Something Like an Autobiography - Akira Kurosawa [41]
Also in this village there lived an old man who hated thunder. When a thunderstorm began, he would crawl under a huge shelf he had suspended from the ceiling to block the thunder. He huddled there until the storm ended.
Once when I visited a farmer’s house, he served me a vegetable dish with miso bean-paste sauce cooked in clamshells—a style called kaiyaki in this part of the country—and fish. While he drank saké over his meal, he said to me in thick dialect, “You might wonder what could be interesting about living in a hovel like this and eating slop like this. Well, I tell you, it’s interesting just to be alive.”
In any case, what I heard and saw of the way people lived in Toyokawa Village fifty years ago was surprisingly simple and almost sadly peaceful. As I recall it now, the memories of this place fade into the distance like a village seen from a train window, growing smaller and hazier.
The Family Tree
DURING THE SUMMER holidays of my third year in middle school I was sent to stay with my relatives in Toyokawa Village. The household was that of my father’s older brother, but since he had already passed away, his oldest son was the master of the house.
The house itself was what had formerly been the rice storehouse. The original house had been sold in grandfather’s time to the area’s wealthiest man. By my time not even the foundation cornerstone was left. But some shadow of the past could still be found in the garden.
There was a lovely meandering stream there. Its course carried it through the center of the kitchen, and from there it continued on to rejoin the brook by the town’s main thoroughfare. They say that in the old days you could catch frogs in the stream, and that they even came into the basin that blocked the flow of the stream in the kitchen.
The building that had once been the rice storehouse had ceiling rafters as big around as the pillars holding up a normal house. The central pillar of this house as well as the beams supporting the ridgepole were thick and sturdy, and the braces all gleamed with a dark glow.
It had been my father’s idea to send me here. He decided that this was the place to cure my physical weakness with discipline. The daily schedule for my training was outlined in a letter from my father to the head of the house. My father’s instructions were to be carried out with extreme rigidity.
For a city boy like me it was a cruel regime. I got up very early in the morning, and as soon as I had finished breakfast I was turned out of the house. I was given a layered lunchbox with two meals for each of two people in it. These meals consisted only of rice, miso bean paste and pickles. I was also given a cast-iron pot to carry. Outside I was met by a primary-school sixth-grader from another family of local relatives. This boy always carried a huge net for catching fish and a massive stick.
The idea was that if we wanted to eat anything besides pickles and rice for our lunch and dinner, we had better catch ourselves some fish. The stick the sixth-grader carried was actually more of a log with a square board nailed to one end of it. You were supposed to stem the flow of the stream with it and chase the fish into the net. The boy who accompanied me was a big fellow who carried the stick like a piece of straw, but when I tried lifting it, I found it awfully heavy. Trying to block off a stream and a fish with it was hard work. But we wanted more than pickles and rice to eat, so we applied ourselves to using it,