Beginnings (A Stray Dog Story)
Heigo (left) and Akira as children
In twentieth century Japan, the first work of art called Rashomon dates to 1915, a short story written by Akutagawa Ryunosuke, just twenty-three at the time, who would catapult to an early but lasting fame. In 1927, motivated by what he called “a vague anxiety,” Akutagawa ended his life at the age of thirty-five, in what still numbers among the most significant Japanese literary events of the modern period. It is possible that as a very young boy, Kurosawa had read Akutagawa’s story. It is certain that he knew of its author by the time of the suicide, so far as Akutagawa had come to symbolize the stunning expressive possibilities, as well as the convulsions and apprehensions, concentrated in Tokyo in the 1920s.
By the time Kurosawa was ready to make a period film in the postwar era and to use Akutagawa’s literary work as a starting point, we should consider that the “period” he really means to investigate is not buried deep in prehistory. Rather, it corresponds to one through which Akutagawa himself and Kurosawa’s brother Heigo had lived and died, and that marked the period of Kurosawa’s own birth and upbringing. In other words, the time Kurosawa most deeply enters in the period film Rashomon belongs to a personal past, riven on the one hand by loss and by a survivor’s shame and confusion, and on the other by the experimental spirit that surged across the post-earthquake cultural scene.
Kurosawa Akira was born in Tokyo on March 23, 1910, the last of eight Kurosawa children. At the time of his birth, six siblings were still alive. He made seven. There could have been four, or five, or eight samurai, but there are, precisely, seven. The foundling taken home by the woodcutter at the end of Rashomon will join the six children he already has and become his seventh. We will return to this, because the circumstances of Kurosawa’s life and certain events in the films he would make traffic in loaded numbers.
His birth year is notable for other events. After its startling earlier victories in two foreign wars, against China in 1894–1895 and Russia in 1904–1905, Japan annexed Korea in 1910. This signaled an expansion of the nation’s colonizing ambitions beyond the evident rewards of conquest and the commercial development already begun on the Chinese mainland and in Taiwan. The Taigyaku Jiken, or Great Treason Incident of 1910, led to a notorious trial and to the execution the following year of the anarchist Kotoku Shusui. It exposed a government and a judiciary all too ready to eliminate unruly elements or challenges to its oligarchic rule. The overreach at this time—the widely perceived violation of procedural rights and the extremity of the verdict—would help ignite social movements of resistance in Japan over the first two decades of Kurosawa’s life. The radicalism of Osugi Sakae was seeded here, as was the rise of the proletarian movement, which Akira, at eighteen, would himself join.
Kurosawa’s earliest years corresponded also to the emergence of cinema as an increasingly popular form of entertainment, especially in Japan’s capital. Beginning in 1903 with the Denkikan in Asakusa, whose performance space was devoted to the projection of moving pictures, theatres dedicated to film sprang up throughout Tokyo, including in the area around Oimachi, near where the Kurosawa family lived in the early 1910s and where Kurosawa says he began seeing American serials as a very young child, often in the company of his family.
Doubtless his later memories of this period are colored by the impact of film on perception, something shared not just among cineastes or those who would become professionally involved with filmmaking, but also with the populace at large, including writers, among them Akutagawa. Rey Chow has called this effect “technologized visuality,” arguing further that it proved irresistible for writers who hoped to record the speed and the sudden “cuts” of modernity in their own prose.
For example, here is an early passage from Kurosawa’s memoir, a visually loaded recollection of an incident that occurred well before he entered nursery school, involving a dog, a tram, and his family:
The location is a streetcar crossing. On the other side of the tracks and closed railway crossing gate are my father, mother, and siblings. I stand alone on this side. Between my side and my family’s a white dog scampers back and forth across the tracks, wagging his tail. Then, after he has repeated this action several times and is just heading back in my direction, the train suddenly hurtles past. Right before my eyes, the white dog tumbles down, neatly split in half. The body of the instantly killed beast was round and bright red, like a tuna sliced crossways for sashimi.
The scene is intensely cinematic, as we might expect from a seventy-year-old memoirist who is also a world-class filmmaker, as he transcribes this early trauma. Here is a storyboard of sorts, picturing for us in words one of his earliest memories—a sighting of a “stray dog”—the first but surely not the last of its kind. Taking both animal and human form, such a character would reappear in countless Kurosawa films, Norainu (Stray Dog, 1949) being just the most obvious stray.
The visual field in the scene above is prevailingly monochromatic. Indeed, it is a composition in white, until a blotch of color is shockingly injected into the scene. The child’s repulsion is keyed to color, for obvious reasons. Kurosawa will declare color (red) to be off-limits, going on to describe how it altered even his later eating habits (no tuna sashimi until he is well past thirty). Further, this spectacle comes to us by way of a machine. Not an editing machine as such, the streetcar nevertheless splices the scampering dog. Life in white motion, the cut, then two red pieces.
Film historians have long noted the anachronistic elements of Kurosawa’s editing technique, especially his marked reliance on an outmoded way of transitioning between scenes. It is known from its wide use in early filmmaking as the “hard-edged wipe.” Compared to a fade-out or a dissolve, it is a more dynamic, attention-getting maneuver, by which the editor snatches one side of the frame before our eyes, then drags the figures on it toward one or another edge of the screen, clearing the way for the next frame and another set of figures.
As a small boy, Kurosawa may or may not have witnessed the accident he transcribes. But we have little reason to doubt that he once stumbled upon something that nearly resembled it (say, the exposed innards of a run-over animal on the street). What this word scene dramatizes, though, is the process whereby memory is keyed to perception. A further point is that the perceived site of violence—where it is recollected or reconstructed—is inherently dramatic. As Kurosawa will elsewhere say: “The clarity of my memory seems to improve in direct proportion to the intensity of shock I underwent.”
The “hard-edged wipe” of the tram, in its association with a terrifying scene, ignited the perception of a child and left an enduring impression in the adult Kurosawa’s memory. The hard-edged wipe of the camera gave Kurosawa, analogously, a way to punctuate the smooth flow of the story with a dramatic cut into the action, making both the edges of each frame and the imagery inside them all the more vivid and memorable.
There is an intriguing ancillary storyline that he attached to this stray dog memory. After the incident, Kurosawa’s family tried to compensate for his shock by bringing home dog after dog as a possible pet. Exasperated, Kurosawa identifies each of them to have been a white dog. Far from taking his mind off the traffic accident, these substitutes just kept the killing alive. He protests: “Whenever I was shown a white dog I would fly into a mad rage, crying and screaming, ‘No! No! . . . Wouldn’t it have been better to bring me a black dog?” In either case, the world of substitutions for the lost life would be one seen as white, or black.
Over time, film historians and film industry insiders came to understand that Kurosawa was a restless craftsman, among the most innovative Japanese filmmakers of his generation. Strangely, he seems the one most fixated on the black-and-white films of the 1920s and early 1930s. He never made a film in the silent era, as had Ozu or Mizoguchi, each of whom were making color films by the 1950s. Yet Kurosawa’s Rashomon reveals, in many of its parts, how stubbornly he was in pursuit of a cinematic style that would capture the feverish mood of that earlier time (during which, of course, his brother Heigo had risen to prominence as a film narrator). This was an enabling obsession for Kurosawa, however. It produced a body of work of epic magnitude, unequaled in scale by any director of his time, or even by his own later color films.
Consider this curious fact of cinematic history. Long after movies in color became an aesthetic possibility and were commercially viable, even desirable in Japan (films being able to project color images that the rapidly spreading TV box still could not), and after the older and culturally more conservative Ozu and Mizoguchi had themselves adapted to the color medium, Kurosawa made one black-and-white feature after the other, all through the 1940s, the 1950s—when color was making serious inroads—and even through the color-saturated 1960s. Of the thirty films Kurosawa would direct, twenty-three, from Sanshiro Sugata (1943) through to Red Beard (1965), are in black-and-white. In quantity and in quality, they overwhelm the later, sporadic color productions, despite whatever scenic splendors those films possess. They may even have kept at bay deep-running personal anxieties. Not long after Kurosawa made Dodeskaden in 1970, his first attempt at color, he tried to kill himself—as if he had betrayed something, or someone.
We will return to this, while for now keeping in mind, as he did, how the life and death of that first stray dog became a composition in black and white.
In the late 1970s, as Kurosawa was entering his seventh decade, he started to write his memoir, an autobiographical piece he would publish in Japanese and in English over the next several years. Such a chronicle about oneself is known in Japanese as a jiden. Not quite fiction, it is nevertheless a way of writing Japanese prose that often strays from flat description. A jiden allows the author—the main character in this genre—to “stage” certain episodes of his life, especially those integral to growing up, drawing attention to their special place in memory. This way of writing about the self only became a widespread phenomenon in Japan following the literary reforms of the 1880s.
It is no surprise, then, that throughout this chronicle about his youth, Kurosawa would reveal his indebtedness to a range of modern writers, from Higuchi Ichiyo to Kunikida Doppo, Natsume Soseki to Akutagawa Ryunosuke. They were all born on the cusp or in the Meiji era (1868–1912), as Kurosawa was himself. He makes no conscious presumption of being their equal as a writer. But he does signal an awareness that his project is very much in line with an inward, self-exploratory streak that runs deep in modern Japanese stories, going back over one hundred years.
The literary reform movements of the 1880s in Japan were wide-ranging and wrought changes in every genre of writing. The reforms extended to the literary language itself. To be modern, it was widely debated at the time, writers could not just keep piling up polished sentences. Such a literary style was sufficient, perhaps, for Lady Murasaki’s eleventh century court romances or for the poet-traveler Basho’s seventeenth century lyrical landscapes. But someone living through the serial turbulence of the modern age would require something more. The sudden “opening” of a long isolated country, ushered in by Commodore Perry’s Black Ships, by “unequal treaty” signings, and by a steady stream of translated novels giving readers a seductive sense of how modern life was being lived in Paris or London or St. Petersburg, demanded an opening in literary expression itself.
The first urgency became to tell stories that seemed grounded in reality, less so in literary form. This would require plainer diction, perhaps a simpler syntax, and, above all, characters who did not seem like types—shining princes or star-crossed lovers—but more like flesh-and-blood human beings who were living now. And the place to find such characters, as writers and their readers came by consensus to decide, would be in the personal, confessional voice of the writer. It was as if in a world in constant flux, when even the emperor is photographed wearing a Western-style uniform, anything outward was not to be trusted and only inner feelings—however small-minded or shame-filled—held sway.
Thus, by the 1880s and through these literary reforms, a new kind of Japanese writing was taking shape. From this time on, the thoughts and feelings of a troubled youth—uprooted from the past and uncertain about the future—became the very signature of what it meant to be a modern writer in Japan. It may not be just a coincidence that the first film Kurosawa ever made, Sanshiro Sugata (1943), is set in the Meiji period, indeed in the 1880s, and features a youth who doesn’t know himself or where he properly belongs.
In writing his version of an autobiography, which he called Gama no abura, Kurosawa took on a confessional author’s identity. It is one he doubtless nurtured long before he sat down to write this memoir. The title, which might be translated The Oily Sweat of an Anxious Toad, sounds at first self-deprecatory, but it is also arch and even parodistically “literary.” It refers to a hoary Taoist legend, which by the nineteenth century in Japan would become a staple of vaudeville comedy in rakugo performance. The star of the show is a deformed toad, placed in a mirror-lined box, which grows so anxious over its multiple reflections that it oozes an oily sweat, which in turn is prized for its touted “medicinal” properties (we note that Kurosawa and his crew deployed an array of reflectors and mirrors to cast light onto the forest action in Rashomon, with its multiple “reflections” of what happened there).
Gama no abura—the English version carries the rather less flamboyant title Something Like an Autobiography—is the richest, most complex, if not necessarily a factually precise account of Kurosawa’s personal life, at least from the time of his birth until the making of Rashomon. It contains a number of highly wrought, dramatically charged passages. After Heigo’s suicide, Kurosawa would call his brother a “failed writer,” as if writing might have been his salvation. And Kurosawa took evident pride in his ability to write film scenarios—he often refers to them as “books.” As noted, Kurosawa repeatedly emphasized that the visuals and montage were not the genesis of a film story but that a scenario was, especially one that did not dissociate itself from its roots in literature.
The family drama plays large in his self-chronicle, in ways it seldom does in Kurosawa’s films, at least on the surface. But not all family members have equivalently significant roles. Curiously, his parents are cast as largely background characters, seldom seen close up. More often they appear in far to middle distance, the way parents often emerge in Natsume Soseki’s writings, and Akutagawa’s, too. But the role of siblings, and especially that of a brother, like the role of a stray dog, comes dramatically, and repeatedly, to the fore.
Indeed, after the dog incident, the next powerful memory that Kurosawa will record also happens to be a violent one: “a scene in which my brother is carried home with his head wrapped in blood-soaked bandages.” It is the first mention in the autobiography of this brother, “four years older,” likely in second grade at the time, whom we will come to know as Kurosawa Heigo, the prodigal son and tragic benshi.
At a physical education class held in the yard of their Kuroda grammar school, Heigo had ventured out along a high balance beam and been blown off it by a gust of wind. We observe the verticality of the scene as the author renders it, especially given Kurosawa’s emphasis as a director on visual compositions and camera movements that trace strong vertical or slashing diagonal lines (in contrast to those of Ozu or Mizoguchi, who favor horizontal movements). Such imagery aligns itself, too, with similar expressions of cultural danger or angst across the modernizing world of the nineteenth century onward, ranging from Ibsen’s The Master Builder to Akutagawa’s The Life of a Stupid Man. The latter’s autobiographical antihero, in a maneuver akin to Ibsen’s doomed protagonist, will climb high on the ladders at that Maruzen bookstore, hoping to reach the heights of the translated greats—Dostoevsky, Strindberg, Baudelaire, Nietzsche—all the while fearing an Icarus-like fall.
Kurosawa will turn this incident of his bloodied brother into an occasion to reflect more broadly on his high-strung family. The youngest of his older sisters, Momoyo, on seeing Heigo’s injury, which she took to be of life-threatening gravity, impulsively cried out, “Let me die in his place!” This melodramatic outburst from his favorite sister, herself doomed to die young, leads Kurosawa to a rueful admission near the very start of his memoir about what it was like growing up in such a home and atmosphere. A genetic fatalism creeps into his summary of this incident: “It seems I come from a line that is overly emotional and deficient in reason. People have often praised us as sensitive and generous, but we appear to me to have a measure of sentimentality and absurdity in our blood.”
Yet heredity doesn’t have much of a determining role to play in Kurosawa’s memoir, despite occasional reminders that he is descended on his father’s side from samurai or that a prevailing stoicism and martial discipline guide the family’s conduct. In fact, it is his father whom Kurosawa identifies as the sentimentalist, giving as an example a visit he paid to his parents, who were spending time with relatives at the Kurosawa ancestral home in the Akita region of Tohoku. Kurosawa’s stay would be brief. As his Tokyo-bound train pulls away from the station, he looks back and catches his father gazing wistfully down the tracks as the distance between them widens. Meanwhile, Kurosawa’s mother, also in that scene when it started, is nowhere in sight, having abruptly exited the station as soon as the train took off.
After giving us that scene of his brother’s fall and the bloody bandages, Kurosawa will sharply transition, as if he were making a hard-edged wipe in prose, to recall it was around this time that he saw his first motion picture, though he is in doubt about exactly what film he saw. Was it an American slapstick comedy? Or the one featuring a prison escape (Victorin Jasset’s immensely popular and long-running Zigomar had been released in Japan the year after Kurosawa was born)? He does recollect the atmosphere of the theatre, in the Aomono Yokocho district close to his home in Shinagawa, and the carpeted section of the upstairs balcony, “the whole family sitting on the floor Japanese style to watch the show.”
What becomes clearer as this jiden tracks through Kurosawa’s memories of these early years is that he, Kurosawa Akira, is the real sentimentalist in the family. As for the reckless “absurdity” allegedly running through the family line: it surfaces in his own generation, too, almost like a mutation, embodied in the uncommon force that is Heigo, his older brother.
Kurosawa’s first family home was near Oimachi, in the Oomori section of Shinagawa ward, quite close to Namidabashi—the Bridge of Tears—so named because it led to one of the city’s most infamous public execution grounds of the Tokugawa period (1603–1867). Like much of eastern and parts of southern Tokyo, proximate to canals or to Tokyo Bay, his neighborhood was built on reclamation land. His father, Kurosawa Isamu, was a graduate of the Toyama Military Academy, founded by the government in 1873 to augment traditional fighting methods with Western-style military training. The nation was turning outward, bracing for battles with foreign forces. There was a felt need to master modern fighting techniques and introduce technologies for the making of mechanized weaponry. Curiously, the same technology used in target sights for modern weapons went into the making of the earliest film cameras and their lenses (an irony perhaps unconsciously acknowledged by a director who once made a propaganda film, The Most Beautiful, featuring the manufacture of such optics for use in long-range aerial or artillery combat). Reliance on the samurai spirit and the sword would no longer be enough, now that Japan had moved into the sights of the expansionist Western powers.
By way of analogy, over the years that span Kurosawa’s lifetime, a literature reliant on words—the “sword,” if you will, of Japanese storytelling—would slowly yield its place of pride to machine-driven filmic tales and, more recently, to digital media.
The cult of the samurai paradoxically took hold during an age when warriors had stopped fighting. After almost four centuries of unremitting clan-based warfare, the Tokugawa era is notable for its domestic peace, if one maniacally enforced by the shogun’s strict surveillance tactics. The Kurosawa family traced its ancestral roots to samurai turned landowners, long resident in a rural area in the eastern part of Akita Prefecture (adjacent to a region devastated by the tsunami of March 2011 and by the lingering effects of the Fukushima nuclear disaster). As noted, Kurosawa’s father was born there, before moving to Tokyo after the Meiji Restoration. He would become a teacher and later a director of physical education at a lower school affiliated with the military academy where he had trained. The sports he taught included the traditional martial arts. Kurosawa relates how pleased his father was when he finally took up kendo—fencing with wooden staves.
But his father seems even better known for his efforts to add Western sports to the standard curriculum. He played an instrumental role in making baseball a more central part of physical education, not just in the secondary school system but in sports culture generally in Japan. Kurosawa will lament that the many testimonials to his father’s accomplishments in this area were destroyed in the Tokyo air raids.
Kurosawa further claimed that his first screenplay, also lost, took baseball as its theme. And he repeatedly declared, even at the height of his career, almost as a boast, that he intended to make a baseball film, just as he promised he would make a bigger and better Rashomon in color, or that the period film he really wanted to make, the one that near the end of his life he says he regretted most not making, was one based on Japan’s greatest warrior epic The Tale of the Heike. This episodic, originally oral narrative is set in the same late twelfth century as is Rashomon, a period marked by earthquake, famine, and war, much like Kurosawa’s own time.
Interestingly, although his baseball screenplay is lost, Kurosawa didn’t give up entirely on this sport his father had championed. In Stray Dog, amid their hunt for the middleman who traffics in stolen ration cards and stolen guns, the detectives find themselves at a baseball game in Korakuen Stadium, near to a school where Kurosawa’s father had once taught. And for an extended period—nearly ten minutes of running time—our attention is split between action on the field and behavior in the stands. While Kurosawa is splicing documentary with dramatic footage, we find ourselves going back and forth: from scenes of players warming up and running the base paths, to hawkers selling ice cream, to fans screaming and mopping their brows under the bright afternoon sun. It is as if the film had taken a break from its film noir–like game of detection to indulge its director’s private sentimentalism regarding baseball and its ties to his family past (the elderly detective will later chastise his younger colleague for being too sentimental toward the criminal).
Baseball is in play again in Ikiru. Early in the film, as the old man tries to secure his front door for the night, he will use a baseball bat as a brace. This simple, seemingly routine action triggers on this night the second of that film’s extended flashback sequences. He will recall the game when his son, from whom he is now estranged, got a key hit, only to be picked off base within seconds. The momentarily proud father slumps back down, humiliated.
And in One Wonderful Sunday, the film Naruse Mikio thought to be Kurosawa’s grittiest and most carnal, the young lovers wander forlornly through the city, too poor to go to a concert or to a nice restaurant. But as they pass by one of those debris-filled, bombed-out lots strewn everywhere in Kurosawa’s films of postwar life, they come upon neighborhood children playing baseball. It is a sight so inspiring to the hapless man that he rushes over to join in, suddenly rejuvenated.
As for Kurosawa’s other “intended” project, a remake of Rashomon in color: the much later made, floridly colorful Ran does feature an imposing castle structure, intact at first but headed toward ruin, which will eventually go up in bright red flames. This adaptation of King Lear, however, yields far less dramatic complexity than what Kurosawa had drawn from Akutagawa’s spare, twisted stories. Perhaps it is because a drama about a father and his progeny—a cross-generational struggle—just interested him less. Ikiru, for example, seems perfectly set up to explore oedipal strife between the dying old man and his son angling for his inheritance. Yet this becomes at most a minor subplot of that great film about a dead man walking and his coming back to life.
Curiously enough, given his brother’s profession as a film narrator, Kurosawa’s favorite classic and the one he most “regrets” not having made into a film, The Tale of the Heike, is itself rooted in an oral tradition. These tales began as a sung narrative, borne along by mendicant chanters long before they were written down. Featured here are wars and natural calamities, exile and a culture on the run. Repeatedly, in the wake of every disaster or defeat in battle, the tale will draw out certain Buddhist lessons: of the impermanence of worldly things, of the necessary fall of the proud and mighty. Many episodes highlight alliances but also treachery between warriors. The most famous instance of such treachery involves warriors who are also brothers—surely not lost on Kurosawa, given the intensity and ambivalence of his own fraternal relations, as we will see.
From this we can fairly assume that Kurosawa, without ever making a movie by that name, inserted pieces of The Tale of the Heike into almost everything he ever made. Large structural elements of this medieval epic will make their way first into The Men Who Tread on Tiger’s Tails, then Rashomon, Seven Samurai, and Throne of Blood, as well as into the later color vehicle about doppelganger brothers, Kagemusha (Shadow Warrior), with its remarkable, self-reflexive line: “The shadow of a man can never desert that man. I was my brother’s shadow. Now that I have lost him, it is as though I am nothing.”
Undeniably, Kurosawa was quite conscious and proud of his samurai heritage. He will even reach back to the eleventh century and the murkier origins of the family to observe its connection to the legendary warrior class. He identifies as his ancestor one known to history, the side-switching warlord Abe Sadato, who would fight with and then against the Minamoto clan for control in northern Honshu, until finally he was captured and beheaded (one of his several sons would take the name Kurosawa). His father’s eldest sister and Kurosawa’s favorite, “Aunt Togashi,” had married into another storied samurai family, that of a border captain whose role in history was immortalized in the famous kabuki play Kanjincho. Kurosawa would adapt this play for his purposes in the last film he embarked on at the end of the war, The Men Who Tread on the Tiger’s Tail, which the Japanese censors suppressed, alleging it took a flippant view of history and made a mockery of the classical hero Yoshitsune. (The American Occupation censors would suppress it again, on the grounds that such period films were guided by a “feudal” mentality.)
But beyond declaiming the fact of the family’s ancestral class status or his father’s stalwart commitment to physical education, Kurosawa leaves much else about Isamu’s life strangely obscure. For example, his father would have been of age and, being a graduate of the military academy, would likely have been prepared to serve in combat. Yet Kurosawa makes no mention of his fighting in either the Sino–Japanese War or the Russo-Japanese War, or the reasons he did not. Nor are there scenes that demonstrate his skill level, much less a standout performance, at any sport or martial art he ever taught or championed. We don’t hear much either about how the Kurosawa family fell on hard times and kept moving their domicile, each time “to one smaller and shabbier than the last,” until finally an older sister’s financial support becomes necessary for the household’s survival.
Kurosawa’s portrayal of his father comes into slightly better focus when the subject turns to cinema. Isamu is reputed to have been a strict and demanding parent, especially, as we will see, because of the high expectations he once had for the brilliant Heigo. But Kurosawa’s father was exceedingly indulgent in one area that would have unforeseen consequences for both of his sons’ careers down the line. Though an educator at a time when many in that profession regarded moving pictures to be a decadent, corrupting medium, he liked films and encouraged his children to see them. Kurosawa claims that one of his earliest film memories was of seeing D. W. Griffith’s Intolerance in the company of his father at a nearby movie theatre, the Ushigomekan in Kagurazaka. As it happens, it is the theatre where Heigo would get his start as a live narrator in 1925.
Kurosawa’s mother, given name Shima, was not of samurai stock, but came from an Osaka-based merchant family. Later in life Kurosawa would claim he lacked any real understanding or appreciation of merchant culture, despite his mother’s background. Nor did he show any sustained interest in kabuki—he routinely compares it unfavorably to Noh drama—although it was the theatrical form produced by and for the merchant class. In adulatory if somewhat clichéd terms, he portrays his mother as a Confucian paragon of wifely virtue, an “impossibly heroic creature” or else “a gentle soul” in the face of the constant demands placed on her by her husband, a “military man” of the Meiji era. Kurosawa captures her expression, tight-lipped and stoic, as she receives the news of her older son’s suicide. Whatever emotionalism ran in the family, Kurosawa plainly saw his mother as more of a realist whose feelings inclined in another direction.
Yet Kurosawa never gets around to acknowledging in his chronicle that his mother was the second wife that Isamu married, or that she was the birth mother of only the youngest five Kurosawa children, he being her last. It is a puzzling omission, but not the only one we come upon in this memoir as it unfolds. Even the most important “other” character here, his older brother Heigo, will fall subject to the author’s way of telling a story, but not the whole story, as he writes about his past and his family life. Perhaps he did so out of reticence, or shame, or motives more tangled still.
Although Kurosawa took evident satisfaction in having samurai forebears, and recounts several youthful incidents involving swimming, kendo, track meets, or other such athletic activities, there are relatively few episodes in Kurosawa’s memoir that highlight acts of patent physical courage. Ironically, one of the most memorable is attributed to his mother, this daughter not of samurai but of Osaka merchants:
During the war there was a popular song called “Father, You Were Strong,” 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.
We might recall that in Rashomon, the one character who wields a blade with conviction and lethal authority is the woman. The two men cross swords with intent, but not with assurance or grace, and often are depicted as buffoons who can barely hold the weapon in their hands (the only time the samurai is resolute is when he plunges a dagger into his own chest), whereas the samurai’s wife advances, possessed, toward the husband who has turned on her, the knife in her grip, pointed straight toward this man she will later “confess” to killing. And in Seven Samurai, amid other displays of bravery to be sure, one of the most highly dramatized such acts is that of the dying farm mother. Speared through the back, mortally wounded, she manages to carry her son from the flames of their burning farmhouse, stumbling through shallow water and past a waterwheel on fire, all to save her child.
In his self-portrayal as a picked-on crybaby at school and, after a very slow start, as a better-performing if never a superior student, Kurosawa also depicts himself as an eager though not quite a talented athlete. The several episodes of his derring-do on the baseball field, or at a track meet, or using his kendo skills to fight off some neighborhood bullies, are offset by an almost equal number that admit to a weak physique and lack of upper body strength. Kurosawa will claim to be a good swimmer, though not compared to Heigo, who had earned “a white bathing cap with a black triangle on it” for his “first-rate over-arm crawl.” He recounts an early swim test of sorts, of being in a boat Heigo rowed to the middle of the Arakawa River, then being flung overboard. Kurosawa struggles to stay afloat and to flail his way back toward the boat, which Heigo kept rowing away from him. Only as he begins to sink below the surface does his brother haul him up. Later, on their way home, eating shaved ice, Heigo casually remarks, “Akira, it’s true that drowning people die smiling. You were.” This angered Kurosawa, though he had to agree with his brother, so far as he remembered feeling “a strangely peaceful sensation just before I went under.” (The old man in Ikiru will recall a similar drowning episode in his childhood, spotting his parents on the shoreline, too far away to be of any help.)
This is not to discount Kurosawa’s enthusiasm for swimming, baseball, or kendo—all to be replaced by fishing and golf in later years—or to deny that it contributed to his competitive streak, something Kurosawa used to duel with envious peers, niggling critics, or obtuse studio producers throughout his filmmaking career. But his kendo training as a schoolboy and his pride in being of samurai lineage didn’t turn Kurosawa himself into a warrior or make him take up either sword or gun during the war.
Throughout the 1930s, as the conflict on the continent intensified and the Japanese Empire was fatefully expanding, many in the film industry were being drafted into service. They included Yamanaka Sadao, a period film specialist whom Kurosawa admired for his irreverent take on the classics and cultural stereotypes, including samurai. Yamanaka would die at the age of twenty-nine in Manchuria. Ozu Yasujiro, too, served three years in the army, at first attached to a chemical weapons division that was deployed to Shanghai in 1937, then to Nanjing the year following (where he met Yamanaka just before the latter succumbed to dysentery). Mifune Toshiro, who would figure so decisively as an actor in Kurosawa’s postwar work, from Drunken Angel through to the last black-and-white film, Red Beard (1965), was born in Tsingtao and raised in Dalian, serving in the army in Manchuria as an aerial photographer during the war.
Meanwhile, Kurosawa, about to be conscripted in 1930, was granted another “reprieve.” This time it came by way of a deferment, arranged by an army officer who had trained with his father. Reporting for the draft, when asked his occupation, Kurosawa offers a half-truth, saying he is an artist, not mentioning the bit about his proletarian connections. Clearly, the officer means to protect Kurosawa. He takes notice of the twenty-year-old’s tall but ungainly appearance and weak posture, and proceeds to sign a form classifying the youth unfit for military service. Kurosawa offers no apology or protest that such an exceptional thing was done for him, just gratitude to the officer, his father’s acquaintance, for giving him yet another reprieve and the chance to do something else with his life during the war. He would later say the deferment spared him from certain death.
The enfant terrible of postwar Japanese literature, Mishima Yukio, was spared under similar circumstances. Unlike Kurosawa, though, he created an entire oeuvre out of his yearning for the “sacred death” that was denied to him, and would end his life with a seppuku meant to reenact one. Note that there is not a single scene of ritual suicide—the “honorable” death of a samurai—in any film Kurosawa ever made. Whatever Kurosawa did for his country, during the war or after it, he did so as a filmmaker, and not with a warrior’s sword.
We do well to keep this military deferment in mind, along with his mother’s act of physical bravery, as we puzzle through the ways Kurosawa will come to represent heroism on screen. It is assumed that Kurosawa was not given to “home drama,” or movies about family life, in the way that Ozu was. It is a further given that Kurosawa was a director who featured men, unlike Mizoguchi, who is known as a feministo for his portrayal of women. But the examples offered above, far from the only ones as we will see, should complicate this received wisdom about how Kurosawa represents women but also men. They also point toward where we will likely find and how we will come to recognize the truly heroic characters in the films he embarked on in the immediate postwar period.