Something Like an Autobiography - Akira Kurosawa [28]
As I mentioned earlier, this teacher and I lost no love between us. How could he make me say these nauseating things about his great kindness and our sadness at parting with him? And what kind of person was this who could write all these laudatory phrases about himself? My flesh crawled with revulsion, but I took his draft and carried it home with me.
Assuming that this was the custom and there was nothing I could do about it, I sat down and set about copying the speech onto good paper. My brother looked over my shoulder as I worked. His eyes raced over the page I was completing. “Show me that,” he demanded. He took the teacher’s draft and read it standing next to me. As soon as he finished, he crumpled it into a little ball and threw it across the room. “Akira, don’t read that thing,” he commanded. I was dumfounded. He went on, “You need a speech; I’ll write you one. You read mine.”
I thought that was a wonderful idea, but I knew the teacher would demand to see my clean copy of the speech he had written. I’d never get away with it, I explained to my brother. He replied, “Well, then, finish copying his speech and show it to him. Then for the ceremony you just slip mine inside it and go up there and read it.”
My brother wrote an extremely acrimonious speech. He attacked the conservatism and inflexibility of primary-school education. He lashed out with sarcasm at the teachers who honored and upheld this system. We graduates had been living in a nightmare until now, he said; throwing off the chains would let us have happy dreams for the first time. For that day and age, it was a revolutionary address. It refreshed my spirit.
Unfortunately, I couldn’t muster the courage to read it. If I had, it occurs to me now, I’m sure it would have caused a scene like the one just before the curtain falls at the end of Gogol’s The Public Prosecutor. Out there in the audience was my father, looking properly majestic in his frock coat. And the teacher had made me read my clean copy of his speech aloud to him for his final approval before I went up to the podium. Yet I did have my brother’s speech hidden in the breast of my kimono. It wouldn’t have been impossible for me to slip it out and read it.
When we arrived home after the graduation ceremony, my father said, “Akira, that was a fine speech you gave today.” My brother probably understood what had happened when he heard this. He looked at me with a quick, sarcastic grin. I was ashamed. I am a coward.
It was in this fashion that I graduated from Kuroda Primary School.
Keika Middle School
WHEN I ENTERED Keika Middle School, its campus was situated, along with Keika Commerce School (which Uekusa attended), in the Ochanomizu district of Tokyo. It remains there today, sandwiched between the Juntendo Hospital and a broad street. In my time the landscape of Ochanomizu, which means “water for tea”—as witness the Keika school song, “Behold the valley of tea …” and so forth—was considered comparable in beauty to some of China’s famous scenic places, although that was a slight exaggeration.
A passage in the class report of my 1927 graduating class describes both the Ochanomizu topography and me at the time I was in my first and second years of middle school. Since it was written by a friend from that time, I’d like to quote from it.
The Ochanomizu embankment was overgrown with lush wild grasses that gave off a fragrance I can’t forget. That canal side has something ineffably nostalgic about it. When classes finally ended, I would find liberation through the Keika Middle School gates (actually a small gate resembling a rear entrance), cross the wide avenue where the city trolley stopped at Hongō Motomachi, wait for a chance and slip past the “No Trespassing” sign into the thick vegetation of the embankment and disappear. From that point on I was safely out of sight, so I’d pick my way very carefully