Bridge for Passing (18 page)

I cannot deny that my heart beat faster as we approached the village of Kitsu, which was where our fisher boy, Toru, lived. Two hundred years ago Kitsu was wiped clean by a tidal wave. It was easy to see how it happened, for this small fishing village lies like a saddle between two mountains, the lesser one terraced straight up to the top and over. I must have been thinking of Kitsu when I wrote
The Big Wave
, so perfectly did this village fit the story. For after the tidal wave the people rebuilt again in the same place, these stubborn, brave Japanese people, and yet sooner or later their village would again be caught by a monstrous wave, and it is just as vulnerable today as it was two centuries ago, the houses the same shape and structure and set in just the same way, on the beach but with no windows to the sea.

I recognized it, every step, as we climbed down the narrow winding path to the village. Here were the houses, here the narrow streets not three feet wide, surely, down which no vehicle could pass, and scarcely two human beings. Down the worn stone steps we went to the sea, followed by twenty-nine children, exactly, for I counted them when we stopped at Toru’s house. There it was, too, the house just as I saw it in my book, and even Grandfather was there, a lively cheerful old face, peering at us over the wall. He was past his fishing days and his sons and grandsons now carried on. His wife was dead, he told us, and his daughter-in-law and granddaughter tended the house and dried and salted the fish and carried the water up from the well on the beach.

We sauntered about the village and with deep content, because it was so exactly right, the fishing nets drying on the shore, the houses nestled between the terraced hills, a small old cemetery on one of them. There was even a flight of stone steps which we could use as the entrance to Old Gentleman’s house on the mountain above. It was all impossibly true and right.

The hours had passed and it was time for luncheon. We ate at a restaurant famous for eel. There we climbed two flights of stairs to a big airy room where we ate broiled eel on rice and drank green tea and congratulated ourselves on our location for the film.

I feared to see our next location and I confessed my fear. It was to be the mansion of Old Gentleman, a scholar and a landlord, and could we find a family living in such a house who would be willing to lend it to us? There must be space and beauty and elegance, set in lovely gardens. I gave up hope privately and toyed with various makeshifts while we drove along a country road.

The impossible became the possible, however, as it does so often in Japan. The moment I saw the house from the road I knew it was Old Gentleman’s house, no matter who lived in it. I entered the gate and found myself in a lovely garden. There were no flowers, for Japanese gardens are seldom flower gardens. A path made of wide irregularly shaped stones led to the main entrance and on both sides evergreens, low shrubbery, ferns and orchids not in bloom, made a landscape. At the door a lady stood. She wore a handsome dark kimono and she bowed low. We bowed in return, to the best of our American ability, and I asked if I might see the rest of the garden. There was a pool, not large, but so designed that it presented the aspects of a lake. There was a bridge leading into a narrow path and a pavilion set among the trees. I saw everything from the point of view of Old Gentleman. It was exactly the sort of garden he would have, and I half expected to see him waiting in the house.

He did not appear, however. There was only the handsome lady who welcomed us into the house, and she led us from one room to another, each spacious and decorated with taste. The farmhouse was three hundred years old, but this was the landowner’s house and it was built only about forty years ago, to replace the older one. Old Gentleman, whoever he is, was a man of wealth and taste. These were his chosen pieces of furniture and the art objects in the tokonoma alcoves were his choices, too. Two of the rooms were furnished with carpets laid on top of the tatami and with chairs and tables, western style, but we ignored the modern aspects of Old Gentleman and stayed by his Japanese side.

Now the lady introduced us to her daughter, a young woman not half so pretty as the mother, and wearing western dress, which did not suit her. But she, too, was kind and I was touched and warmed to the heart when, after I had made my speech of appreciation, I heard them both protest that they considered it an honor to have their house used in my picture, and the lady said she would like some day to perform the tea ceremony for me. I accepted with thanks, and then she served tea in bowls so small that I knew the tea was precious before I tasted it. It was indeed the perfect tea, seldom set before westerners. I could not bear to drink it and have it gone, and yet it was so delicious, so far beyond any tea I usually taste, that I could not but sip it while I praised it. She was moved by my appreciation and brought in the small valuable teapot and poured thimblefuls of the elixir. It was of course the rare tea made from the first tender leaves of the tea plant in spring. An ounce of it costs an American dollar, which is much Japanese money. I am sure she did not serve it often even to Japanese guests. That she did so for us meant that she gave a gift. I received it as such.

And as we talked, I in English, she in Japanese, through an interpreter, she asked if she could record the conversation through an interpreter for her son, who is studying English. I said of course, and was amused to see concealed until now behind a couch a very modern tape recorder!

We said good-by at last, with many bows, promising to return soon, promising to be careful and break nothing in the house and spoil nothing in the garden. She was very gracious and begged me to leave the hotel and live with her, but I said I must stay with the company, thanking her all the same.

Now there remained the farmhouse and the empty beach to be seen. The beach could wait, for the day was darkening, but the farmhouse we must see. We drove past a village and between fields and road I recognized it. The farmhouse stood among terraces, itself built on a wide terrace, the road in front of it twenty feet above the rice paddy below. A wall of ancient brick ran across the front, but the wide wooden gate stood open and I walked into the world of my story book. Yes, this was the house, simple but spacious, wooden walls, rooms divided by shoji, a thatched roof so old that grass and flowers grew on it. Chickens, a goat, a little vegetable garden, some ornamental shrubbery, a few decorative rocks, a fine old-fashioned kitchen, a narrow veranda, a small pool for washing rice and vegetables, the farmer himself, a cheerful widower with a married daughter looking after him—it was exactly right. And, best of all, the farm family was friendly and eager to be helpful. When were we coming? Tomorrow? Good—good—the house was ours. Yes, they had electricity—and a pump in the kitchen, modern farm, the farmer said proudly. And he would be glad to have Americans see how he managed everything. Tea, please, before we left! It was night before he would let us go, and work began at seven o’clock the next day. Every hour of light is precious when a film is made on location.

The chickens, I noticed as I left, were of the most articulate variety. Only the darkness silenced them. Their dissonant cackling, their exclamations of excitement and outrage when we moved in the next day, were to be the background music of every scene we filmed at the farmhouse.

We were delayed, alas, and by rain—rain—rain. By the time we reached our hotel that night, the rain was falling. I had feared rain, always the hazard of filming on location, especially in the climate of southern Japan, where sea and mountain are close neighbors. If the wind blows from the sea the sky will clear; if from the land, it will rain. This I remembered from days long past, and while I lay in my Japanese bed listening to the rain and waiting for sleep, I pondered on the strange divisions of my life.

How incredible, above all, that for the whole first half of my life, I did not know he existed! When I was here before, where was he? And now when I am here again, where now is he? Between these two eras were twenty-five good years of life together, a gem set into eternity before and after. And the old question beset me again, as it besets every human being who has known death come too near. I set my teeth against the inexorability of death.

Is there life beyond?

I remembered the courage of his atheism. How often we argued of the future in which one of us must live alone! For it would have been too good to be possible that we should die at the same moment and hand in hand cross the invincible barrier. I had known for years that it would be I who would be left, I with the heritage of long-living ancestors on both sides of my family. The question was should I remind myself of the possibility of life beyond or thrust it aside and live as though eternity were now—which it is, in one sense, there being no beginning or end in the endlessness of all things. So what then is the present solitude in which I am living? Is it an end to what once was, or is it a beginning to something I do not yet comprehend?

Did he know I was here in Japan? Was he still hovering about the house at home, the essence of himself, and were I there would I perceive his presence? Lying there on my Japanese bed, the sound of the rising sea mingling with the rain on the tiled roof, I fought off the mighty yearning to go in search of him, wherever he was. For surely he was looking for me, too. We were ill at ease, always, when apart. But what are the pathways?

I remembered an evening at Sardi’s, in New York. I was with a friend from Hollywood, and for the first time I met his wife. While her husband talked shop with other guests, this woman talked to me rather shyly, a pleasant Midwestern woman, not at all of Hollywood. She was timid at first and then upon some impulse she lowered her voice to tell me that she wanted some “real talk” with me. She had had, it seemed, a strange personal development in recent months. Her father, to whom she was very close, had lived with her for many years after her mother died, but had himself recently died. She worried about him, wondering if he were still himself somewhere, and if so, if he were happy, and in such worry she became depressed and was joyless.

One evening, she said, when her husband was delayed at work, she was sitting alone at her crocheting, a pastime to which she was addicted, and as usual, grieving over her father. Suddenly she heard him call her name, and looking up she saw him quite clearly across the room.

“You must stop this worrying about me,” he had said in his usual practical voice. “I am all right—happy, in fact.”

“Were you afraid?” I asked her.

“Afraid of my father? No!”

“But was he the same?”

“Exactly the same,” she said, and then added, half puzzled, “Except I knew that, though
he
was there, his body wasn’t.

“And have you seen him again?”

“Yes,” she said, “several times, though I don’t worry any more. Sometimes when Jack and I are just sitting at home quietly of an evening, he reading and I crocheting, I’ll feel somebody else is there and I’ll see my father smiling at us.”

“Does Jack see him?” I asked.

“I asked him once, ‘Jack, do you see Dad over there?’ He said no, he didn’t see him, but he believed I did, because in the old country where he came from there were people like me who could see beyond.”

Yes, and remembering, I thought of what my fourteen-year-old daughter told me the day after the funeral. She had wanted his room after it was empty because it was next to mine and she slept there quite peacefully the first night, I remember, for I had asked her if she really wanted to sleep there so soon.

“I don’t want the room to be empty,” she said.

The next morning she said entirely naturally at breakfast, “Daddy came in last night. He looked wonderful—all well again and so cheerful. He just came back to see that everything was all right.”

I restrained incredibility. “Did he speak to you?”

“No, just smiled.”

“And what was he wearing?” I asked.

“I think it was his red velvet smoking jacket,” she said.

But the red smoking jacket, though his favorite, had been laid away five years ago when he forgot about smoking.

Do I believe? If I do it is only because I believe that some day we shall know as we are known, and communications will be clear, the laws of science revealing to us the laws that govern the creating universe. Religion calls the creative force by a name, God for whom we wait.
En attendant Godot!

There in the darkness of the night by the Japanese sea, I besought him to let me know by some true sign that he lived somewhere, only to tell me that he was. He made no sign. Yet silence is not finality. It may be only definition. He is there, I am here. We do not have the same wave length yet. Is that faith? I dare not call it so. I am trained in science. There are two schools in the approach. One is to believe the impossible an absolute unless and until it is proved the possible. The other is to believe the possible an absolute unless and until it is proved the impossible. I belong to the latter school. Therefore all things are possible until they are proved impossible—and even the impossible may only be so, as of now.

In this way my life continued to be lived on two separate levels, one by day, the other by night; one upon Earth, the other in search of a habitation not made with hands.

The rains fell, it seemed endlessly. It poured for three days without letting up. The mountains were hidden in rain and the sea roared against the rocks. We looked at one another in alarm. What if this went on and on?

“I thought you said June was the rainy season and this is September,” the American said to me reproachfully.

I myself was somewhat startled by the downpour, and referred the matter to the Japanese
maître d’hôtel
, who said that June was always the rainy season.

“Then what is this?” I asked.

“It is just rain,” the Japanese replied.

No one could deny the fact and so we passed on to more disputable matters. We decided to work on the script, planning each day’s schedule, in case the rain stopped some day. Scene by scene and shot by shot we planned and we planned. It was necessary and constructive work, and I also learned what I did not know before, that for a motion picture one does not tell the story in time sequence. One shoots all the scenes at each location, regardless of where these belong in the narrative. Thus for the first four days we would stay at the farmhouse, shooting everything that had to do with the farmhouse and its family of four, Father, Mother, Yukio and Setsu. This seemed a confusing business to me, but I could see its logic.