Something Like an Autobiography - Akira Kurosawa [34]
We ourselves went to look for relatives who had been burned out in the fires around the Ueno district. Simply because my father had a full beard, he was surrounded by a mob carrying clubs. My heart pounded as I looked at my brother, who was with him. My brother was smiling sarcastically. At that moment my father thundered angrily, “Idiots!” They meekly dispersed.
In our neighborhood each household had to have one person stand guard at night. My brother, however, thumbed his nose at the whole idea and made no attempt to take his turn. Seeing no other solution, I took up my wooden sword and was led to a drainage pipe that was barely wide enough for a cat to crawl through. They posted me here and said, “Koreans might be able to sneak in through here.”
But there was an even more ridiculous incident. They told us not to drink the water from one of our neighborhood wells. The reason was that the wall surrounding the well had some kind of strange notation written on it in white chalk. This was supposedly a Korean code indication that the well water had been poisoned. I was flabbergasted. The truth was that the strange notation was a scribble I myself had written. Seeing adults behaving like this, I couldn’t help shaking my head and wondering what human beings are all about.
A Horrifying Excursion
WHEN THE HOLOCAUST had died down, my brother said to me in a tone betraying his impatience to do so, “Akira, let’s go look at the ruins.” I set out to accompany my brother with the kind of cheerfulness you feel on a school excursion. By the time I realized how horrifying this excursion would be and tried to shrink back from it, it was already too late. My brother ignored my hesitation and dragged me along. For an entire day he led me around the vast area the fire had destroyed, and while I shivered in fear he showed me a countless array of corpses.
At first we saw only an occasional burned body, but as we drew closer to the downtown area, the numbers increased. But my brother took me by the hand and walked on with determination. The burned landscape for as far as the eye could see had a brownish red color. In the conflagration everything made of wood had been turned to ashes, which now occasionally drifted upward in the breeze. It looked like a red desert.
Amid this expanse of nauseating redness lay every kind of corpse imaginable. I saw corpses charred black, half-burned corpses, corpses in gutters, corpses floating in rivers, corpses piled up on bridges, corpses blocking off a whole street at an intersection, and every manner of death possible to human beings displayed by corpses. When I involuntarily looked away, my brother scolded me, “Akira, look carefully now.”
I failed to understand my brother’s intentions and could only resent his forcing me to look at these awful sights. The worst was when we stood on the bank of the red-dyed Sumidagawa River and gazed at the throngs of corpses pressed against its shores. I felt my knees give way as I started to faint, but my brother grabbed me by the collar and propped me up again. He repeated, “Look carefully, Akira.”
I resigned myself to gritting my teeth and looking. Even if I tried to close my eyes, that scene had imprinted itself permanently on the backs of my eyelids. In this way, convincing myself it was inescapable, I felt a little bit calmer. But there is no way for me to describe adequately the horror I saw. I remember thinking that the lake of blood they say exists in Buddhist hell couldn’t possibly be as bad as this.
I wrote that the Sumidagawa was dyed red, but it wasn’t a blood red. It was the same kind of light brownish red as the rest of the landscape, a red muddied with white like the eye of a rotten fish. The corpses floating in the river were all swollen to the bursting point, and all had their anuses open like big fish mouths. Even babies still tied on their mothers’ backs looked like this. And