Something Like an Autobiography - Akira Kurosawa [2]
However, I believe Kurosawa’s reluctance to continue his autobiography beyond 1950 stems not only from the maxim “If you can’t say anything nice …” These events and people truly are too close in the past. Kurosawa has not yet retired from filmmaking, and to complete one’s autobiography must be to complete all statements about one’s life. My suspicion is that he will never catch up with himself and the urgency he feels to express himself in his primary medium, that of the film. He has, in fact, admitted that he hopes to end his life in the midst of his work, by collapsing on the set.
Kurosawa in his own preface to this book expresses the fear that anything he has to say about himself will end up being about movies. Of course there are many anecdotes about the making of particular films here, and much more about his movie-making methods and attitudes in general. Yet the autobiography of Kurosawa Akira is not exclusively about movies.
In large part, this work affords a first-person glimpse of an era and place very little known to us in the West. Kurosawa was a boy in Taishō Japan (1912–1926), when country life was still robust but peaceful with a nineteenth-century kind of slowness. City culture was beginning to absorb the ideas of the whole outside world—Symbolism, avant-gardism, the Russian revolution, new democracy, Dada, new technology. Kurosawa experienced both city and country life, and grew up in a household that combined the most modern with the most traditional philosophies. His autobiography, much of which is devoted to this growing-up period, thus provides a sweeping yet personal portrait of pre-war Japan.
The personal experience of an artist in wartime, with all the frustrations of thought control and censorship, also emerges as a strong theme. The fact that his directing career could begin only after Japan had entered the Pacific War lends special poignancy to his struggles with the censors. The self-chastisement of the artist in his seventies looking back on the burning desire of youth to create has moved me more than once in the course of this translation. And some descriptive passages, notably those on the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923, were so disturbing I had to stop and come back to them another day.
It has been a great privilege to engage in this endeavor; to work with Mr. Kurosawa himself and his producer/script girl/archivist Miss Teruyo Nogami; with the support of the Japan Society of New York and its Education and Communications Director, Peter Grilli; and with the understanding, precision and guidance of Charles Elliott as editor at Alfred A. Knopf. But it all came about from that first meeting over coffee in 1977, which set the tone for my relationship with Mr. Kurosawa.
I expected an aloof ogre. I was far too intimidated to bring a tape recorder, and only hoped my ignorance would not offend him. My journalist’s duties—to ask about those troublesome times of the last decade or so—were forgotten along with my composure. Too agitated to ask about anything so personal, I stumbled through the formalities and then finally hit upon the idea of asking Kurosawa about his impressions of Naruse Mikio, a director he assisted on one picture in 1938, and who is as little known in Japan today as he is in the United States. From anecdotes about Naruse we progressed to talk about Enomoto Ken’ichi, who starred in Kurosawa’s 1945 The Men Who Tread on the Tiger’s Tail and who was one of the most popular comedians of the immediate prewar and wartime era. Most of the films in which he appeared, including many by Kurosawa’s mentor Yamamoto Kajirō, have been lost, so few people know about him today.
The shy gentleman wearing sunglasses who answered my questions soon became enthusiastically involved in reminiscing. These were people and experiences obviously dear to him, but nearly forgotten. He seemed pleased to recall them,