Something Like an Autobiography - Akira Kurosawa [50]
I guess I got a thrill out of this dangerous life-style, and I had a pretty good time. I enjoyed changing my appearance all the time, wearing glasses, thinking up new disguises. But the arrests increased from day to day, and the proletarian newspaper became short-handed. It wasn’t long before, newcomer though I was, I was made an editorial assistant. The man in charge said to me, “You’re not a Communist, are you?” He was right, I wasn’t.
I had tried reading Das Kapital and theories of dialectic materialism, but there had been much that I couldn’t understand. For me to try to analyze and explain Japanese society from that point of view was therefore impossible. I simply felt the vague dissatisfactions and dislikes that Japanese society encouraged, and in order to contend with these feelings, I had joined the most radical movement I could find. Looking back on it now, my behavior seems terribly frivolous and reckless.
Yet I stayed with the proletarian movement until the spring of 1932. The preceding winter had been especially cold. The money that came to me from time to time as compensation for my movement activities was small indeed and always seemed on the verge of ceasing altogether. Many days I had only one meal, and some days I didn’t eat at all. There was of course no heat in the room I rented, and the only way to get warm was to go to the public bathhouse before going to bed.
A fellow messenger of working-class background explained his economics to me. When he received his movement compensation, he would count the days until his next payment was due. He would then divide it all up and budget his daily food allowance. But I could never do it that way. In order to fill my empty stomach, I’d spend my share with complete abandon. When my money was gone and I had no duties to carry out, I would spend the day under the covers trying to endure my hunger and the cold. As it became more and more difficult to publish the newspaper, the number of such days increased.
I had one escape route left—to go to my brother for help. But my pride prevented me from appealing to him.
I lived in a tiny four-mat room untouched by any sunlight, upstairs over a mah-jong parlor near Suidōbashi. One day I had a terrible cold and my fever was so high I literally couldn’t move. As I pressed my head to the pillow, the rattle of the mah-jong pieces being shuffled together downstairs fluctuated oddly, at times very near and loud, at others soft and distant. I spent about two days listening to this noise fade in and out, and then the landlord became suspicious. He looked in on me and was greatly alarmed by the smell of sweat in the room and the beads of perspiration standing on my hot face. He said he would call a doctor immediately, but I resisted with all my might. “It’s nothing, really,” I insisted. I didn’t know whether my cold was nothing or not, but I knew it would be something if a doctor came, because I had no money to pay a doctor. The landlord listened to me and left without saying anything else.
A little while later the landlord’s daughter appeared with a bowl of rice gruel for me. Until I got well again, she came three times a day every day with a bowl of rice gruel. I no longer have any recollection of what she looked like. But I shall never forget her kindness.
During the course of my illness, my ties with the members of the proletarian newspaper staff were completely severed. We had been very wary of grapevine-style arrests, so we made sure none of us knew each other’s addresses. When we met outside, we decided the time and place of our next meeting on the spot. There was no way for me to find them after missing a meeting.
I suppose that if I had really wanted to find them again, I could have done so. But, still weak and dazed from my illness, I simply couldn’t muster the spirit. To put it more precisely, I used the fact that I could not contact them as an excuse to extricate myself from this painful illegal political movement. It was not a case of the leftist movement’s fever dying down; it was a case of my own leftist