Something Like an Autobiography - Akira Kurosawa [29]
Going on down to the water’s edge, there was a flat area just wide enough for a single person to walk on. I would travel along this until I got close to the Suidōbashi area and then scramble back up the bank and onto the street.…
The only reason I did all this was that I didn’t want to go straight home from school. A friend of the same mind was Kurosawa Akira. He and I climbed down the bank two or three times together. Once we stumbled on a pair of snakes mating in a clump of grass. Coiled together, they seemed to be standing up, and scared us badly.
Kurosawa Akira was poor at all subjects but composition and painting. His work was often published in the school magazine. One of these published paintings, a still-life of some fruit, as I recall, left an impression on me that still lingers. The actual painting itself was no doubt even more inspiring. I hear that because he was so talented our dashing young teacher Iwamatsu Gorō showed him special attention.
Kurosawa’s ability in physical education was zero. When he went to the chinning bar, he’d hang there with both feet planted on the sand from start to finish. It made me very anxious. Kurosawa’s voice was also very girlish. I remember a strangely bittersweet feeling as I climbed down the bank and lay down shoulder to shoulder staring up at the sky next to this tall, pale youth.
Reading this, I get the distinct impression that I still had certain effeminate qualities at this age. The only comfort I can find in it is that while my Konbeto-san period was just sweet and indulgent, at least by this time I’d become “bittersweet,” so I guess I had grown up a little.
In any event, the self I see when I think about my past and the Kurosawa Akira that others remember are so different that I am uncomfortably surprised. From the time I adopted the affectations of a boy swordsman I imagined myself to be robustly masculine. What could have happened to cause the writer of the above excerpt to refer to my physical capacities as “zero”? I feel moved to voice an objection.
That I had no strength whatsoever in my arms and simply hung there on the bar is the truth. That I couldn’t pull myself up is the truth. But it is not true that I had zero physical capacities. I did very well in all the sports that don’t require very much strength in the arms. In kendō swordsmanship, which I have discussed above, I reached the top rank. In baseball I pitched, and the catchers were afraid of the balls I threw; when I wasn’t pitching, I played shortstop, and I was renowned for my ability to snap up the infield grounders. In swimming I learned two Japanese-style strokes and later mastered the newly imported Australian crawl. I have never been a fast swimmer, but even at my present age I have no trouble swimming. In golf, as I have mentioned, I’m very bad at putting, but I haven’t given up the game.
However, it shouldn’t surprise me that to my classmates I appeared to have no physical capacities. Our physical-education class at Keika Middle School was led by a former army officer, and he put great emphasis on athletics that required strength in the arms. He had a ruddy face, so we called him Beefsteak behind his back.
Once Beefsteak played a trick on me. I was hanging from the bar as usual, and he tried to push me up over it. I was not pleased to feel myself being forced, so I let go of the bar and fell with all my weight on top of Beefsteak, making him collapse on the sand. Covered with a layer of sand from head to foot, Mr. Beefsteak looked like a breaded cutlet.
At the end of that term I set a new school record by getting a zero in physical education. It was the first time in the history of Keika Middle School.
But something else happened to me in Mr. Beefsteak’s class. We were doing running high jumps, and those who missed the bar were out—it was a competition to see who’d be left as the bar was moved higher. When my