Bridge for Passing (19 page)

We sat around the long low Japanese table together with our cameraman and our Japanese sound man and assistant to the director. We sat on the floor, of course, and the cameraman was so unwise as to choose one end of the low table. I say unwise because he has long legs, very long, and he could not stretch his legs out when he was tired of sitting on them, because I had already grown tired and my legs were already stretched out, crosswise, under the table.

Here I pause for a moment to discuss the matter of sitting on one’s folded legs. Before I came to Japan this year, after so long a time away, I practiced faithfully every day folding my legs and sitting on my feet. It is not easy and at first I could only do it for three minutes and at best only got to twenty minutes, which does not last through a Japanese dinner, at least not the kind my friends give me. I was ashamed, but it was the best I could do. What was my pleasure, therefore, to discover that in the years I had been away, the Japanese have all but given up prolonged sitting on their legs! Instead they sit on chairs whenever possible, and the children, many of them, do not sit on their legs at all and even my friend said frankly that she could not sit for long in the Japanese fashion and anyway she thought it bad for the circulation. She attributed the surprising increase in height of this generation of young adults to the fact that they have not had to sit for hours on their folded legs. It may be the reason. Certainly I noticed the new height of the Japanese. The people are better looking and they have straighter legs.

Now let me speak of the cameraman. First I must say that he was charming, kind, temperamental and, in his field, an artist. He spoke little English but he understood much more than we thought he did. He was obviously devoted to his work, and wanted us to know that he had a special devotion to
The Big Wave
, which I believed he had, else why should he have worked with us? He was famous and could easily have earned as much on an easier job. But I was enchanted with him for other reasons. He was the most spectacular-looking human being that I had ever seen, very tall and very narrow in the feet, legs, body, arms, and hands, neck and especially face. He had a long, low-slung jaw and—but I cannot explain his anatomy. I do not know how he came to look like that. All I know is that I liked him, and I enjoyed his spectacular looks. There was so much in that long face of his that I looked at him again and again across the table. It was a sad face, I thought, and then again I thought it was not, so I kept looking at it. And our Japanese assistant was such a contrast, a very modern young woman in shirt and slacks and with a beehive arrangement of hair. She spoke foreign languages and she had studied ballet in Europe and she was newly married to our leading young actor, the grown-up Toru. His motion picture commitments prevented his being with us until the twenty-first, and so this was their first separation. She was teased a good deal by other members of the cast, and they forced her to write hourly postcards to her bridegroom, addressing them for her, and so on. She lent herself good humoredly to their fun, a calm young woman, intelligent and efficient and, incidentally, but importantly, very much in love.

Alas, upon the very day when it stopped raining and we had begun filming our first scenes at the farmhouse, our cameraman fell into a rice paddy. This was not as mild an event as it sounds, for it came at the end of a twelve-hour day. I had left location a little early in order to attend to some Tokyo business by telephone and was summoned to the hospital. There I beheld the elongated cameraman stretched on a bench in the hall, waiting to be X-rayed. We feared the worst, for he fell not only into the rice paddy outside the farmhouse, but the rice paddy was at the foot of a stone wall upon which the road ran, and he fell not as I had imagined, into soft mud and high rice, but upon rocks at the bottom of the paddy. His frame could best be defined at any time as a collection of very long thin bones connected loosely by withered brown skin, and lying on the bench he looked eight feet long.

We exclaimed our alarm but he refused to share it, and was carried into the X-ray room against his will. In half an hour the doctor reported no broken bones, only a bruise. The cameraman himself came out looking as gay as possible with his sort of a face, expecting our admiration, which we gave. He looked very smart in a clean black-and-white yukata, he had also permitted the doctor to put his right arm into a sling but only until he got out of the hospital, for he insisted upon returning to the job. We rode back to the hotel with him and gave him numerous orders, through our interpreter, that he was to have an attendant who would carry his chair everywhere for him to sit upon, together with a fan, an umbrella, cool drink and fruit.

The cameraman listened to this without change of expression and added, “And beddo.”

We laughed and the indomitable old figure sat very straight on the front seat. We bade him good night at his hotel and so ended that day.

Here I must consult my notes, scratched on the pages of my script, and written everywhere and anywhere in the farmhouse, wherever the scene was being played.

The first note says, “Feather—”

Feather?

Ah yes, that is the scene where Toru lay in the long stupor after the tidal wave had struck, and mischievous little Setsu stole into the room and tickled him with a feather to wake him up. It was a pretty scene, interrupted by Mother who came in with eggs in a small basket, followed by our last addition to the cast, a small, very intelligent dog. A duck was the really last addition but he had not yet appeared on the set.

While this scene was taken, I saw Father in another corner rehearsing his big scene with Yukio. Father is a good farmer, his face an honest brown. Our make-up man, the best in Japan—or did I say that before?—was dabbing at Father’s face and delicately wiping away the sweat of concentration. Mother’s personal attendant was doing the same to her in another corner. The attendant provided us with laughter. She was so very efficient, rushing in at last moments before the camera began to call them, in order to set straight a hair on Mother’s head and to add a touch of make-up to the corner of her eye or the edge of her lip.

“When work is over,” my notes tell me, “it is a sight to see Mother in her elegant gray silk kimono wending her dignified way along the dirt road at the top of the wall above the paddy field. She is an actress of some distinction in Japan, Father acted in
Teahouse of the August Moon
, and Toru and Yukio are both child stars. I am proud of our
Big Wave
family.”

That was the day, I remember, when the postman brought me a letter from a Japanese friend in Tokyo, a fellow writer, who had taken the trouble to go to the public library and collect some data on tidal waves from old family records. He wrote me that before a tidal wave rolls in there is a dreadful hollow booming from the sea. The Japanese call it the “ocean gun.” And one sign of an approaching wave is that the wells go dry, or rise, and the water is muddy. And the fish, especially the catfish, swim toward land.

While I read the fascinating pages I heard the assistant director, a man, call the new scene.

“Yoi!”

“Hoomba!”

“Starto!”

“Backo!”

The actors took their places and the cameraman alerted. Then came the director’s final command.

“Action!”

“Schis-kani,” was said again and again during the scenes and I did not know what it meant until an electrician echoed it by roaring it in semi-English.

“Silento!”

The result was profound silence. And I was amazed by the simplicity of the mechanism. The microphone was something tied up in a cotton bag and suspended at the end of a bamboo pole and the end of the pole was always sticking into someone, as my own ribs could testify, but it worked well enough. When I listened to the sound track played back, I was surprised to hear how clear it was. Effects were achieved with strangely simple means. The camera, for example, was wrapped up as tenderly as a baby in a snowstorm in Central Park. I could not think why, for the weather was steaming hot, and surely the thing was not cold. Upon inquiry I learned that the blankets and quilts were to silence the noise of the camera itself so that the microphone would not pick it up.

Can it be that I have forgotten to tell how the city of Obama celebrated our arrival? Ah, but it took a little time. We arrived without pomp or circumstance in small Japanese cars, we unloaded ourselves and settled unobtrusively into the hotel. Moreover, we were all Japanese except the American director, his wife and child, and myself, and we were quiet folk, for Americans at least. In a day or two, however, word went about that we were there, that I was there, that a picture was to be made. The city fathers asked permission to call upon us, and we let them with pleasure. They came bearing huge bouquets of mixed flowers and with gifts of enormous flat sponge cakes, a specialty of Nagasaki, the nearest city. We invited them to drink tea with us, they accepted with pleasure, and begged us, through interpreters, to ask them for anything we needed.

“If you do not ask,” they told us, “we will not know. Therefore ask!”

We promised, and tea drunk, they bowed and we bowed, and thus we parted.

The next day a large banner was hung on the wall of the main street, which in English and Japanese welcomed us to the city of Obama. The hotel, not to be outdone, made a similar banner, photographers took our pictures holding bouquets, and banners continued to wave during our entire stay. As time passed, a few letters faded in the sudden rains to which we were liable and in general the banners took on a spotted appearance, but the welcome, I am happy to say, remained as warm as ever.

And speaking of letters, I am reminded that Japanese school children are condemned to learn three languages, all Japanese. One is the ancient Chinese still used in formal writing, one Japanese phonetics, and the third the new language necessary in modern times, which is phonetic for English words incorporated into the Japanese tongue.

In spite of this linguistic burden, the children looked healthy and happy all day long except for the boy I saw on the way to our village, Kitsu. We turned an unexpected corner one day and came upon a robust and irate mother spanking the boy for some wrongdoing. She finished the job, in spite of our appearance, the boy howling as loudly as possible, then she dusted her hands, smiled at us cheerfully while the boy retired to a corner of the wall to finish off his sobs, and went back to her housework.

Should one spank children? I lingered behind the others on the narrow hillside path while I pondered the question. It was an old one in our American family, never settled. He said he believed in spanking children at certain ages because they were not open to reason and functioned entirely on instinct and emotion. I said I hated all physical punishment and believed it did no good. The difference between us was that when a child provoked me to anger, which in fairness to myself I must say was not often and only after outrageous provocation, I could and did find myself administering a swift and well-placed spanking. He, in spite of his belief in the principle, never had the heart to spank any child for any cause—except on one momentous occasion when I refused to have anything to do with it.

“The boys should be spanked,” he told me one day, his face very grave.

I do not remember what they had done, but they had got into some devilishness together. They stood before us one fine summer’s day, the three of them so near of an age, all handsome and healthy and unrepentant.

“I can’t do it,” I said.

“Then I will have to,” he said firmly.

To our mutual astonishment, mine and the boys’, he actually spanked each of them in turn. Grown men that they are now, they still roar with laughter when they talk of it together. They too do not remember what naughtiness they committed, but him they remember with love and amusement.

“We knew we ought to cry,” the second son says, he with the gay sense of humor. “Just for his sake we should have cried, so that he’d have the satisfaction of knowing he was doing a good job, but it was so damned funny—we had to laugh.”

I remember some sort of muffled noise and a pretense of rubbing their eyes with their knuckles and I was not fooled for one second. I knew they were laughing, bless them, and trying not to, because they did not want to hurt his feelings.

I suspected the Japanese boy of somewhat the same pretense. She was not hitting him very hard, and he was making a noise out of all proportion. Let my mother enjoy herself, he was thinking—Let her believe she is doing me good. … Let us, in short, be kind to our parents!

That evening, at my solitary dinner—it was a great scarlet crab—I found myself laughing aloud as I remembered. It was the first time I had laughed spontaneously alone since we used to laugh together and it was another milestone toward my new life.

The farmhouse was our first location and we worked there for days, each day like the one before. This was the pattern: I woke at half past five and went downstairs for my bath. The little maid, always watchful, needed no summons. While I was out of my room she came in and folded away the bed, set out the table and the cushion seat, and brought in my breakfast. This was, I must confess, the least successful meal of the day, made tolerable only by a special fruit that looked like an apple, but was a pear, not of the soft American variety but the crisp Chinese one. Two boiled eggs, thick toast and strange coffee completed the menu. I explained that I ate only one egg at breakfast and only one slice of toast, but explanations meant nothing. The company manager had ordered what I was to have and what he had commanded appeared. I suppose the little maid finished off the surplus, and I let it go at that.

In any case I had to be at the front door by seven o’clock. There we all gathered to exchange our slippers for our shoes, little maids waiting to help. Then we filled several cars, bowed to the assembled company of maids who waited to bow us away, and so we were off. The streets were clean, as everything is in Japan, the dust laid with fresh water and the cobblestones gleaming. The mountains pressing closely upon the sea were brightly green and the sea sparkled blue under the morning sun, if the day were fair. We drove through the city at reckless speed, passing hundreds of gaily dressed school children and out into the country on graveled roads between fields of ripening rice. There are times when I think Japan is the most beautiful country in the world. Yet it is the enchantment of Asia that every country is beautiful in its own way. We say
Asia
, and think in terms of a vast and swarming continent, the people indistinguishable one from another, but nothing can be more mistaken. The countries and peoples of Asia are as different one from the other as they can possibly be—more different than Americans are from Europeans. “That’s for sure,” as my Pennsylvania Dutch neighbors say. True, India and China are the two great mother civilizations, and their influence spreads into the neighboring lands and cultures, yet each land and each culture, acknowledging the influence, has nevertheless developed with individual and peculiar grace.