Something Like an Autobiography - Akira Kurosawa [32]
At that point I heard a rumbling sound from beneath the ground. I was wearing my high wooden clogs, and in order to hit the cow I was moving my body, so I didn’t feel the earth move. What I noticed was that my friend who had been squatting next to me suddenly stood bolt upright. As I looked up at him, I saw that behind him the wall of the storehouse was crumbling and falling—toward us. I stood up in a hurry, too.
Because I was wearing high clogs I couldn’t keep my balance on the rippling ground, so I took them off and carried one in each hand. Like someone on a boat in heavy seas, I lurched and ran to where my friend stood with his arms wrapped around a telephone pole for dear life. I did likewise. The pole was waving around crazily, too. In fact, it was snapping its wires into thousands of little pieces.
Then, before our eyes, the two storehouses belonging to the pawnshop started shedding their skins. They shuddered and shook off their roof tiles and then let go of their thick walls. In an instant they were skeletons of wooden frame. It wasn’t just the storehouses that were doing this either. The roof tiles of all the houses, as if they were being put through a sieve, suddenly danced and shook and slipped off. In the thick dust the roof beams lay revealed.
Isn’t it remarkable how well Japanese houses are built? In this situation the roof becomes light and the house doesn’t collapse. I remember thinking these thoughts as I stood clinging to the violently shuddering telephone pole. But this doesn’t mean that I was calm and collected. Human beings are funny creatures—if they are too severely startled, one part of the brain is often left out entirely and remains strangely composed, thinking about something completely unrelated. But my poor brain, which in this moment contemplated Japanese domestic architecture and its capacity to withstand earthquakes, in the next moment became feverish with concern over my family. I set out at a breakneck run for my house.
The front gate had lost half of its roof, but it stood solidly without even a list to one side. But the stone walk from the gate to the front entrance of my house was blocked by a mountain of roof tiles that had fallen from the buildings on either side. I could hardly see the front door. My family must all be dead.
Strangely enough, the feeling that came over me at that moment was not one of grief, but rather a deep resignation. The next thing that occurred to me was that I was all alone in the world. Looking around me and wondering what to do, I saw the friend I had left holding on to the telephone pole come bursting out of his house with all the members of his family. They stood in a group in the middle of the street. Thinking there was not much else I could do under the circumstances, I decided to stay with my friend, and I started walking toward them.
As I approached, my friend’s father started to say something to me, but then stopped suddenly. He walked past me and stared at the front of my house. Following his gaze, I turned around and looked back. There were all the members of my family coming out of the front gate. I ran like one possessed. Those I had thought dead were not only safe, but appeared to have been worried about me. As I ran to them, they welcomed me with relief visible on their faces.
You would think I would have burst into tears as I ran to them. But I didn’t cry. In fact, I couldn’t cry. It was impossible for me to cry because my brother began to scold me with a vengeance. “Akira! What’s the meaning of this spectacle? Walking around barefoot—what slovenliness!” Looking at them, I saw that my father, mother, sister and brother all had their clogs on. I hastened to put my high clogs back on, and I felt terribly ashamed. Of all the members of my family, I was the only one who had conducted himself in a disorderly fashion. To my eyes it looked as if my father, mother and sister were not in the least perturbed. As for my brother, he was not only calm in the face of the Great