Something Like an Autobiography - Akira Kurosawa [8]
But what was it that made me so ill on that occasion? The answer is my own memory. Seeing Wasurerareta kora, I recalled a bad feeling—a feeling I did not really want to remember.
When I was in my first year at the primary school of Morimura Gakuen, for me school might as well have been called jail. As I sat quietly in my chair in the classroom with my head full of bitterly painful thoughts, my only activity was to stare through the glass doors at the household servant who accompanied me to school. His worry evident, he would pace up and down the corridor outside.
I don’t like to think I was a retarded child, but it is a fact that I was slow. Because I understood nothing of what the teacher was saying, I just did whatever I wished to amuse myself. Finally my desk and chair were moved away from those of the other children, and I ended up getting special treatment.
As the teacher gave his lessons, he would look over at me from time to time and say, “Akira probably won’t understand this, but …” or “This will be impossible for Akira to solve, but …” The other children would turn to look at me and snicker when he did this, but no matter how bitter I felt, he was right. Whatever the subject, it was completely incomprehensible to me. I was pained and saddened.
During morning exercises, when told to stand at attention, I would inevitably fall down in a faint. For some reason, when I heard the command “Attention!” I would not only assume a stiff posture, but also hold my breath. Later I would find myself lying on a bed in the school medical office being peered at by the nurse.
I recall an athletic incident. It was a rainy day, so we were in the gymnasium playing dodge-ball. When the ball was thrown to me, I was unable to catch it. This must have been amusing to the others. The ball kept flying in my direction and hitting me. Sometimes it hurt, and since it was not amusing to me, I picked up the ball that hit me and threw it outside into the rain. “What are you doing?” the teacher shouted angrily at me. Now, of course, I understand perfectly well why he should have been annoyed, but at the time I could see nothing wrong about getting rid of this ball that tormented me.
So, for my first two years of primary school, life was a hellish punishment. It’s a terrible thing to make retarded children go to school simply because some rule says they should. Children come in many varieties. Some five-year-olds have the intelligence of a child of seven, and, conversely, there are seven-year-olds who have not surpassed the average child of five. Intelligence develops at differing rates. It’s a mistake to decree that a year’s progress must take place within exactly one year, no more and no less.
It seems I’m getting carried away. But when I was about seven, I was so isolated and school life was so miserable for me that it left a mark, and I have unconsciously slipped into writing from the viewpoint of such a child.
As I remember it, the fog-like substance that clouded my brain finally vanished as if blown away by the wind. But my eyes did not open with clear intelligence until after my family moved to Koishikawa, another district of Tokyo. It happened when I was in the third grade at Kuroda Primary School.
Crybaby
IT WAS IN the second or third term of my second year in school that I transferred to this school. Here everything was so entirely different from Morimura Gakuen that I was astounded. The schoolhouse itself was not painted white, but was an unadorned, humble wooden building rather in the style of a Meiji-era military barracks. At Morimura all the students had worn smart European-style uniforms with lapels; here they wore Japanese clothing with the wide trousers called hakama. At Morimura they had all worn “Landsel,” German-style leather knapsacks for their books; here they carried canvas bookbags. At Morimura they had worn leather shoes; here they wore wooden clogs.
Above all, their