Something Like an Autobiography - Akira Kurosawa [97]
Another time we were filming with the hidden camera on the sidewalks of Shinjuku. But while we aimed at Numasaki and Nakakita walking toward the camera, a streetwalker appeared in front of them and began scratching her behind. The camera, of course, seemed focused on nothing else. There was no way that Numasaki and Nakakita would draw attention away from it. Numasaki wore a baggy suit and a military overcoat, and Nakakita an oversized raincoat and the kind of scarf you might see anywhere, so you certainly couldn’t say they stood out in a crowd. In fact, they blended in so well with the throngs of other couples in the same kind of drab attire that both the cameraman and I lost track of them any number of times. The story called for them to be the kind of young couple you might see anywhere in Japan at that time, so in that sense they were perfect for the parts. And for that reason they seem to me, as I think about them today, to be like a couple I met by chance right after the war in Shinjuku, talked with and became friends with, rather than protagonists of a movie.
Several days after One Wonderful Sunday opened I received a postcard with the following message: “When the film One Wonderful Sunday ended, the lights came up in the movie theater. The audience all stood up to leave. But there was one old man who remained in his seat sobbing.…” I read on and found myself almost on the verge of shouting with joy. The old man who was crying turned out to have been Mr. Tachikawa, the primary-school teacher who had favored and educated me and Uekusa. Tachikawa Seiji’s postcard went on:
“When I saw the credit titles at the end that said ‘screenplay: Uekusa Keinosuke; director: Kurosawa Akira,’ the screen became blurry and I couldn’t read the rest very well.”
I called Uekusa right away and we decided to invite Mr. Tachikawa to the Toho studio dormitory for dinner. In times when food supplies were scarce, there we could at least be assured of getting something as nourishing as sukiyaki.
It had been twenty-five years since we had shared a meal with Mr. Tachikawa. We were saddened to see that he had become very small, and his teeth were so weak he couldn’t chew the sukiyaki beef very well. But when I started to get up to order something softer for him, he stopped me. It was enough of a feast for him, he said, just to be able to see our faces. We obeyed, moved by his emotion, and sat down again. As he gazed into our faces, he made little mumbling sounds of approval and nodded his head. And as I gazed back at him, my old teacher’s facial features became indistinct, and soon my blurred eyes couldn’t see him very well.
A Neighborhood with an Open Sump
I WROTE MY next script with Uekusa also. We stayed at an inn in the seaside hot-spring resort of Atami. From our room we could look out over the bay, and there I saw a strange-looking freighter sunk offshore. It was a ship made of concrete, the product of Japanese war industries approaching defeat with no iron left for building warships. In the lingering heat of late summer, children used the concrete prow that jutted out of the water as a diving board from which they plunged into the glittering sea. Watching their play, it seemed to me this bay with the sunken concrete ship was a kind of parody of defeated Japan. This depressing image that we gazed at every day while writing the script developed into the sump in Yoidore tenshi (Drunken Angel, 1948).
The idea for Drunken Angel actually originated in a pre-existing film set. Right after the war Yama-san had made a film called Shin baka jidai (The New Age of Fools), portraying the conditions we lived in during those chaotic times. The company had built a huge open set of a shopping street with a black market for this film, and later they came to me asking if I couldn’t use it