Something Like an Autobiography - Akira Kurosawa [55]
My stoical mother endured the incident of my brother’s suicide in complete silence without shedding a single tear. Although I knew she did not bear the slightest grudge against me, I couldn’t help feeling accused by her silence. I had to apologize to her for treating my brother’s words so lightly when she had come to me for consultation. But all she said was, “What do you mean, Akira?” The relative who had said “What are you doing?” when I was paralyzed at the sight of my brother’s corpse had not been able to intimidate me, but I could not forgive myself for what I had said to my mother. And how terrible the results had been for my brother. What a fool I am!
Negative and Positive
WHAT IF …? I still wonder sometimes. If my brother had not committed suicide, would he have entered the film world as I have done? He had a great knowledge of films and more than enough talent to understand filmmaking, and he had many appreciative friends in the film world. He was still young, so I’m sure he could have made a name for himself if he had wanted to.
But probably no one could have changed my brother’s mind once it was made up. He was overwhelmed by that first defeat when as a superior student he failed the entrance examination for the First Middle School. At that point he developed a wise but pessimistic philosophy of life that saw all human effort as vanity, a dance upon the grave. When he encountered the hero expounding this philosophy in The Last Line, he probably clung all the more steadfastly to it. Moreover, my brother, so fastidious in all things, was not the sort of person to be wishy-washy about any statement he had once made. He must have seen himself as already sullied by worldly affairs and on his way to becoming the kind of ugly person he despised.
In later years when I was chief assistant director on Yamamoto Kajirō’s film Tsuzurikata kyoshitsŭ (Compostion Class, 1938), the lead was being played by Tokugawa Musei, the famous silent-film narrator. One day he looked at me with a long, curious stare and said, “You’re just like your brother. But he was negative and you’re positive.” I thought it was a matter of my brother having preceded me in life, and that is how I understood Musei’s comment. But he went on to say that our appearance was exactly the same, but that my brother had had a kind of dark shadow in his facial expression and that his personality, too, had seemed clouded. Musei felt that my personality and face were, by contrast, sunny and cheerful.
Uekusa Keinosuke has also said my personality is like that of a sunflower, so there must be some truth to the allegation that I am more sanguine than my brother was. But I prefer to think of my brother as a negative strip of film that led to my own development as a positive image.
I was twenty-three years old when my brother died. I was twenty-six when I entered the film world. During the three-year interval nothing very noteworthy occurred in my life. The only major event had taken place before my brother’s suicide. This was the news that my oldest brother, who had not been heard from for a long time, had died of an illness. The deaths of my two older brothers left me the only son, and I began to feel a sense of responsibility toward my parents. I became impatient with my own aimlessness.
But in those days it was much harder than it is now to succeed as an artist. And I had begun to have doubts about my own talent as a painter. After looking at a monograph on Cézanne, I would step outside and the houses, streets and trees—everything—looked like a Cézanne painting. The same thing would happen when I looked at a book of Van Gogh’s paintings or Utrillo’s paintings—they changed the way the real world looked to me. It seemed completely different from the world I usually saw with my own eyes. In other words, I did not—and still don’t—have a completely personal, distinctive, way of looking at things.
This discovery did not surprise me unduly. To develop a personal vision isn’t easy. But when I was a young man, this insufficiency