Something Like an Autobiography by Akira Kurosawa

Author:Akira Kurosawa [Kurosawa, Akira]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 978-0-307-80321-4
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2011-08-02T16:00:00+00:00

A Long Story: Part II

WHEN YAMA-SAN AND I were working together, we drank together when the day was over, and he often asked me to his house for dinner. After completing a film he was always already under pressure to start the next one, and he would include me in the consultations on it. I remember one time, when we had finished Tōjurō’s Love, how after all our terribly hard work the reviews weren’t favorable. Disappointed, Yama-san and I started drinking in the morning. I’ll never forget the bitter feeling of sitting there silently with him in the morning sun in a Yokohama bar overlooking the port, just watching the ships in the harbor as we lifted our glasses.

After I had worked as Yama-san’s chief assistant director on a number of films, he started me writing scripts. Yama-san himself had originally been a scriptwriter, and his talent in this area was unsurpassed. On one occasion the irrepressible Taniguchi Senkichi said to Yama-san’s face, “You’re a first-rate screenwriter, but as a director you’re not really so hot.” Of course this is an excellent example of Sen-chan cheek, but there is no doubt about Yama-san being a first-rate screenwriter. I can testify to his writing abilities because of his precise criticisms and revisions on the scripts I later wrote. Anyone can criticize. But no ordinary talent can justify his criticism with concrete suggestions that really improve something.

The first script I wrote under Yama-san’s supervision was based on Fujimori Nariyoshi’s story Mizuno Jŭrozaemon. In the original there is a scene where the eponymous hero tells his comrades of the Shirat-suka band about an edict he has seen put up on a signboard in front of Edo Castle. I followed the original closely and had Mizuno go back and report to his friends what he had seen. Yama-san read this and said if this were a novel it would be fine, but for a script it was too weak. He quickly dashed off something and showed it to me. Instead of having Mizuno do something dull like talk about the edict after having read it on the signboard, Yama-san had him uproot the signboard and arrive carrying it over his shoulder. He plants it in front of his comrades and says, “Look at this!” I was awed.

From this point on, my approach to literature changed. I made a deliberate effort to change it. I began to read carefully, asking myself what the author was trying to say and how he was trying to express it. I thought while I read, and at the same time I kept notes on the passages that struck some emotional chord in me or that I considered for some reason important. When I reread in this new way things I had read in the past, I realized how superficial my initial reading had been.

Not just literature but all the arts, as one matures, become gradually more comprehensible in their depth and subtlety. This is of course a very commonplace notion, but for me at that time it was a revelation, and it was Yama-san who led me toward it.

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