Something Like an Autobiography - Akira Kurosawa [24]
Apropos of fires I remember something else: the horse-drawn fire wagons of those days. They were pulled by beautiful horses, and they were very elegant affairs with things that looked like pure brass sakéwarming bottles on top. I hate fires, but I had long wished to see these fire wagons just once more. My chance came years later on an open set at the 20th Century-Fox studios. It was a scene representing old New York City, and the fire wagon was pulled up in front of a church where masses of purple lilacs were in bloom.
But let me return to the sounds of Taishō. All of them carry memories for me. When I saw the child of the freshwater-clam vendor, who raised a pitiful wail to sell his goods, I felt fortunate in my own lot in life. Noon on a stifling summer’s day when the hot-red-pepper vendor passed by, I remember holding a bamboo rod for catching cicadas and studying the insects’ movement in the oak tree overhead. At the sound of a humming kite string I see myself standing on Nakanohashi bridge clutching the string under a windy winter sky almost strong enough to take it away from me.
If I were to continue enumerating the somewhat sad childhood recollections that arise from sound stimuli, there would be no end to it. But as I sit here and write about these childhood sounds, the noises that assail my ears are the television, the heater and the sound truck offering toilet paper in exchange for old newspapers; all are electrical sounds. Children of today probably won’t be able to fashion very rich memories from these sounds. Perhaps they are more to be pitied than even that freshwater-clam seller’s child.
Storytellers
AS I HAVE mentioned previously, my father’s attitude was one of extreme severity. My mother, who came from an Osaka merchant family and was thus less sensitive to finer points of samurai etiquette, received frequent scoldings about the fish set out on the individual meal trays. “Idiot! Are you trying to make me commit suicide?” Apparently there was a special procedure for serving the meal that precedes a ritual suicide. It seems it extended to the position of the fish on the plate. My father had worn his hair in a samurai topknot as a child, and even at the time these scoldings occurred he would frequently take a formal sitting position with his back to the art alcove and hold his sword straight up to polish the blade with abrasive powder. So it’s probably quite natural that he should have been angry, but I couldn’t help feeling sorry for my mother and thinking it could hardly matter that much which way the fishhead pointed. Yet my mother continued to make the same mistake over and over again. And every time the fish on his tray was pointed the wrong way, my father scolded her. As I think about it now, it could have been that my father’s fault-finding was so frequent an occurrence that she became deaf to it, as the saying goes, “like a horse’s ears in an east wind.”
I’m still not sure how a meal tray is supposed to be presented to someone about to commit suicide; I have yet to put a scene of ritual suicide in one of my films. But when you are served a fish on a meal tray, usually its head points to the left and its belly is toward you to make it easy to reach. If you are going to commit suicide, I gather that it is served with its head pointing to the right and its belly away from you, because it would be insensitive to place a cut fish belly directly facing someone who is about to cut open his own abdomen. This is my assumption, but it is no more than an assumption.
And yet I can’t imagine that my mother would do something no Japanese would ever think of, like serving a fish in such a way as to make it difficult to reach, with its belly away from the person about to eat it. So she must have mistaken only the part about pointing the head to the left or right. And this alone made my father angry with her.
I, too, received my share of scoldings on the subject of mealtime etiquette. If I