Something Like an Autobiography - Akira Kurosawa [51]
Freshly recovered from my illness, I walked on legs that were still wobbly along a path I had worn well as a lower classman in middle school, from Suidōbashi to Ochanomizu. I crossed Ochanomizu and went toward Hijiribashi bridge. Across Hijiribashi I went down the hill to the left and, turning the corner at Sudacho, I came to the Cinema Palace movie theater. I had seen my brother’s name in the Cinema Palace newspaper advertisements. If I climbed back up the winding path on the hill I had just come down, I would be at his home.
As I have been writing this, a poem by Nakamura Kusadato suddenly comes to mind:
Coming down the winding trail,
The springtime voice of the crying calf.
An Alleyway in the Floating World
AT A CORNER on the way from Ushigome-Kagurazaka to the stockade, there is a little alleyway that remains just as it was in the feudal era. In that alley, although the doors had been replaced with glass, there were three divided tenements that in every other respect remained as they had been centuries ago. My brother lived in one of these with a woman and her mother. When I recovered from my illness and was able to leave my room, it was to this tenement that I moved.
My appearance backstage at the Cinema Palace Theater that first day had startled my brother. He stared at me with frank amazement on his face and asked, “Akira, what’s wrong? Are you ill?” I shook my head and replied, “No, I’m just a little tired.” My brother looked again and shrugged. “I wouldn’t call it a little. Come on to my place.”
And so it was that I came to impose on my brother’s hospitality. About a month later I moved to a room nearby, but even after that I spent every waking moment at my brother’s. My father had been told that I was staying with my brother from the time I first left home; now that lie became the truth.
The tenement and the alley where my brother lived were like the places the rakugo storytellers have set their tales in for generations. There was no running water, but only a well where people drew their water. The residents were all the most traditional of born-and-bred “Edokko,” the original Tokyoites. My brother’s role in this setting was like that of a masterless samurai, like the late-seventeenth-century battle scarred warrior Horibe Yasuhei of the war romances. He was looked upon with awe and respect.
The way these tenements were divided up, each had a two-mat entry (about four by four feet) and a six-mat room in the rear with the kitchen and toilet along the back of it. The space was tiny. At first I couldn’t understand why my brother, with his income, would live in a place like this. But as the days went by, I began to appreciate the special qualities of this life-style.
Some of the people who lived in this neighborhood were construction workers, carpenters, plasterers and the like. But the majority of the residents had no visible means of support and no definable profession. Yet somehow they shared and depended on each other to such a degree that what should have been a terribly difficult life became surprisingly optimistic and, at every opportunity, downright humorous. Even the small children made wisecracks.
Adults’ conversation went something like this: “So this morning I’m lying out on the stoop in the sun. Right before my eyes, a rolled-up mattress comes flying out of my next-door neighbor’s. And my neighbor himself comes rolling out of the middle of the mattress. You know, his wife is really ruthless with the housecleaning.” The reply to this man was, “No, I’d say she’s especially considerate. She wraps him up so he won’t get hurt.”
In houses as cramped as these there were still those who made tiny rooms in the attics and rented them. In one such rented attic room was a young man who made his living selling fish. Every morning he would get up before the crack of dawn and carry his tin box to the riverbank, where he bought his goods. He worked furiously for an entire month, and then at the end of the month he put on his finest clothes and went out to buy