Something Like an Autobiography - Akira Kurosawa [92]
However, people with empty stomachs can’t gather together with a vacant feeling and produce good haiku even if they knock their heads together. You can’t do anything well unless you have your full strength and will to pour into it. During this time I, too, wrote many haiku, but not one of them is worth setting down here. They are all superficial and affected.
Around this time in a book of Takahama Kyoshi’s poetry theories I came across a haiku I must recommend. It was entitled “A Waterfall.”
On the mountaintop
water appears
and tumbles down.
When I first read it, I was struck with amazement. It was apparently a poem by an amateur, but I felt as if its pure, clear vision and simple, straightforward expression had hit me over the head. My affection for my own poems, which were no more than words lined up and twisted around in different ways, dried up completely. Simultaneously I recognized my lack of education and talent, and I felt deeply ashamed. There must be many such things I thought I understood and yet really knew nothing about.
My reaction was to resume a study of traditional Japanese culture. Up until that time I had known nothing at all about pottery and porcelain, and my familiarity with the other industrial arts of Japan was superficial at best. In fact, as far as my esthetic judgment goes, the only art I knew how to appraise at all was painting. And in the performing arts I had never even seen that peculiarly Japanese dramatic form, the Noh. I began by going to visit a friend who was well versed in ancient Japanese implements and asking him to teach me about pottery.
I had always been rather contemptuous of this friend’s interest in curios without knowing exactly why. But as I listened to his instruction, I gradually came to understand that not everything can be lumped together or dismissed as “an interest in curios.” In antiques there are deep and shallow as in other fields. There is everything from the retired dilettante to the serious scholar and esthete in the connoisseurship of Japanese art and culture. The spirit of the age, the life-style of the people of the age, can emerge from a single old food bowl. As I listened to my friend teach me about ceramics, I realized that there were still limitless things for me to study and absorb.
During the war I had been starved for beauty, so I rushed headlong into the world of traditional Japanese arts as to a feast. I may have been motivated by a desire to escape from the reality around me, but what I managed to learn despite the motive was nevertheless of great value to me. I went to see the Noh for the first time. I read the art theories the great fourteenth-century Noh playwright Zeami left behind him. I read all there was to read about Zeami himself, and I devoured books on the Noh.
I was attracted by the Noh because of the admiration I felt for its uniqueness, part of which may be that its form of expression is so far removed from that of the film. At any rate, I took this opportunity to become familiar with the Noh, and I had the pleasure of viewing the performances of the great actors of each school—Kita Roppeita, Umewaka Manzaburo and Sakurama Kintaro.
Among their plays there are many performances I will never forget, but the most memorable of all was Manzaburo’s Hanjo (The Lady Han). It was thundering and raining outside, but while I watched him on the stage I heard nothing of the weather. Then when he came out on stage again and began the dance of the jo introduction act, the evening sun was suddenly reflected off his form. “Ah, the moonflower has bloomed,” I thought, entranced. It was a moment that allowed me to savor to the fullest the play’s melancholy poetic reference to the moonflower chapter of The Tale of Genji.
The Japanese have rare talents. In the midst of the war it was the encouragement of the militarist national policies that led us to a fuller appreciation of traditions and arts, but this political sponsorship is not necessary. I think Japan can be proud at any time of having a very special esthetic