Something Like an Autobiography - Akira Kurosawa [31]
Along this path I read Japanese novelists Higuchi Ichiyō (1872–1896), Kunikida Doppo (1871–1908); Natsume Soseki (1867–1916) and the Russian Ivan Turgenev. I read books borrowed from my brother and sisters as well as books I bought myself. Whether I understood it or not, I read everything I could get my hands on.
At that stage of my life I didn’t understand very much about people, but I did understand descriptions of nature. One passage of Turgenev I read over and over again, from the beginning of The Rendezvous where the scenery is described: “The seasons could be determined from nothing more than the sound of the leaves on the trees in the forest.”
Because I understood and enjoyed reading descriptions of natural settings so much at this time, I was influenced by them. Later I wrote a composition that my grammar teacher Ohara Yōichi praised as the best since the founding of Keika Middle School. But when I read it over now, it’s precious and pretentious enough to make me blush.
As I think back, I wonder why I didn’t write about that long red wall I walked along as if being carried on a stream, on my left in the morning and my right in the afternoon. That wall protected me from the wind in the wintertime, but in summer it made me suffer with the heat it reflected from the blazing sun. It’s too bad. When I try to write about that wall today, I cannot do it. And when the Great Kanto Earthquake came, the wall fell down; not a single brick of it remains.
September 1, 1923
IT HAD BEEN a dark day for me, because it was the day after summer vacation ended. For most students it was a day full of enthusiasm for the resumption of school. Not for me. It was also the day of the ceremony opening the second term, an event I always found disgusting.
When the convocation ended, I set out for Maruzen, Japan’s largest foreign bookstore, in the downtown Kyōbashi district. My oldest sister had asked me to pick up a Western-language book for her. But when I got there, the store hadn’t opened yet. More disgusted than ever, I headed for home again, intending to try once more in the afternoon.
Two hours later the Maruzen Building would be destroyed and the horrifying photograph of its ruins sent around the world to show the kind of devastation wrought by the Great Kanto Earthquake. I can’t help wondering what would have become of me if the bookstore had been open that morning. I probably wouldn’t have spent two hours looking for my sister’s book, so it’s unlikely I would have been crushed by the toppling Maruzen Building. But how could I have escaped the terrible fire that engulfed and destroyed central Tokyo in the wake of the earthquake?
The day of the Great Earthquake had dawned cloudless. The sweltering heat of summer still lingered on to make everyone uncomfortable, but the clarity of that blue sky unmistakably foretold autumn. And then about eleven o’clock, without a stir of warning, a violent wind sprang up. It blew my little handmade bird-shaped weathervane right off the roof. I don’t know what relationship this wind may have had to the earthquake, but I remember climbing up onto the roof to put the weathervane back, looking up at the sky and thinking, “How strange!”
Just before the historic tremor, I was back home from Kyōbashi, in the street in front of my house with a friend from the neighborhood. Across the way was a pawnshop. We were crouching in the shadow of its storehouse and throwing pebbles at a red Korean cow that was tethered by the gate of my house. This cow belonged to our nextdoor neighbor, who used it to pull the cart in which he carried feed for his pig farm in Higashi Nakano, then a rural suburb of Tokyo. The night before, he had for some reason left it tied up in the narrow alleyway between our houses, and it had lowed noisily throughout the entire night. As a result, I had not been able