Something Like an Autobiography - Akira Kurosawa [6]
One last memory of babyhood remains. In this case, too, I am on my nurse’s back, and from time to time we enter a small, dark room. Years later I would occasionally recall this frequent occurrence and wonder what it was. Then one day all at once, like Sherlock Holmes solving a mystery, I understood: my nurse, with me still on her back, was going to the toilet. What an insult!
Many years later my nurse came to see me. She looked up at this person who had reached nearly six feet and more than 150 pounds and just said, “My dear, how you’ve grown,” as she clasped me around the knees and broke into tears. I had been ready to reproach her for the indignities she had caused me to suffer in the past, but suddenly I was moved by this figure of an old woman I no longer recognized, and all I could do was stare vacantly down at her.
For some reason, my recollections of the years between the time I learned to walk and my entrance into nursery school are less distinct than those of my babyhood. There is only one scene I recall, but I remember it in vivid colors.
The location is a streetcar crossing. On the other side of the tracks and closed railway crossing gate are my father, mother and siblings. I stand alone on this side. Between my side and my family’s a white dog scampers back and forth across the tracks, wagging his tail. Then, after he has repeated this action several times and is just heading back in my direction, the train suddenly hurtles past. Right before my eyes the white dog tumbles down, split neatly in half. The body of the instantly killed beast was round and bright red, like a tuna sliced crossways for sashimi.
I have no recollection at all of anything subsequent to this awful spectacle. It probably threw me into such a shock that I lost consciousness. But later I have a vague memory of a great number of white dogs in succession being brought before me, carried in baskets, held in people’s arms, led on leashes. It seems that my father and mother were searching for a dog like the one that had been killed to give to me. According to my older sisters, I showed no gratitude for their efforts. On the contrary, whenever I was shown a white dog I would fly into a mad rage, crying and screaming, “No! No!”
Wouldn’t it have been better to bring me a black dog, perhaps, instead of a white one? Didn’t the white ones simply remind me of what had happened? In any event, for more than thirty years after this incident I was unable to eat sashimi or sushi made of fish with red flesh.
The clarity of my memory seems to improve in direct proportion to the intensity of shock I underwent. My next recollection is also a bloody one—a scene in which my brother is carried home with his head wrapped in blood-soaked bandages. He was four years older than I and, since I was not yet in school, he must have been in first or second grade. He had fallen from a high balance beam at the gymnastics school when he walked out on it and was blown off by the wind. He had come within a hairbreadth of losing his life. When the youngest of my older sisters saw him in his bloodied condition, I clearly recall her suddenly bursting out, “Let me die in his place!” It seems I come from a line that is overly emotional and deficient in reason. People have often praised us as sensitive and generous, but we appear to me to have a measure of sentimentality and absurdity in our blood.
It is a fact that I was enrolled in the nursery school attached to the Morimura Gakuen school, but I barely remember anything of what I did there. Just one thing I recall: we had to make a vegetable garden, and I planted peanuts. I think I did this because, having a weak digestive system at that age, I was never allowed to eat more than a few peanuts at a time. My plan was to grow a lot of my own. But I don’t remember reaping much of a peanut harvest.
I think it was around this time that I saw my