Something Like an Autobiography - Akira Kurosawa [12]
When I try to write about Uekusa and me when we were students at Kuroda Primary School, all I can remember is the two of us like tiny dots of human figures in an Oriental landscape painting. I see us standing beneath the wisteria arbor on the school grounds, the clusters of flowers waving in the wind. I see us walking up the slope of Hattorizaka, or up Kagurazaka hill. I see us under a huge Zelkova tree busily nailing up straw dolls to exorcise evil spirits during a shrine visit at the Hour of the Ox, between two and four a.m. In every instance the landscape comes to mind with glistening clarity, but the two boys remain nothing more than silhouettes.
Whether this lack of distinctness is due to the passage of so much time, or whether it has something to do with my personality, I can’t tell. Whatever the cause, it requires a special effort for me to recall the detailed characteristics of these two boys. I have to do something equivalent to removing the wide-angle lens from the camera and replacing it with a telephoto lens, then looking once again through the viewfinder. And even this isn’t enough. I need to concentrate all my lights on these two boys and stop down the lens so as to record them clearly.
Well, then, looking at Uekusa Keinosuke through my telephoto lens, I now see that, like me, he was someone who differed from the rest of the students at Kuroda Primary School. Even his clothes were different: he wore some kind of silk-like flowing material, and his hakama trousers weren’t the usual duck cloth, but a soft fabric. The overall impression was that of a stage actor’s child. He was like a miniature player of lover-boy roles, the kind you can knock over with one punch.
Speaking of knocking him over with one punch, Uekusa the primary-school student was always falling down and crying. I remember him falling once on a stretch of bad road and ruining his fancy clothes. I accompanied him as he cried all the way home. Another time, at a track meet, he fell in a mud puddle and turned his sparkling white athletic outfit pitch black; I had to try to comfort him while he blubbered.
The saying goes that birds of a feather flock together. Crybaby Uekusa and I felt something in common; we were drawn to each other, and soon we were playing together continually. Gradually I came to treat Uekusa the way my older brother had treated me.
Our relations are very frankly described in the passage about the track meet in Uekusa’s novel. Once Uekusa, who always came in last in any race, for some inexplicable reason was running in second place. I rushed up behind and shouted, “Good! Good! Come on, come on!” Together we ran the last stretch and leaped across the finish line into the open arms of the beaming Mr. Tachikawa.
When the meet was over, we took our prizes—colored pencils or paints or whatever—and went to see Uekusa’s mother on her sickbed. She cried tears of joy and kept thanking me on her son’s behalf. But, looking back on it all now, I am the one who should have been saying “Thank you,” because while this weakling Uekusa made me feel protective toward him, I somehow at the same time became someone the school bully could no longer push around.
Mr. Tachikawa seems to have looked favorably on our friendship. He once called me in for consultation as the class president and asked me what I thought of appointing a vice president. Thinking this meant I had been doing a poor job as president, I fell into a dark silence. Mr. Tachikawa studied my expression and asked whom I would recommend. I named one of the best students in the class. Mr. Tachikawa said that he would prefer to try putting a less impressive student in that position. I stared at him in surprise. He went on to say with a big smile that if we put someone who was not very good in the job now, that person would be sure to shape up and prove worthy. Then, addressing me as my classmates did, he said, “So,