Something Like an Autobiography - Akira Kurosawa [54]
My brother’s attempt to end the suffering of his life cast gloom over the household once again. I desperately wanted to find some happy event to distract everyone. I hit upon the idea of having my brother marry the woman he had been living with. I had sponged off her for nearly a year, had found nothing objectionable in her character and had come to behave with her as if she really were my sister-in-law. I felt that bringing about the formalization of their relationship was a natural role for me to play.
My mother, father and older sister expressed no objections to my idea. But the odd thing was that I couldn’t get a straight answer out of my brother. I attributed his reticence to the simple fact that he was out of work.
Then one day my mother said to me, “I wonder if Heigo is all right.” “What do you mean?” I asked. She explained her misgivings: “Hasn’t Heigo always said he would die before he reached the age of thirty?” What she said was true. My brother had always said that. He claimed that when human beings lived past thirty, all they did was become uglier and meaner, so he had no intention of doing so. He was a great devotee of Russian literature, hailing Mikhail Artsybashev’s The Last Line as the best book in the world, and he had always kept a copy of it close at hand. But I had always found my brother’s espousal of the hero Naumov’s creed of a “weird death” to be nothing more than an excess of emotion—certainly not the presage of his own death it turned out to be. So when my mother expressed her concern to me, I laughed it away, saying, “People who talk about dying don’t die.”
I had made light of my brother’s words, but a few months after I had assuaged my mother’s fears in this way, my brother was dead. Just as he had promised, he died without reaching the age of thirty. At twenty-seven he committed suicide.
He had treated me to dinner three days before his suicide. But, strangely enough, much as I try, I can’t remember where it was. It may be that his death was such a shock to me that, although I remember with extreme clarity everything about our last words to each other, I remember nothing of what came before or after.
We said our goodbyes at Shin Okubo Station. We were in a taxi. As my brother got out to go up the steps to the train station, he told me to take the cab all the way home. But when the car started up again, he came back down the steps and motioned the driver to stop. I got out of the cab and walked over to him, saying, “What is it?” He looked at me very hard for a moment and then said, “Nothing. You can go now.” He turned and went back up the stairs.
The next time I saw him he was covered with a bloody sheet. He had taken his life in a detached cottage of an inn at a hot spring on the Izu Peninsula. At the entrance to the room I found myself unable to move. A relative who had come with my father and me to recover the body said to me in an angry voice, “Akira, what are you doing?” What was I doing? I was looking at my dead brother. I was looking at the body of my brother, who had had the same blood as I flowing in his veins, who had made that blood flow out of his body, and whom I esteemed and who for me was irreplaceable. He was dead. What was I doing? Damnation!
“Akira, give me a hand,” my father said very softly. Then, with great effort, he began to wrap my brother’s body in the sheet. The sight of my father puffing and straining touched me deeply, and at last I was able to step into the room.
When we put my brother’s corpse into the car we had come in from Tokyo, the body let out a deep groan. His legs, folded against his chest, must have pushed the air out through his mouth. The driver of the car began to shudder, but he managed to put the body through the crematorium and turn him to ashes. He drove like a madman all the way back to