Something Like an Autobiography - Akira Kurosawa [16]
The latter trip was my own choice. Mr. Tachikawa had left Kuroda Primary School, but Uekusa and I continued to visit him at his home. We passed many a fulfilling day in the atmosphere of free education and respect for individuality he created, and the warm hospitality his wife provided. No matter what my other duties, I was unable to forgo these precious hours.
In order to carry out this daily program, I had to leave home before dawn in the morning, returning after sunset at night. It occurred to me to try to evade the shrine visits, but my father prevented that. Telling me it would provide a record of my piety, he gave me a little diary in which I was to receive the imprint of the shrine seal every morning.
There was no way out. My innocent request for kendō lessons had brought me a load of unexpected tasks. But I had asked for it, so there was nothing I could do. My father accompanied me to the Ochiai fencing school when I applied for admission, and, beginning the very next morning, I followed this rigorous daily schedule for several years, until I graduated from Kuroda Primary School. The only surcease came on Sundays and during summer vacation.
My father did not permit me to wear tabi socks with my wooden clogs, even in winter. So in the cold season my feet were pitifully chapped and frostbitten. It was my mother who attempted to rescue me with hot foot baths and medication.
My mother was a typical woman of the Meiji era, Japan’s age of swift modernization, during which women were still expected to make extreme sacrifices so that their fathers, husbands, brothers or sons could advance. Beyond that, she was the wife of a military man. (Years later when I read the historical novelist Yamamoto Shugoro’s Nihon fudoki [An Account of the Duties of Japanese Women], I recognized my mother in these impossibly heroic creatures, and I was deeply moved.) In such a way as to escape my father’s notice, she would listen to all my complaints. Writing about her like this makes it sound as if I am trying to set her up as a model for some moral tale. But that is not the case. She simply had such a gentle soul that she did these things naturally.
In the first place, I believe that things were the opposite of what they appeared on the surface. My father was actually the sentimentalist, and my mother the realist. During the war years, when I visited my parents in Akita Prefecture, to which they had been evacuated, I had to part with them under conditions that meant we might never meet again. I was on a lonely road that stretched off into the distance from the front gate of the house. I kept looking back over my shoulder at my parents standing there to see me off. It was my mother who immediately turned and hurried back into the house. My father kept standing there perfectly still, looking in my direction, until he appeared as small as a bean.
During the war there was a popular song called “Father, You Were Strong” (“Chichi yo, anata wa tsuyokatta”), 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.
Afterward the doctor arrived, used pincers to peel away the blackened skin and applied medication to her charred hands. I could hardly bear to watch. But my mother’s facial expression never betrayed the slightest tremor. Nearly a month passed before she was able to grasp something in her bandaged hands. Holding them in front of her chest, she never uttered