Something Like an Autobiography - Akira Kurosawa [26]
I liked the stories I heard the masters tell in the storytelling halls, but I liked the tenpura on buckwheat noodles we had on the way home even better. The flavor of this tenpura-soba on a cold night remains especially memorable. Even in recent years when I am coming home from abroad, as the plane nears the Tokyo airport I always think, “Ah, now for some tenpura-soba.”
But lately tenpura-soba doesn’t taste like it used to. And I miss something else. The old noodle shops used to pour out the day’s broth in front of the entrance in order to dry the bonito flakes used to make it; they could be reused. When you walked past, the flakes gave off a familiar fragrance. I remember this with great nostalgia. This is not to say that noodle shops never pour out the broth in front any more, but if they do, the smell is completely different.
The Goblin’s Nose
IT WAS NEARING graduation time. I was going down the steep street called Hattorizaka in front of our school on a “Taishō skate.” It was like a giant skateboard or a scooter, with one wheel in front and two in the back. You put your right foot on it, grabbed the handle and pushed with your left foot. I was careening down the hill, holding my breath, when the front wheel hit the metal cover of a gas main. I felt myself somersaulting through the air.
When I woke up, I was stretched out in the police box at the bottom of Hattorizaka hill. My right knee was badly hurt, and for some time I was virtually crippled and had to stay home from school. (My right knee is still bad to this day. Trying to protect it, I seem to do the opposite—I am constantly bumping it on things and hurting it. This knee is the reason I’m no good at putting in golf. It’s painful for me to bend over, so I can’t anticipate the undulations of the putting green very well. Otherwise I would no doubt be an expert putter.)
Around the time my knee healed, I went with my father to a public bathhouse. There we met an elderly gentleman with white hair and a white beard. My father seemed to know him, and exchanged greetings with him. The old man looked at me in my nakedness and asked, “Your son?” My father nodded. “He seems to be pretty weak. I’ve opened a fencing school near here—send him over.” When I asked my father later who that man had been, he explained he was the grandson of Chiba Shŭsaku.
Chiba Shŭsaku was a famous fencer of the late feudal age who had had a school at Otama-ga-ike and left behind many a tale of his prowess. Hearing that this man’s grandson’s school was in our immediate area, I was greedy for fencing lessons and began going there right away. But the white-haired, white-bearded person who was called the grandson of Chiba Shŭsaku did nothing but occupy the highest-ranking position at the school. Never once did he deign to give me a lesson.
The man who did give the lessons was the assistant to the master, and he had a shout that went “Chō, chō, yatta! Chō, yatta!” like a folk-dance refrain. Somehow this shout prevented me from respecting him very much. On top of that, the students were all neighborhood children who approached fencing as if it were a game of tag, and it was all very silly.
Just as I was feeling all these frustrations, the head of the fencing school was hit by an automobile, still a rarity at the time. For me, this was like hearing that the famous feudal swordsman Miyamoto Musashi had been kicked by his own horse. All the respect I had for the grandson of Chiba Shŭsaku disappeared completely.
Perhaps as a reaction to my experience with the Chiba school, I made up my mind to take lessons at the fencing school run by Takano Sazaburo, who had taken a whole generation by storm with his art. But my resolve proved to be no more than that of a “three-day monk.” I knew his reputation, but the reality of the violence of Takano’s lessons surpassed even my imagination.