Something Like an Autobiography - Akira Kurosawa [102]
I also feel bad about slighting Yamamoto Reizaburo, who has since passed away. He was playing the gang boss who gets out of jail and comes back to recover his woman and his territory from Mifune. I had never seen eyes as frightening as his, and when I first met him I was afraid to get close enough to carry on a conversation. When I finally did talk to him, though, I was surprised at what a fine human being he was.
On Drunken Angel I worked for the first time with composer Hayasaka Fumio. Following this collaboration, Hayasaka would do all of the music for my films up until the time of his death. He would also become one of my closest friends.
While I was working on this film, my father died. I received a telegram informing me he was failing quickly, but I was so pressured to get the picture done for the fixed release date that I couldn’t go to be at his side in Akita Prefecture.
The day I received the news of my father’s death I went out to Shinjuku alone. I tried drinking, but it only made me feel more depressed. Frustrated, I wandered out into the crowds of people in the streets of Shinjuku. I had no objective in mind. As I walked, I suddenly heard the strains of “The Cuckoo Waltz” blaring over a loudspeaker system somewhere. The cheerful brightness of the song threw my black mood into high relief, intensifying my sorrow to an intolerable degree. I hurried my steps to escape from this awful music.
In Drunken Angel there is a scene where Mifune, the yakuza, walks the length of the black-market street in a very grim mood because he has just learned that Yamamoto Reizaburo has come back to take over this territory he has been running. Shopkeepers’ insults confirm Mifune’s sudden loss of power, coupled with his knowledge that he has tuberculosis, and his feelings grow blacker and more desperate the farther he walks.
When I met with Hayasaka to discuss the dubbing of the sound for this sequence, I told him to try having “The Cuckoo Waltz” assail Mifune from a loudspeaker along the street. Hayasaka looked at me with some surprise, but then he immediately broke into a smile. “Ah, counterpoint,” he said. “Right,” I confirmed, “the Sharpshooter.” This expression “The Sharpshooter” was part of a private language Hayasaka and I developed. It referred to a Soviet film released in Japan under that title in which the counterpoint between sound and image was the most magnificent I have encountered. So “Sharpshooter” became an abbreviation for everything involved in the techniques used to achieve such cinematic effects. Hayasaka and I had already discussed the application of these techniques somewhere in Drunken Angel as a kind of experiment.
The day of the actual dubbing we performed our experiment. From a loudspeaker the sound of “The Cuckoo Waltz” flooded over the sorry figure of the gangster Mifune as he walked. Backed by this light music, the gangster’s dark thoughts leaped to the screen with amazing force. Hayasaka looked at me and smiled happily. As Mifune entered his usual little bar and closed the door behind him, the music simultaneously came to an end. Hayasaka turned to me in surprise. “Did you time your editing to the length of the tune?” he asked. I replied that I had not, and in fact I was more than a little surprised myself.
I had calculated a counterpoint effect from contrasting the images of this sequence with “The Cuckoo Waltz,” but I had not measured the actual length of either. I could not understand what had made their timing coincide. I wonder if it could have been that when I heard this music blaring at me after my father’s death in the course of experiencing feelings very similar to those of the gangster in my film, I unconsciously registered its exact length in my brain.
Subsequent to this “Cuckoo Waltz” incident, the same kind of thing happened to me many times. It seems that, no matter what is happening to me in my personal life, I am always thinking about my work without even knowing it. This phenomenon resembles some kind of karma. In fact, my having become a film director,