly after the earthquake, Heigo would find a mentor who gave him basic voice training and subsequently a referral. Thus began his career as a benshi, one of the live narrators who were featured performers at silent films of the day, their status in Japan rivaling that of even famous movie actors and actresses. By the late 1920s, Heigo had achieved a precocious notoriety in this profession and cultivated his own devoted following at the theatres where he performed.
Then, as quickly as he had risen, Heigo fell. Sound technology had arrived by the early 1930s, rendering his skill obsolete. He became a strike leader but was fighting a rearguard, losing battle against the studios to keep the “talkies” at bay. Soon Heigo was out of the public eye and adrift again, like a ronin (or masterless samurai, like the “seven samurai,” who are, strictly speaking, ronin). It is the role several observers claim was the one best suited to his character. His younger brother, who idolized and feared him, would follow Heigo down most every strange path he took. At the end, he followed him to that Izu hot springs inn to help their father bring Heigo’s corpse back to Tokyo.
Kurosawa would write that this brother was “irreplaceable” for him, his story one he didn’t want to tell.
Recall, though, that opening sequence in Rashomon. Because by the third and fourth camera setup, as we are taking in the ruined gate from several vantages, human forms become recognizable beneath the twisted wreckage. There are just two of them. Elsewhere, as far as the eye can see, there is no landscape, no other signs of life.
No wonder Kurosawa was appalled by accusations from certain critics at the time, charging that Rashomon won the Venice Golden Lion for its exoticism and had seduced a Western audience with a tale tricked out in lush costumes set in an Oriental past. Because Rashomon’s landscape, in its stark, apocalyptic dimensions—the world all gone, except for this shattered remnant—comes to us from no such place.
Instead, it brings us face-to-face with Kurosawa’s vision of the modern world, indeed of a city—his city—the one he twice saw vanish. He surveyed its destruction once with his brother. Then, as a filmmaker in the postwar period, without his brother except in spirit, he returned to face the ruins and draw a strength from them, again and again.