Forest scene, with witch and two warriors, from Throne of Blood
Even as Rashomon was gaining recognition abroad—the Venice Golden Lion was quickly followed by the Honorary Academy Award it received in 1952—Kurosawa still called his film “a leap of faith.” He knew there was nothing quite like it among Japanese period films of the time. He was aware, too, that his evolving style was testing the limits of local taste or studio patience. As accolades from foreign countries kept pouring in, Kurosawa wryly counted the number of congratulatory messages he’d received from Japanese critics or journalists. He stopped counting at two.
Further complicating his reputation at home was his two hour and forty-six minute production of The Idiot. The full scope of this work’s daring we will never know, because Shochiku—longtime studio home to Ozu and incubator of poignant, often witty and comforting films about “ordinary” Japanese family life—ordered Kurosawa to take the roughly four hour and twenty-five minute print he’d finished editing and lop off about two hours (reportedly, Kurosawa was so furious, he told them to just go and cut the film themselves, lengthwise). As with Rashomon, in which he exhausted his set design budget to satisfy an obsession for a broken gate of monumental proportions, we see, in his uncut ambition to deal with Dostoevsky head-on, another mark of Kurosawa’s will to keep faith with memories of his past. Another cardinal trait of a Kurosawa hero, as we know, is unrepentant stubbornness.
Of course Kurosawa was not alone in his devotion to this Russian author. In the immediate postwar era, Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment became a bestseller in Japan. It had been published in a Japanese translation as early as 1893 and would be retranslated twice again by the time Kurosawa made Rashomon. Moreover, just before the Great Earthquake of 1923, the complete works of Dostoevsky had made their way into Japanese. The Shincho collection of inexpensive editions of world literature, hitting the market in the late 1920s, would further implant Dostoevsky into the nation’s cultural consciousness.
The Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 and Dostoevsky’s subsequent fall from grace in the Soviet Union spilled over into a widespread denunciation of this author’s bourgeois “subjectivism” by Japanese proletarian writers around the same time. But for some—the brothers Kurosawa evidently among them—Dostoevsky’s lacerating examinations of human characters in conflict and his probing of the sickness, or the moral darkness, that can take over a human mind, remained pivotal for their understanding of modern civilization and of their own discontent.
Kurosawa will look back on his early years and say he led a “sheltered childhood,” save for a single incident—the earthquake that befell his city. In its aftermath, still in middle school, he claims a teenager’s indifference to news of the world outside his “greenhouse.” He recollects heading off on Sundays, with his father’s pass, to the racetrack at Meguro, not to bet (he says) but just to look at the splendid animals. We recall how many scenes of sheer grace or raw physicality in Kurosawa’s films, from his work as a first assistant on Yamamoto Kajiro’s wartime Uma (The Horse, 1940), through to Seven Samurai, Throne of Blood, and the Guernica scene of battlefield carnage in Kagemusha, required his assured direction of horses. Around this time, too, as if to reward an interest he had harbored since his days in Tachikawa sensei’s inspirational drawing class, his parents gave him a set of oil paints, which he would take to the outskirts of the city, there to draw pastoral scenes of “country life.”
In the spring of 1927, age seventeen, Kurosawa was about to graduate from Keika chugakko (such a “middle school” in Japan at that time comprised grades seven through eleven). It was the highest level of school Kurosawa would ever attend. He was not an academic thoroughbred, as Heigo had been, at least until his brother walked out on formal education altogether. And so when Kurosawa expressed a wish to pursue painting, it would not have caught his family by total surprise. His father had encouraged the study of calligraphy all along for the discipline it enforced, less obviously for any intrinsic aesthetic value (say, the austerity of monochrome). Still, Kurosawa had observed the impact of his brother’s errant choices and willfulness on his family. He knew that acceptance by a respected art school would be minimally necessary to reassure his parents that he was not just sliding off, like Heigo, into the vagaries associated with the art and entertainment business.
True, his older brother’s big bet placed on becoming a benshi was paying off. By 1927 Suda Teimei was a headline narrator at the Cinema Palace, one of the grandest foreign film theatres in Tokyo. But Heigo was contributing nothing of his quite decent salary to the Kurosawa household and was further estranged because of his perceived nihilism and dissolute way of life. His mother would remind Kurosawa of how often Heigo announced he would not live to see his thirtieth birthday—so clearly did he reckon his fate or remain in the grip of morbid ideas or of suicidal types he’d discovered in Russian fiction, like Naumov, the death-crazed hero of Artsybashev’s Breaking Point. Over the last several years of his life, Heigo chose deliberately to live below his means, in a back alley tenement in a run-down corner of Kagurazaka, keeping with him a girl, still in her teens, and, according to some sources, a child born to the couple. The name of this woman and the existence of this child remain unconfirmed, unknown, and unaccounted for. As we will see, Kurosawa has things to say in his memoir about the woman, whom he knew and even lived with for a time. But he never uses her proper name or tells us what became of her once his brother was gone.
To be filial, then, Kurosawa dutifully took the entrance examination for the prestigious Tokyo School of Fine Arts. The result was the same as when he earlier tested to enter an elite middle school. He failed. Yet Kurosawa resolved to pursue the visual arts regardless, signing up, like any amateur, to get private instruction at a nearby atelier and even succeeded in having an early “still life” accepted at an establishment exhibition. He was uneasy, though, perhaps even ashamed to be indulging a selfish impulse, instead of applying himself to a more stable career or just taking a job to help out his family, who were in worsening straits and had moved repeatedly over the previous ten years, each time to a more cramped or more poorly built residence. Once, when he took the family pass to see the horses in Meguro, he wondered why his father even had such a thing. Left hanging is the thought that there may be a connection between this racetrack pass, his father’s own interest in the horses, and the family’s dwindling finances.
Unbound by any art school curriculum, Kurosawa pored over reproductions of art as models to study and perhaps to emulate. He began to collect affordable books and magazines devoted to the fine arts, the collection later lost when his house in Ebisu was destroyed in the firebombings. Of the canvases he painted and exhibited in the late 1920s, Kurosawa admits to burning them himself, before the war was over, offering no reason why he did such a thing.
As for the artists Kurosawa seems attracted to from the outset, he repeatedly mentions Cézanne and van Gogh. There is a segment in his late color film, the self-consciously autobiographical Dreams (1990), when a young Japanese artist wanders through brightly painted sets. Once, he arrives at a “real” yellow wheat field, whereupon he encounters van Gogh sketching the scene before him and sermonizing about it as he draws. This van Gogh is a really fast talker (not so surprising once we identify Martin Scorsese under the broad-brimmed hat and the white bandage covering a sliced ear).
But there are other connections to pursue, between the French Impressionists and Kurosawa’s initial contact with them, as he was emerging from his sheltered “greenhouse.” For the first time in his life, he found himself on the move, without direction and following no painted sets, out in a world he would call “the labyrinth” of the late 1920s.
The year 1925 marked the start of radio broadcasts in Japan, which Kurosawa credits for bringing “the wind and rain of life” to his ears. The same year saw the enactment of the Peace Preservation Law, which gave the government more sweeping powers than it had earlier commanded to control any assembly or cultural document targeted as a threat to “the body of the nation.” The law was directed especially at anarchists, socialists, and communists, whose numbers on the sociocultural scene in Japan were multiplying throughout the 1920s, inciting countermeasures: periodic mass round-ups of any and all suspected to be subversive. In 1925, whether or not a radio broadcast carried the news to him, Kurosawa was likely oblivious to the deeper significance of this law or the impact it would have on him just a few years down the line.
Meanwhile, in December 1926, shortly before he graduated from Keika, Kurosawa had published an essay in the school literary magazine, titled “A Certain Letter” (Aru Tegami). It is an elegiac piece, an ode to the beauty of the pasture land and fields around Nakano, as he remembered them as a child, that were fast disappearing amid the building crush of an ever-expanding and fast-changing metropolis. To bolster his argument, he cites a short essay, In Praise of Millet, which casts the French artist as a “rebel” against a modernism set to abandon the unsung beauty of the land and tillers in the field. The Millet essay was written by Arishima Takeo, an author who had gained fame for his highly melodramatic novel A Certain Woman (Aru Onna, 1919), written with Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina in mind. Shortly before his death, Arishima lent his pen and his money to help launch the first significant proletarian journal of the day, Tanemakuhito (The Sower; 1921–1923), the name and cover art taken from the Millet painting.
Arishima was already closely associated with one of Japan’s most influential Japanese literary magazines of the early twentieth century, Shirakaba (White Birch), founded in 1910—the year of Kurosawa’s birth—and whose last edition appeared just months after Arishima’s death, in 1923. The magazine was known principally for advancing art as “self-expression” and for an embrace of “universal humanism.” Even if some readers did not quite get what it meant to be “a child of humanity” or a “child of the world,” Shirakaba became valued for its cosmopolitan cultural tastes, especially for the reproductions of European art featured in every monthly installment. For many in Japan, Shirakaba offered the first sighting of a Western painting or a sculpture, ranging from Greek urns and Egyptian statuary, through to Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Rembrandt (the self-portraits), to Blake and Rodin, but with a disproportionate number of issues devoted to the French Impressionists and Post-Impressionists. Cézanne and van Gogh were two of the most repeatedly featured artists, along with profiles of their lives and the impact of their “self-expressive” art.
Like other members of the Shirakaba coterie, Arishima came from a wealthy family. His father was a senior official in the Finance Ministry, who in the late nineteenth century had purchased a large tract of farmland in Hokkaido as an investment. It was a time when that sparsely populated, vaguely threatening hinterland was being developed and “reclaimed” by the central government, eager to exploit the natural resources and the vast, open space of its northern territory.
Some see the reclamation plan for Hokkaido as a warm-up for later, even more ambitious Japanese government plans to cultivate still wider expanses in Manchuria. The “emptiness” that surrounds the gate in Rashomon draws a portion of its allegorical capital from associations with the unsettled, and foredoomed, space of empire and colonizing ambition.
Arishima himself went north to study at the Sapporo Agricultural College, forerunner to Hokkaido University. There he converted to Christianity, entering the famous Free Church founded by the nondenominational firebrand preacher Uchimura Kanzo (who would, in the end, bitterly denounce Arishima as an apostate). After formal study in the United States and travels throughout Europe, Arishima returned to teach at this northern outpost. He became even more radical in his thinking there, inspired by the Russian prince turned anarchist Peter Kropotkin. It was away from the city, precisely as a sojourner in this strange, untamed northern wilderness, that Arishima was first struck by the severity of the class divide between the landed gentry, which he represented, and the farmers who worked the land (class divisions that Kurosawa foregrounds in Seven Samurai). As a teacher at the Agricultural College, he knew the sons and daughters of the “underclass ,” and so this wasn’t just a matter of ideology for Arishima. Before he died, he signed over his patrimony—the tract of farmland his father had bought near Mount Niseko—to the tenants who lived and worked there.
In Hokkaido, too, Arishima had married and started a family. But when his wife contracted tuberculosis, dying at the age of twenty-seven in 1916, he moved back to Tokyo with his three young sons. The oldest of these three, Yukimitsu, had been born in Sapporo in 1911. Decades later, he and Kurosawa would come to know each other well.
In July 1923, less than two months before the calamitous earthquake, Yukimitsu’s father went off, without the children, to the Arishima country estate, located in the wooded mountains around Karuizawa, a fashionable resort town. There, together with his lover, Hatano Akiko, a journalist and a married woman, Arishima Takeo committed suicide. The extended family did its best to shield the children from the sordid details of their father’s death (the couple had hung themselves in the forest; their corpses were not found for a month). But Yukimitsu was old enough to know better than his younger brothers what had happened. He grew up in the shadow of this knowledge, eventually turning resentful toward an illustrious author who was once a close and attentive father to his children, until without warning he left them for good.
Some of us know Arishima Yukimitsu as Mori Masayuki, the stage name of the famous actor who would play the samurai in Rashomon and the epileptic “innocent” in Kurosawa’s version of The Idiot. He grew up sheltered to some degree by his famous family. Arishima Ikuma, Takeo’s older brother, was an establishment painter in the Western style, who had studied in Italy and France. He was a prolific self-portraitist and an early champion of Cézanne. Satomi Ton, Takeo’s younger brother, himself became a novelist known for his crafted, astringent style, unlike his older brother’s (two of his novellas, Equinox Flower and Late Autumn, would be gracefully adapted by Ozu for the screen).
Mori would study acting at the Bungaku za, a shingeki or “new theatre” group, which attracted and produced a generation of distinctive talent for the stage and screen in Japan. Desperate for cash as the war dragged on, Mori turned to film (even the extended Arishima family seems to have lost some of its prewar fortune; his father’s “gift” of the family’s Hokkaido farmland to its tenants further eroded any direct inheritance). Very shortly, he was in demand by many of the most prominent directors of the midcentury, playing lead roles for Mizoguchi Kenji (Ugetsu, Princess Yang Kuei-fei), Naruse Mikio (Floating Clouds, When a Woman Ascends the Stairs), and Ichikawa Kon (Ototo, Alone across the Pacific). While the war still raged, Kurosawa himself cast Mori in two of his earliest film roles: Sanshiro Sugata, Part Two and Men Who Tread on Tiger’s Tails.
It was for his portrayal of the samurai in Rashomon, though, that Mori Masayuki first achieved international acclaim. In that movie, we recall, the third witness to the crime is the dead man himself, played by Mori, who tells us, through an off-screen shaman, that he took his own life in a forest and reenacts the deed there.
To make The Idiot, Kurosawa again cast Mori in a leading role, opposite Mifune (and, to complete the doomed love triangle, Hara Setsuko, as Dostoevsky’s Natasha). Kurosawa decided to transpose Dostoevsky’s St. Petersburg to another cold northern city, namely Sapporo, where Mori had been born. For the many interior scenes of the film, which called for a Western-style house, Kurosawa requisitioned the very one where the Arishima family had once lived. The Idiot was thus shot where Mori spent his childhood years and even in the house where, for the last time, his family was all together, his mother and father still alive.
The entanglements here between the stories Kurosawa is telling on screen and documented events in his own or Mori’s family life give us pause. There are the de facto double suicides of Mori’s father and Kurosawa’s brother in a “country” place (Karuizawa/Izu) away from the city. And especially in the making of The Idiot, there is also a return to the site of an actual domestic tragedy (the mortal illness of Mori’s young mother), authorized by a director who surely knew the Arishima family history and who cast Arishima’s oldest son to play a tormented soul in the Dostoevsky novel Kurosawa is adapting for his own purposes.
This can’t be dismissed as just coincidence, nor does it seem consciously planned. A storyboard or an analysis that contained this much would seem contrived and melodramatic. But for the shock of plain recognition that such things can and do happen at specific junctures in the lives we lead or in the culture we make or value, we need only look into Kurosawa’s black-and-white films, in all of their postwar, cross-cutting intensity. Or we might turn to Dostoevsky himself, who in The Idiot wrote: “For my part, I will merely observe that almost every reality, though it has its immutable laws, is almost always incredible and improbable. In fact, the more real it is, the more improbable it sometimes appears to be.”
Passages like this one might have steadied Kurosawa over the years, giving him the courage to weather public reversals and to keep telling twisted stories, entwining art and life. Far from intending to be artfully deceptive, Kurosawa meant to be faithful to the reality he knew and responsible in the art he practiced.
In the fall of 1945, ashes and exhaustion all around him, Kurosawa was far from beholden to the pastoral quietism of “still life” painting. Whenever stillness is in the air of his postwar films, it is associated with characters who have seen or are about to face annihilation or certain death: the woodcutter’s stunned silence, the x-ray shot of the bureaucrat’s terminal disease, the farmers on their knees in the dust—all of them “still,” in submission to their respective fates. But we know such still shots are just a prelude, a setup for the kinetic energy Kurosawa will suddenly, even recklessly, release, to bring these various dead zones back to life, to get these “mummies,” these victims, moving again.
Already by the late 1920s, Kurosawa seemed to know he was not destined to be a “still life” painter and began to gravitate toward other artistic styles and other media. He starts to notice all around him how much the cultural ground had shifted after the destruction of 1923. Artists now were marching under several banners to bring art out of the studio. Many began to see culture as a construction project (especially after the earthquake), the artwork as an action to grapple with, not an object to contemplate in repose. Marx, Marinetti, and Tzara were very much part of the Japanese cultural fray, as were performance artists, inspired by what they had recently seen on stage in Germany and Russia: aggressive assaults on bourgeois notions of pleasure and of beauty. The Futurists and the Surrealists, but especially advocates of proletarian practice and cultural critique, were working to collapse the distance between a settled art, to be studied and appreciated in a gallery or museum, and the unsettled conditions of everyday life.
Such unsettlement was dramatized by the disastrous earthquake, of course. But it was serially exposed by the government’s sharply enhanced surveillance and censorship law (1925), by the mass arrests of communists or others deemed subversive (1928), as well as by the collapse of world markets (1929) and the ensuing sting of widespread poverty and unemployment. On the film front, 1930 marked the appearance of von Sternberg’s Morocco, which would become a tremendously popular “talkie” in Japan, signaling the imminent demise and wholesale cashiering of the benshi, including Heigo.
All of this seems to have pressed on Kurosawa and moved him to leave his studio. He made a turn toward uncertainty, taking what may well have been the biggest chance in his life until then. Abandoning a bourgeois study of painting, he joined the proletarian movement, if for reasons still bound to certain family issues. The worldwide economic depression struck home. Kurosawa recalculated the cost of his canvases and art supplies, realizing it was more than his parents could bear. But his brother, too, was doubtless a motivating factor. Without Heigo’s example of living life as a series of high wire acts and without his disdain when told of Kurosawa’s newfound political allegiance—“it’s a fever; it will pass”—Kurosawa might not have edged closer toward the real, not metaphorical, risks he took as the 1920s were coming to an end.
Not surprisingly, then, at the point in his memoir when Kurosawa is set to leave studio painting behind and turn to the streets for inspiration, he cuts to a scene that features his brother. He recounts Heigo’s own forced departure from home, of his drifting across the city, a modern day ronin, “moving from boardinghouse to boardinghouse.” The only constants in his brother’s life seem to be his inner demons. Literati in general had shown affection for the Russians, but for Heigo, Kurosawa observes, “Russian literature was an addiction.” His devotion to moving pictures, too, was all consuming. Movies may have their fans, but Heigo was “fanatical.” Long before he became a headline benshi, his brother had incubated strong views about the movies he habitually attended and conveyed them to Kurosawa with irresistible insistence:
I took special care to see every film my brother recommended. As far back as elementary school I walked all the way to Asakusa to see a movie he had said was good . . . I remember waiting in line for the discount tickets, for the late show, and I remember my brother getting a terrific scolding from my father when we got home.
From the age of nine, by Kurosawa’s reckoning, so regularly did he follow Heigo’s voice into one or another Tokyo movie theatre throughout the silent era that at the midpoint of his personal chronicle he can provide a remarkable inventory of the films he recalls seeing over a ten-year period, closely corresponding to the decade of the 1920s. It comprises almost a hundred titles. There is scant accompanying commentary and no critique. Beyond giving us the title of a given film and its director, we are left on our own to gauge how or why each one left an “impression” on Kurosawa.
We can fairly assume that Heigo instructed his brother to see many, most, or all of them (“even I am surprised at the number of films I saw during this time that have survived in the annals of cinema history. And I owe this to my brother”). American directors are prominent: D. W. Griffith, Charles Chaplin, Cecil B. DeMille, Frank Borzage, King Vidor, John Ford, William Wellman, Rex Ingram, Fred Niblo (along with such comic performers as Harold Lloyd, Buster Keaton, and Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle). Conspicuous, too, are the Germans, including those whose careers began in that country, even if ambition or political necessity after the Nazi ascent drove them to Hollywood: Robert Wiene, Ernst Lubitsch, Erich von Stroheim, Fritz Lang, Josef von Sternberg, F. W. Murnau, G. W. Pabst, and Lupu Pick. Elsewhere, Kurosawa will say that Abel Gance’s La Roue had an especially profound effect on him. He acknowledges other French directors: Jean Renoir, Jean Epstein, Léon Poirier, Germaine Dulac, Man Ray, and Luis Buñuel (the latter two not French but whose careers were importantly shaped by the Surrealist movement based there at the time). Besides the Russians—Sergei Eisenstein and V. I. Pudovkin—he notes the Swedish director Victor Sjöström and the Danish filmmaker Carl Dreyer (whose Jeanne d’Arc will feature the saint on trial, against a white background, facing magistrates seen and unseen, elements that seem to be restaged during the woman’s testimony in Rashomon).
Nowhere else in Kurosawa’s memoir are we treated to anything like the detail that Kurosawa pours into the silent films he saw during this ten-year period. There is no such record, for example, of the artwork he saw in reproduction. We are left to conclude that his attachment to these silent films is far more intense than is his recall of paintings, including those he may have studied and tried to replicate. If even van Gogh was important to him in the late 1920s, it had more to do with the example the artist set—to reveal his “self” inside the art, perhaps, too, for the tragedy of his self-sacrifice—and less so for a particular use of color, composition, or anything else that was strictly “pictorial.” Kurosawa never remarks on the irony that van Gogh was finding his own way toward a European “modernism” via examples taken from Japanese ukiyo-e, even as Japanese artists and writers were looking toward Europe for examples to stimulate their own take on the modern.
Any of us might reasonably ask: Is this list Kurosawa rolls out in the middle of his memoir factually accurate? If he reports seeing The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari in 1919, but the record shows the film was not completed until 1920 and not screened in Japan until the following year, does it diminish his account? Or does it redirect us to something other than such facts, to locate a deeper truth about how Kurosawa’s memory and his films revisit and reshape the past? Perhaps it is not just Weine’s film so much as the exact year when he says he saw it we should key on (given that the list is devoted to the 1920s, Kurosawa’s chronology is just slightly “off,” so far as it begins in 1919).
When the woodcutter in Rashomon stops in his tracks and in horror stares at the pair of hands raised in rigor mortis, Kurosawa may be flashing back to another set of dead hands reaching out from the “coffin” near the start of Caligari. He dates seeing this expressionist film to 1919, when he could not have seen it, because it was not yet made or available in Japan. But 1919 is the year when he did see his beloved sister lying dead in her own coffin. The same year marked Heigo’s fall from academic grace, the beginning of his exile from the family, and his ronin-like movement toward the primary dramatic narrative of his own life: his rise and fall in the movie business.
Perhaps we should look upon Kurosawa’s detailed record of the silent films that were memorable to him, spanning 1919 and 1929, as an expression of his gratitude. In a crucial way, silent films kept him and his older brother together over a ten-year period when other factors might have driven them apart. For Kurosawa, silent films filled a physical and an emotional void in his life—a departed sister, an estranged brother—and so he remembered them, as he might remember Lilian Gish or Rudolph Valentino, because for him they were playing a double role.
The cinematic line Kurosawa strings across this decade also helps us understand his move from being a painter of “still life” to one of life in motion as a member of the proletarian collective. Kurosawa was a voracious reader but not a systematic thinker (Mishima once made this point, saying Kurosawa’s ideas were those a middle schooler might have, albeit from a time when Japanese chugakko were really good). Kurosawa admits to contact with Das Kapital, also to mystification about the inner workings of the Marxist “dialectic.” It is unlikely he embraced the proletarian movement from anything he read or from elaborate political convictions.
Rather, he appears gripped by the same sort of “vague anxiety” that the author Akutagawa had identified as his reason for leaving the world. But Kurosawa used his anxiety, or such “dissatisfaction” as he felt about the Japanese present or near future, to move in the opposite direction—that is, to engage the world with hope and a will to change it. Kurosawa sensed how much was roiling and in constant motion outside anyone’s “studio” in Tokyo in the 1920s, such that “still life” painting would come to seem small, a decorous frame better fit for another time and place. Proletarian art offered the promise of a larger canvas. In place of fruit or flowers arranged in a bowl or a vase, it gave Kurosawa license to paint people in agitated motion, workers massing together, seen close up, as if they were heroic (the way the neighborhood women, en masse, confront the bureaucrats and propel the action in Ikiru, or how the students gather in stirring protest near the start of No Regrets for Our Youth).
No doubt the silent films Kurosawa had taken in all along, at his brother’s encouragement or insistence, fed his need for a larger canvas on which to project his artistic vision. Before he signed up to make proletarian art, the experience of joining the masses in the darkness of a movie theatre in a bustling part of town had already provided Kurosawa with a larger screen and a more public space. Silent films had given him cause to move, as he would, toward an art more in gear with the turmoil of the era.
Kurosawa was just thirteen when the earthquake struck. The shock of what he saw then imprinted itself on the backs of his eyelids. But the ensuing social unrest is something he claims ignorance of, tucked away as he was in his adolescent “greenhouse.” Kurosawa surely sensed, though, that the cultural ground around him was opening up. Set to give the graduation speech at Kuroda Elementary just before the earthquake, he nevertheless knew it was time to read the “revolutionary” address his brother wrote for him, even if he was “a coward” and not yet ready to read it.
Not just buildings lost their shape when the earthquake broke the surface on which they stood. Perceptions were also skewed, or else became attuned to a new world, where instabilities were to be expected. Collages start to replace “still life”; short stories break into shorter, banal or aphoristic pieces. Even local or rural places, celebrated in tradition, appear to be tottering and losing their identities. The familiar now lies at an angle. Akutagawa apprehended this shift perhaps much earlier, but wrote about it tellingly after the earthquake:
He was living in the upstairs room of a house in the suburbs. The second story tilted oddly because the ground was unstable.
In that room, his aunt would often quarrel with him, though not without occasional interventions from his adoptive parents. Still, he loved his aunt more than anyone. She never married, and by the time he was twenty, she was an old woman close to sixty.
He often wondered, in that suburban second story, if people who loved each other had to cause each other pain. Even as the thought crossed his mind, he was aware of the floor’s eerie tilt. (from The Life of a Stupid Man)
By 1928, news of the turmoil outside—the mass arrest of communists in March, the assassination of a Chinese warlord, and heightened adventurism on the continent—no longer seemed so distant. Unbeknown to his family, Kurosawa begins commuting to the Proletarian Art Research Institute in the Toshima district of northern Tokyo. The following year, he would formally join the All-Japan Federation of Proletarian Arts. By doing so, he became part of a very broad-based movement, which included fiction writers, cultural and social critics, as well as visual artists and filmmakers.
Proletarian art and criticism had become indeed a dominant cultural force, a testament to how widespread and long-standing were voices in Japan calling for revolutionary change along with “a new art for a new world.” Kotoku Shusui, the anarcho-socialist inspired by Kropotkin who was arrested the year of Kurosawa’s birth (1910) and executed the following year on exaggerated charges of treason, signaled a beginning of subversive political and cultural expression in modern Japan. By the mid-teens, Osugi Sakae would take up the anarchist banner, joined by radical feminists such as Ito Noe, who would become his lover. In the vigilante terrorism after the earthquake, the police captured and murdered this “subversive” couple. The police officer who oversaw their actual killing, Amakasu Masahiko, would go on to become the head of Manei, the film production company the Japanese military set up in Manchuria during the war (the composer Sakamoto Ryuichi plays Amakasu in Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor).
As earlier noted, The Sower, appearing in 1921, augured a succession of proletarian and counterculture journals that would emerge throughout the decade. One journal-producing art group of particular significance was Mavo, begun just months after the earthquake, which attracted artists across the oppositional spectrum. It became the hub of the experimental avant-garde in Japan, drawing on German expressionist energies, as well as on post-Bolshevik constructivists. At the outset, the Mavo group relied on “self-expressive” acts. Any notion here of making art “for the people” was based on a prior demand for personal revolution—a liberation of the self. Led by the charismatic performance artist Murayama Tomoyoshi, Mavo took as its rallying cry “from the atelier to the streets.” A Dada-like spontaneity, a disdain for beauty, a Futurist mixing of media (theatre, painting, music, dance), the randomness of collage, were underscored in the manifestos and mission statements produced by Mavo in its early phase.
Murayama and his group saw the destruction of Tokyo in the earthquake of 1923 as a tabula rasa, the vast material and human loss as an urgency: to pick up the pieces of a broken world and create a new one, though with no need of a governing politics or a predictable cultural order. Such were the currents surging through and reanimating the desolate urban space of post-earthquake Japan.
By the time Kurosawa joined the All-Japan Federation of Proletarian Arts, one of its leaders was Okamoto Toki. He was a former member of Mavo, who by the late 1920s had come to reject its self-expressive permissiveness. No longer content with the experimental avant-garde, Okamoto and some other Mavo members moved to embrace a more organized commitment to social liberation. Kurosawa never mentions Okamoto in his memoir. But Okamoto, writing in Akahata (Red Flag) in 1966, vividly recalls the young Kurosawa’s proletarian art and specifically a massive watercolor, Meeting at the Construction Site. Traits evident in his proletarian paintings of the late 1920s, Okamoto argues, would re-surface in Kurosawa’s postwar black-and-white films:
A youth, full of energy, showed up at our Proletarian Artists Research Studio, and very rapidly became a champion of proletarian art. This painting is a depiction of struggle at a construction site. It is a large-scale watercolor, and what struck me about it were the many contentious lines criss-crossing over the entire surface. There is dynamism and a bright spirit in the painting, even if it showed signs of not being fully worked out, and so lacking in a certain persuasive force.
Of course he had only been in our studio to study for six months, before graduating and becoming a full-fledged member of our collective. In that sense, what he produced was not a perfected artistic style, rather one that shows someone still grappling with the medium.
Those were tumultuous, turbulent days. The painter of this watercolor would become famous, and is now recognized worldwide as a great movie director. So everyone knows him for his work in film. On the other hand, his work from these early years is barely known to anyone.
But if we look at the scale and the layered depths of his paintings from that time, we can detect the beginnings of an artistic vision that is evident in his films, as well as elements of his distinctive, personal style.
Meeting at the Construction Site
Five of Kurosawa’s works from his proletarian period were shown at the Second All-Japan Federation of Proletarian Arts Exhibition, held in Ueno at the Municipal Art Museum, December 1–15, 1929. Three were oil paintings: Farmers—A Study, Against the Imperialist War, and For a Farmers’ Cooperative. Additionally, there was a poster, For Labor Unions, and what seems to have been the most attention-getting piece of all: a large-scale watercolor titled Meeting at the Construction Site, which so impressed Okamoto. All of these works are lost. There is a black-and-white photograph of the watercolor and of two other posters Kurosawa thought to exhibit but never did, titled Give Workers Unemployment Insurance and Join Our Rally—“Total Opposition to the Imperialist War.”
The photographs show distinct traces of Soviet influence, if also the barbed satire of the German artist George Grosz, who had been enthusiastically advanced by the Mavo group years earlier. Proletarian critics of the time recognized Kurosawa’s talent and promise but, like many of his postwar film producers, found fault with his “message,” as if it were split or confusing to the point of being meaningless.
Kurosawa knew early on that the kind of socialist realism called for in proletarian art was not his style (if it had to be “realism,” he says he preferred Courbet, that is, a moodier realism, a lushness of shadow). And so his work in the exhibition was subjected to predictable criticism: too much Expressionist energy, too much Futurism, too much romantic melodrama. “For all his technical skill,” one critic wrote, “Kurosawa’s handling of his subject is too academic and formal. Avant-garde flourishes obstruct a straightforward realism.” The overall thrust of the critique was that Kurosawa should get his hands dirty and become a manual laborer before he tried to paint “labor” again.
Kurosawa’s debut at the All-Japan Federation of Proletarian Arts Exhibition of 1929 would have no follow-up (it seems he attempted to exhibit two works in the same show the following year, but they were “withdrawn,” or perhaps rejected). We may recall that 1929 also marks the “end” of Kurosawa’s catalog of memorable silent films and was also when his brother Heigo would narrate his last films at the Cinema Palace before moving to Asakusa’s Taishokan for what would be his final stand as a benshi.
But a sense of being born and growing up as an artist amid intense worldwide struggles in cultural exchange with writers, thinkers, and artists from many foreign quarters surely contributed to the raw ambition of Kurosawa’s postwar film work. Okamoto is right to trace the monumental, heroic style of Kurosawa’s allegories back to a boldness already evident in Kurosawa’s 1920s paintings, when he meant to advance, according to his own best lights, an utopian and increasingly desperate cause.
By 1930, we see Kurosawa already backing away from proletarian art, perhaps in frustration that he could not make his style more correct in the eyes of the movement’s arbiters. He does not retreat from the world, however. Rather, he follows through more resolutely on a call sounded throughout the 1920s, whether by the experimental avant-garde or by the Marxists: to leave art, as such, behind and take action to the streets.
In other words, painting, even if associated with a political art meant to spur dramatic social change, is something Kurosawa now puts down and walks away from. For a period of nearly two years, Kurosawa will go underground. He becomes a courier for proletarian publications, passing messages between clandestine cells. He did so at risk. The arrest and interrogation scenes in No Regrets for Our Youth, the first film he made in the postwar period, no doubt gather their dramatic force from Kurosawa’s agitated memory of such experiences.
When he left the studio for the streets, Kurosawa doubtless calculated that the risk was worth the chance of effecting some significant change in society, at the least a way to slow down or degrade the build-up of an imperialist regime. But as the 1920s ended, the shadows were deepening. The coming years, 1930–1933, brought diminishing light or comfort to anyone who hoped to alter the course of things to come and to the personal lives of the brothers Kurosawa. The news just grew more desperate as the government closed the door firmly on challenges to its rule. The utopia envisioned by many revolutionaries across the ideological divide—an East Asia “liberated” from the Western powers—was now usurped and redefined by the nationalist right. The Japanese government would paint its military expansion and colonial occupation as a bucolic landscape where all Asians were brothers, linked in mutual “co-prosperity.” Such a landscape made the 1930s an especially treacherous time for anyone attempting to use imagery or language to eke out the truth, instead of giving in to the half-truth or the lie.
Around this time, too, silent films were coming to an end, a cultural footnote to the more encompassing silence of a nation about to embark on a total war. As for Kurosawa’s brother, unemployed and adrift again: he would take one last train, to the country, and there fulfill the destiny he had always said lay in wait for him.