Something Like an Autobiography - Akira Kurosawa [52]
For me this existence was as interesting as living among the characters of late-eighteenth-century fiction in stories of Sanba and Kyoden. I learned a lot. The old men who lived in the neighborhood had jobs like taking care of the footwear at the storytellers’ halls on Kagurazaka or doing menial work around the movie theaters. As part of their privileges they had passes to their establishments and rented these out at very low rates to their neighbors. I availed myself of these cheap passes and spent every day and every evening I lived in the area going to the movies or listening to the storytellers.
At that time Kagurazaka boasted two movie theaters, the Ushigomekan for foreign pictures and the Bunmeikan for Japanese films. There were three storytellers’ halls, the Kagurazaka Enbujo and two others whose names I have forgotten. I didn’t see films only at the two Kagurazaka theaters, though. My brother introduced me to friends at other theaters, so I saw movies to my heart’s content. But the reason I was able to savor the art of the storytellers so fully is that I had the experience of living in the tenement near Kagurazaka. I had no idea what role these popular arts of storytelling and singing would play in my future; I just enjoyed them without thinking about it.
Besides the acts of well-known artists, I also had a chance to watch the performances of clowns and comedians who rented the storytellers’ halls to put on their own shows. I still remember one of these acts called “The Fool’s Sunset.” It was a pantomime of a fool standing and staring at the sunset sky and the birds flying home to roost. It seemed very simple, but the artistry of the man evoking the winsomeness and pathos of the scene filled me with admiration.
Around this time the talkies first appeared in the movie theaters, and some of them remained imprinted on my memory: All Quiet on the Western Front by Lewis Milestone, The Last Company by Curtis Bernhardt, Westfront 1918 by G. W. Pabst, Hell’s Heroes by William Wyler, Sous les toits de Paris by René Clair, The Blue Angel by Josef von Sternberg, The Front Page by Milestone, Street Scene by King Vidor, Morocco and Shanghai Express by von Sternberg, City Lights by Charles Chaplin, The Threepenny Opera by Pabst and Der Kongress tanzt by Erik Charell.
As the talkies came in they spelled the end of the silent-film era. As the silent films went out, so did the need for the narrators, and my brother’s livelihood was struck a terrible blow. At first all seemed well because by this time my brother was chief narrator at a first-run movie house, the Taikatsukan in Asakusa, where he had his own following. The change was very gradual, and coincided with my discovery that the bright, cheerful humor of tenement life I enjoyed so much harbored in its shadows a dark reality. This is probably true of human life everywhere—a light exterior hides a dark underside. But I was seeing it for the first time, and I was forced to think about it.
Ugly things happened here, as they did everywhere else. An old man raped his little granddaughter. A woman caused a great disturbance throughout the tenements with her suicide threats every night. One night, after trying to hang herself and being laughed at by everyone in the neighborhood, she quietly jumped into the well and drowned. And there were the stories of battered stepchildren, just as in the fairy tales, stories that would make you very sad. I will relate only one of them here.
Why would a stepmother be cruel to her stepchild? That her behavior toward a child would be motivated by her hatred for her husband’s previous wife doesn’t make sense. The only explanation for this kind of crime is ignorance. But ignorance is a kind of insanity in the human animal. People who delight in torturing defenseless children or tiny creatures are in reality insane. The terrible thing is that people who are madmen in private may wear a totally bland and innocent expression in public.
There is an old story told in senryŭ verse about the stepchild