Something Like an Autobiography - Akira Kurosawa [87]
My proposal went something like this: “It looks as if we are going to lose the war, and if it comes to the point of the Honorable Death of the Hundred Million, we all have to die anyway. It’s probably not a bad idea to find out what married life is like before that happens.”
The answer was that she would think about it. To ensure that things would go smoothly, I asked a very close friend to intercede with her on my behalf. I waited and waited and no reply came. I got fed up with trying to keep cool. Finally I went to her and demanded, “Yes or no?” like General Yamashita Tomoyuki demanding surrender as he occupied Singapore in 1942.
She promised that she would reply very shortly, but the next time we met she handed me a thick stack of letters. She told me to read them and said, “I can’t marry a person like this.” They were all letters from the man I had asked to plead my case with her. I read them and couldn’t believe my eyes. I was horrified.
All these letters contained were slanderous statements about me. The variety and caliber of the phrasing of these terrible things were positively ingenious. The fullness of the hatred for me expressed in these letters sickened me. This fellow, who had accepted the job of aiding me in my suit, had been doing his utmost to ruin my chances. And on top of that, he had frequently accompanied me to the Yaguchi home and sat at my side wearing an expression of sincerest concern and cooperation in my efforts to persuade Miss Yaguchi to marry me.
Apparently Miss Yaguchi’s mother had observed all this and said to her, “Which are you going to put your faith in, the man who slanders his friend or the man who trusts the person who slanders him?” The result was that she and I were married. Even after we were married, this man felt no compunctions about coming to visit us. But my mother-in-law absolutely refused to let him in the house.
To this day I can’t understand it. I can’t think of any reason this fellow should have hated me so much. What dwells at the bottom of the human heart remains a mystery to me. Since that time I have observed many different kinds of people—swindlers, people who have killed or died for money, plagiarists—and they all look like normal people, so I am confused. In fact, more than “normal,” these people have very nice faces and say very nice things, so I am all the more confused.
My wife and I began our married life, and for her it must have been a devastating experience. She had given up her career as an actress in order to marry, but what she didn’t know was that my salary was less than one third of what hers had been. She had never dreamed that a director’s pay was so low, and our life became “like traveling in a burning horse cart.”
My fee for the Sugata Sanshirō script had been 100 yen (roughly $2,000), and the fee for directing the picture had also been 100 yen. After that, my fees for The Most Beautiful and Sugata Sanshirō, Part II had risen by 50 yen each. But I had drunk up the greater part of my pay on location, so we were in real trouble.
With Sugata Sanshirō, Part II I signed an official director’s contract with the company. I was to receive severance pay in compensation for my previous work as a regular company employee. But when I asked for this money, I was told that it was being put away for my future, and they refused to give it to me. I still have not received it. Maybe they are still keeping it for my future, or maybe they are planning to draw from it to help me repay the enormous debts I now owe to Toho.
At any rate, with no severance pay, I faced insurmountable financial difficulties at the outset of my married life. I had no choice but to go back to scriptwriting. I even forced myself to write three scripts at once. Probably the only reason I was able to do this was because I was still young, but I really reached the outer limits