Something Like an Autobiography

  First Vintage Books Edition, May 1983

  Copyright © 1982 by Akira Kurosawa

  Appendix copyright 1975 by Toho Company, Ltd., Japan All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. in 1982.

  This book is published under a program designed to encourage the translation and publication of major Japanese writings not previously available in English. The program was conceived by the Japanese Society of New York, and Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., is grateful to the Society for its continued support.

  Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

  Kurosawa, Akira, 1910-

  Something like an autobiography.

  Translation of : Gama no abura.

  1. Kurosawa, Akira, 1910-

  2. Moving-picture producers and directors—Japan—Biography.

  I. Title.

  PN1998.A3K789413 1983 791.43′0233’0924 [B] 82-48900

  eISBN: 978-0-307-80321-4

  v3.1

  Translator’s Preface

  I AWAITED my first meeting with Kurosawa Akira with a great deal of curiosity and a fair amount of dread. I had heard stories about his “imperial” manner, his severe demands and difficult temper. I had heard about drinking problems, a suicide attempt, rumors of emotional disturbance in the late sixties, isolation from all but a few trusted associates and a contempt for the ways of the world. I was afraid a face-to-face encounter could do nothing but spoil the marvelous impression I had gained of him through his films.

  Nevertheless I had a job to do: I was writing a book on those I considered to be Japan’s best film directors, past and present. I had promised my publisher interviews with all the living artists; I could hardly omit the best-known Japanese director in the world. I requested an interview through his then producer, Matsue Yōichi. I waited.

  Six months went by, and my Fulbright year in Tokyo was drawing to a close. I was packing my bags and distributing my household goods among my friends in preparation for departure the next morning when the telphone rang. Matsue was calling to say Kurosawa and he would have coffee with me that very afternoon.

  In the interim I had of course interviewed all the other subjects for the book, and all had spoken very highly of Kurosawa. In fact, the whole chapter on Kurosawa was already roughed out with the help of previous publications and these directors’ contributions, so it seemed possible that my meeting with the man himself would be nothing more than a formality. Not only Kurosawa’s fellow directors, but film-company executives, independent producers and most of the older generation of Japanese critics regarded him as a special case, someone whose eccentricities were readily excused by his stature as an artist. Even the younger generation of filmmakers credited Kurosawa, whose style they opposed as representative of “the establishment,” with bringing Japanese cinema to the attention of the world, and thus opening an international pathway for them. In short, although Kurosawa was indeed regarded as a difficult person to deal with, a large part of this difficulty seemed to lie in the fact that he was in a class by himself, the most important member of the Japanese film community, yet one whose standards were anything but typical.

  The unique and in some respects uncomfortable position Kurosawa held grew out of his unprecedented and as yet unmatched international success. His 1950 film Rashōmon not only opened the eyes of the world to the existence of a cinema in this remote, war-shaken country that could be universally appreciated, but launched his personal career into a course of consistent triumphs a decade and a half long. Rashōmon’s Golden Lion at the Venice International Film Festival was succeeded by countless awards for virtually every film he wrote and directed, period and contemporary dramas alike.

  The twelve films that Kurosawa made between 1950 and 1965 were all box-office successes in Japan, and eventually made an impact on international commercial cinema. The Italian Sergio Leone did him the ambiguous honor of remaking Yojimbo as a spaghetti Western called A Fistful of Dollars, while Hollywood itself remade two of his period films as Westerns: Rashōmon as The Outrage and Seven Samurai as The Magnificent Seven. No other Japanese director has ever received such homage from the West.

  But after the success of Red Beard, released in 1965, Kurosawa’s steady rise came to an abrupt halt, and his career seemed to suddenly collapse. Hollywood’s discovery of his talent had led to a contract with 20th Century-Fox to direct the Japanese half of an ambitious bilateral vision of the Pacific war called Tora! Tora! Tora! It was not long before terrible communication problems developed over the budget, the schedule and, most important for Kurosawa, “final cut,” or the right to approve the editing of his own work. Amid accusations that he was carrying perfectionism to the point of insanity, he left the project.

  To anyone who reads Something Like an Autobiography, Kurosawa’s insistence on artistic control will come as no surprise; throughout his career his position on this point has been almost absolute. But in this case it seriously jeopardized his future as a filmmaker. He was unable to obtain financing for further projects until three fellow directors joined with him to produce Dodes’kaden, released in 1970, which he made, he says, “partly to prove I wasn’t insane.” It cost less than one million dollars and was shot in twenty-eight days, but it still lost money at the box office, the first time a Kurosawa film had ever done so.

  This discouragement and ill health—an undiagnosed gallstone condition—were the apparent causes of a suicide attempt in 1971. Recovery came only with successful medical treatment and surgery and—in 1973—an offer from the Soviet Union to direct a project of his own choosing, financed by Mosfilm. Dersu Uzala, a Russian story he had been attracted to since the time he was an assistant director, was the result. It required two years of filming in Siberia and gained the 1976 Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.

  Despite the acclaim, Kurosawa’s projects continued to meet opposition. It was difficult for outsiders to understand why Japan’s foremost director was not working. The basic reason was that the Japanese film industry had entered a decline in the late 1960’s and the budget for a Kurosawa film was no longer affordable. I did not know it at the time, but I would be meeting Kurosawa at a moment when two of his scripts in succession had been turned down because of their high production cost, and when he was about to start work on yet a third.

  For that third script to become a finished film would require the intervention of Kurosawa’s American admirers Francis Ford Coppola, of The Godfather and Apocalypse Now fame, and George Lucas, the writer-director of Star Wars and American Graffiti, who persuaded 20th Century-Fox to negotiate for the purchase of the international distribution rights. An understandably wary Kurosawa finally agreed, and Kagemusha, the 1980 Cannes International Film Festival Golden Palm winner, became the first Japanese film ever to be released worldwide by an American company. There have been no regrets.

  The retelling of these incidents from a third-party latecomer’s viewpoint may help to suggest some of the stubbornness and perfectionism of the man who will talk in the following pages about his life up to the point where Rashōmon emerged to startle the world. By adhering strictly to the principle of authorship of his films and refusing to compromise on either artistry or energy, Kurosawa has managed to survive both the venom and the equally destructive glamour of the movie business.

  Kurosawa Akira has written, by his own admission, only a partial autobiography. If he were to tell the whole story about many people who have been associated with him, some who still are and some who have passed on, a certain amount of
embarrassment and resentment would be the inevitable result. Kurosawa, as these pages and all of his films will show, has the capacity for—or perhaps the fault of—telling more truth than most of us. In the film industry especially, it is both refreshing and unnerving to come across such a person.

  However, I believe Kurosawa’s reluctance to continue his autobiography beyond 1950 stems not only from the maxim “If you can’t say anything nice …” These events and people truly are too close in the past. Kurosawa has not yet retired from filmmaking, and to complete one’s autobiography must be to complete all statements about one’s life. My suspicion is that he will never catch up with himself and the urgency he feels to express himself in his primary medium, that of the film. He has, in fact, admitted that he hopes to end his life in the midst of his work, by collapsing on the set.

  Kurosawa in his own preface to this book expresses the fear that anything he has to say about himself will end up being about movies. Of course there are many anecdotes about the making of particular films here, and much more about his movie-making methods and attitudes in general. Yet the autobiography of Kurosawa Akira is not exclusively about movies.

  In large part, this work affords a first-person glimpse of an era and place very little known to us in the West. Kurosawa was a boy in Taishō Japan (1912–1926), when country life was still robust but peaceful with a nineteenth-century kind of slowness. City culture was beginning to absorb the ideas of the whole outside world—Symbolism, avant-gardism, the Russian revolution, new democracy, Dada, new technology. Kurosawa experienced both city and country life, and grew up in a household that combined the most modern with the most traditional philosophies. His autobiography, much of which is devoted to this growing-up period, thus provides a sweeping yet personal portrait of pre-war Japan.

  The personal experience of an artist in wartime, with all the frustrations of thought control and censorship, also emerges as a strong theme. The fact that his directing career could begin only after Japan had entered the Pacific War lends special poignancy to his struggles with the censors. The self-chastisement of the artist in his seventies looking back on the burning desire of youth to create has moved me more than once in the course of this translation. And some descriptive passages, notably those on the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923, were so disturbing I had to stop and come back to them another day.

  It has been a great privilege to engage in this endeavor; to work with Mr. Kurosawa himself and his producer/script girl/archivist Miss Teruyo Nogami; with the support of the Japan Society of New York and its Education and Communications Director, Peter Grilli; and with the understanding, precision and guidance of Charles Elliott as editor at Alfred A. Knopf. But it all came about from that first meeting over coffee in 1977, which set the tone for my relationship with Mr. Kurosawa.

  I expected an aloof ogre. I was far too intimidated to bring a tape recorder, and only hoped my ignorance would not offend him. My journalist’s duties—to ask about those troublesome times of the last decade or so—were forgotten along with my composure. Too agitated to ask about anything so personal, I stumbled through the formalities and then finally hit upon the idea of asking Kurosawa about his impressions of Naruse Mikio, a director he assisted on one picture in 1938, and who is as little known in Japan today as he is in the United States. From anecdotes about Naruse we progressed to talk about Enomoto Ken’ichi, who starred in Kurosawa’s 1945 The Men Who Tread on the Tiger’s Tail and who was one of the most popular comedians of the immediate prewar and wartime era. Most of the films in which he appeared, including many by Kurosawa’s mentor Yamamoto Kajirō, have been lost, so few people know about him today.

  The shy gentleman wearing sunglasses who answered my questions soon became enthusiastically involved in reminiscing. These were people and experiences obviously dear to him, but nearly forgotten. He seemed pleased to recall them, even at the behest of an American film student/journalist whose Japanese—to this day—is far from perfect.

  The next thing I knew, I was being asked to take part in conversations when he was preparing to begin his autobiography. Later I was summoned on numerous occasions around the world to translate for him, to act as what he jokingly calls his “Foreign Minister,” and have been flattered to do so.

  I hope that in translating Kurosawa Akira’s account of his own life that I have conveyed the spirit and sensibilities of this unique personality in a fashion that is comprehensible to the Western reading public. I have only my experience as his interpreter to guide me (and I have no professional training as an interpreter), but the content of this volume is far more delicate and necessarily far more personal than interviews and press conferences.

  I have over the last four or five years seen Mr. Kurosawa in situations where he appears meek, vulnerable and, on occasion, testy—but only when provoked. These are usually meetings with the press. I have also seen him in situations where he is totally in command and clearly in love with what he is doing—making movies. The image I retain of him in my mind’s eye directing the night battle scenes in Kagemusha is one of a man brimming with confidence, authority and potential. If some of the excitement I have experienced in the presence of this contradictory and inspiring personality emerges in the translation of this remarkable life, my hopes will have been fulfilled.

  AUDIE BOCK

  Berkeley, October 1981

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Translator’s Preface

  Preface

  Babyhood

  Morimura Gakuen

  Crybaby

  Whirlwind

  Kendō

  Calligraphy

  Murasaki and Shōnagon

  The Fragrance of Meiji, the Sounds of Taishō

  Storytellers

  The Goblin’s Nose

  The Gleam of Fireflies

  Keika Middle School

  A Long Red Brick Wall

  September 1, 1923

  Darkness and Humanity

  A Horrifying Excursion

  Honor and Revere

  My Rebellious Phase

  A Distant Village

  The Family Tree

  My Aunt Togashi

  The Sapling

  The Labyrinth

  Military Service

  A Coward and a Weakling

  An Alleyway in the Floating World

  A Story I Don’t Want to Tell

  Negative and Positive

  A Mountain Pass

  P.C.L.

  A Long Story: Part I

  A Long Story: Part II

  Congenital Defects

  Good People

  A Bitter War

  My Mountain

  Ready, Start!

  Sugata Sanshirō

  The Most Beautiful

  Sugata Sanshirō, Part II

  Marriage

  The Men Who Tread on the Tiger’s Tail

  The Japanese

  No Regrets for Our Youth

  One Wonderful Sunday

  A Neighborhood with an Open Sump

  Drunken Angel

  On the Banks of the River Sai

  The Quiet Duel

  A Salmon’s Old Stories

  Stray Dog

  Scandal

  Rashōmon

  Epilogue

  Appendix: Some Random Notes on Filmmaking

  A Note About the Author

  A Note About the Translator

  Preface

  IN THE PRE-WAR era when itinerant home-remedy salesmen still wandered the country, they had a traditional patter for selling a potion that was supposed to be particularly effective in treating burns and cuts. A toad with four legs in front and six behind would be placed in a box with mirrors lining the four walls. The toad, amazed at its own appearance from every angle, would break into an oily sweat. This sweat would be collected and simmered for 3,721 days while being stirred with a willow branch. The result was the marvelous potion.

  Writin
g about myself, I feel something like that toad in the box. I have to look at myself from many angles, over many years, whether I like what I see or not. I may not be a ten-legged toad, but what confronts me in the mirror does bring on something like the toad’s oily sweat.

  Circumstances have conspired, without my noticing it, to make me reach seventy-one years of age this year. Looking back over all this time, what is there for me to say, except that a lot has happened? Many people have suggested that I write an autobiography, but I have never before felt favorably disposed toward the idea. This is partly because I believe that what pertains only to myself is not interesting enough to record and leave behind me. More important is my conviction that if I were to write anything at all, it would turn out to be nothing but talk about movies. In other words, take “myself,” subtract “movies” and the result is “zero.”

  Not long ago I gave up trying to refuse, however. I think my capitulation derives from the fact that recently I read the autobiography of the French film director Jean Renoir. I once had the occasion to meet him, and even to be invited to dinner with him, over which we talked of many things. The impression I had of him from this encounter was that he was not at all the type of person to sit down and write his autobiography. So for me to hear that he had ventured to do so was like having an explosion go off under me.