Something Like an Autobiography - Akira Kurosawa [73]
The last good person I want to write about is Fushimizu Shu. Although he and I were born the same year, he a few months after me, he died at the very early age of thirty-one, in 1942. He had seemed to be the one who would inherit Yama-san’s talent with musical films, so it is all the more tragic that his life was cut short. We all called him “Mizu-san,” and Mizu-san’s appearance was exactly what you would imagine the ideal image of a film director to be. He had fine features and was always dashingly well dressed. Yama-san, too, was handsome and dressed well, so Mizu-san seemed to be his most suitable heir. Somehow, perhaps because he had already been promoted to director, none of us—Taniguchi Senkichi or Honda Inoshiro or I—no matter how big we acted elsewhere, could ever look like anything but little brothers next to Mizu-san.
Two or three days after we heard from Yama-san that our “older brother” Mizu-san was seriously ill, I was waiting for the bus to the Toho studios at Shibuya Station in Tokyo. Suddenly Mizu-san stepped out of the crowd in the station. I knew he was supposed to be confined to his bed at his family home in the Kyoto-Osaka region, so I was shocked. But even if I hadn’t known that, I would have caught my breath at the way he looked. Weakened from his illness, he appeared truly ghostly.
I ran over to him and asked, “Are you all right? What are you doing here?” He drew up his pale face into a kind of smile at last and replied, “I want to make films. I’ve got to make movies.” I couldn’t say anything else. He must have been thinking all along, “I’ve only just begun, just begun,” and couldn’t stay still in his bed. That same day Yama-san took him to a hotel in Gora in the Hakone Mountains and had him given full nursing care, but it was too late.
There was also a marvelously talented assistant director to Mizu-san named Inoue Shin. He died before he became a director. On location in the Philippines he contracted a fatal illness, but before he went off to the Philippines he came to me for advice on whether or not to go. I had some kind of premonition about it and told him I thought it would be better to stay home. If only I had been more persuasive!
With Inoue’s death the line of succession to Yama-san’s musicals was cut off. The proverb says that beautiful people do not live long, but it also seems that good people have short lives. Naruse, Takizawa, Mizu-san, Inoue Shin—they all died much too soon. I must say the same for directors Mizoguchi Kenji, Ozu Yasujirō, Shimazu Yasujirō, Yamanaka Sadao and Toyoda Shiro. For them, too, I have to say “Good person, short life.” But I am probably just being sentimental about those I have lost.
A Bitter War
WHEN THE MAKING of Horses came to an end, I was relieved of my duties as an assistant director. From that point on, I did only occasional second-unit shooting for Yama-san, and spent the major part of my time in scriptwriting. I submitted two of my scripts to a contest sponsored by the Information Ministry; Shizuka nari (All Is Quiet) won a second prize of 300 yen (roughly $6,000) and Yuki (Snow) won a first place, with a prize of 2,000 yen ($40,000). My salary at the time was only 48 yen (about $960) a month, and this was the highest any assistant director received, so the Information Ministry prize money was to me a fabulous sum.
I used it to take my friends drinking day after day. The schedule went like this: First we’d drink beer near Shibuya Station, then proceed to Sukiyabashi near Ginza and drink saké with an array of Japanese dishes, and finally we’d end up in the Ginza bars to drink whiskey. We talked about nothing but movies the whole time, so I can’t really say it was pure dissipation, but it is a fact that we burdened our digestive systems thoughtlessly.
When I had drunk up all my money, I sat down at my desk again and began to write. What I wrote was in the main for money, and