Something Like an Autobiography - Akira Kurosawa [10]
There is one more incident I would like to relate about my brother. When I was still in my “Konbeto-san” period, my father suddenly decided to start taking us all to the Suifuryu practice pool, which was built out into the Arakawa River. At this time my brother was already wearing a white bathing cap with a black triangle pattern on it and swimming around the practice pool with a first-rate over-arm crawl stroke. I was put in the charge of the Suifuryu teacher, who was apparently a friend of my father.
Because I was the youngest child, my father spoiled me. But how irritated he must have been to see me carrying on like a girl, playing patty-cake and cat’s cradle with my older sisters. He said if I learned to swim and got tanned by the sun—even if I just got a suntan without learning to swim—he would give me a reward. But I was afraid of the water, and I never entered the practice pool. It took many days of scolding by the swimming teacher for me even to get wet up to my navel.
My older brother also accompanied me whenever we went to the pool, but as soon as we arrived, he would abandon me. He would swim straightaway to the diving raft out in the deepest part of the river, and he never came back till it was time to go home. I spent many a lonely and frightened day.
Then one day, when I was finally learning how to kick my feet along with the other beginners, holding on to a log floating in the river, my brother appeared. He came rowing up to me in a boat and offered me a ride. Rejoicing, I reached out my hand and let him pull me up into the boat. As soon as I was on board, he began rowing vigorously out toward the middle of the river. Just when the flag and the reed blinds of the poolside hut began to look very small, he suddenly pushed me into the river.
I flailed with all my strength to keep afloat and reach the boat with my brother in it. But as soon as I came close, he rowed away from me. After he repeated this action several times, my strength drained from me. When I could no longer see the boat or my brother and had already sunk below the surface, he grabbed me by my loincloth and pulled me up into the boat.
Shaken and surprised, I found there was nothing wrong with me except that I had swallowed a little water. As I sat gasping and wide-eyed, my brother said, “So you can swim after all, Akira.” And sure enough, after that I wasn’t afraid of the water any more. I learned to swim, and I learned to love swimming.
On the way home that day my brother bought me some shaved ice with sweet red-bean sauce. As we ate, he said, “Akira, it’s true that drowning people die smiling—you were.” It made me angry, but it had seemed that way to me, too. I remembered having felt a strangely peaceful sensation just before I went under.
A second hidden force that aided my growth was that of the teacher in charge of Kuroda Primary School, Tachikawa Seiji. Some two years after I transfered to Kuroda, Mr. Tachikawa’s progressive educational principles came into direct conflict with the conservatism of the school principal, and my teacher resigned. He was subsequently invited to teach at Gyosei Primary School, where he was responsible for developing a great number of talented men.
I will have more to say about Mr. Tachikawa, but I’d like to start with an incident that took place when I was still behind the others of my age in my intellectual development and very timid about it. Mr. Tachikawa came to my aid and for the first time in my life enabled me to feel what is called confidence. It happened during art class.
In the old days—in my day, that is—art education was terribly haphazard. Some tasteless picture would be the model, and it was simply a matter of copying it. The student drawings that mose closely resembled the original would always get the highest marks.