Japanese Portraits: Pictures of Different People (10 page)

I had my reasons. Money restores equilibrium. Any male foreigner in Japan soon learns that he can be attractive to a dissatisfied girl. It is his foreignness, not his maleness, that attracts. She wants a mentor, not a friend; a confidant, not a lover. The foreign male, this one at any rate, is wise to avoid complications. Plain Masako with her touching ambitions was not, I decided, going to complicate my life. Hence the tip. Money is a conservative, even reactionary commodity. It always restores the status quo.

Snipping away, Masako was thereafter silent. No talk of Colette, no mention of rice cakes and the far north. I looked at her reflection in the mirror as, sober, serious, she cut my hair. And I wondered why I had been afraid of her. That she would touch something in me? In me, who had already touched her?

Then, one day, I went to the barbershop and at the back chair stood an acned youth.

- Notice anything different? asked the head barber with a smirk: Your girl friend's gone. (This was said with a laugh.) Just upped and left. Not a word to anyone. Never saw anything like it. Why, she doesn't know a soul in Tokyo but I called her folks back in the country and they haven't heard anything. The young people these days. No idea of what a woman should be
(onna rashikunai).

- Aren't you worried, though? Something might have happened to her.

- Well, she moved all her stuff out of the room we'd put her in. All this without a word of thanks, not an ounce of gratitude. Just upped and left. Oh, she had us fooled, she did. She was a sly one.

I thought of quiet Masako and her brown eyes. Whatever else she may have been, she was not a sly one. She might have been a desperate one. She might yet be a brave one.

And now she was out in the city, out there somewhere, alone. She had done what few girls did. And I wondered, too, if I had helped her. Colette and I.

Thereafter as the months passed I always asked after her while the acned youth snipped inexpertly and left my mane fashionably shaggy. But no one had ever heard anything at all. It was their opinion that she had shortly come to no good. Was probably making more than they were by doing something indecent.

And I came in time to regret my cowardice. I would very much like to know what happened to Masako, out on her own in the cold world— she, who had so much more courage than I did.

One day in winter, 1948, when I was twenty-four, my friend, the late composer Fumio Hayasaka, took me to the Toho studios to watch the shooting of a film for which he was doing the score.

On an elaborate open set of postwar streets, ruins, shops—so detailed it looked hardly different from the neighborhood outside the studio—a good-looking young man in a white suit and slicked-back hair was being directed by a tall, middle-aged man wearing a floppy hat.

During a break Hayasaka introduced me. After our halting conversation they went back to work. I spoke no Japanese then, and they, except for Hayasaka, no English. I watched and wondered who they were and what the film was about.

The young man in the white suit was Toshiro Mifuné, the tall man in the hat was Kurosawa, directing the young actor for the first time, and the film was
Drunken Angel.

Then there was a spring day in 1954, and I had just emerged from the first screening of the full
Seven Samurai
. Never had I seen a film like it—my ears were still ringing, my eyes still watering. People gathered, talking, as they do when the film is a success. Several clustered around a tall man in a floppy hat, the same man I had met six years before. I did not think I would be remembered (Hayasaka was nowhere around). So, though I could now speak some Japanese, I did not go and congratulate him as the others were doing. Instead, I stared, admired.

In late autumn, 1956, Joseph Anderson and I were in Izu, at one of the open sets for
Throne of Blood
, Kurosawa's adaptation of
Macbeth.
It was known that we were doing a book on the Japanese film and would probably be writing this picture up for the press. Toho was most co-operative.

Work was running far behind schedule, Kurosawa having refused to use a completed set because it had been constructed with nails and the long-distance lenses he was using might show the anachronistic nailheads. Both Joe and I were thrilled by this unwillingness to compromise.

The present set represented the provincial palace of Lord Washizu, the Macbeth character, and Duncan's approach was being filmed: soldiers, banners, horses, a stuffed boar slung from poles—an entire procession. When an assistant gave the signal it moved forward under the late autumn afternoon sun.

Above us, on a platform, were Kurosawa and his cameraman. We had spoken with the director earlier and he had told us his plans for this scene. Now we were watching him do it. The entire afternoon was spent stopping and starting this distant procession. Sections of it were being filmed with the long-distance lenses, then refilmed, then filmed once again.

Half a year later when we saw the finished picture in the screening room, not one of these shots was in it. I asked him why. The scenes were nice enough, he said, but not really necessary. Besides, they interrupted the flow of the picture. Both Joe and I marveled.

Then again, in late summer, 1958, I was at one of the open sets for
The Hidden Fortress
, near Mt. Fuji. After a long day's shooting Mifuné was in the bath. I was sharing it with him. It had been a difficult day, the same scene shot over and over again.

I had noticed that, during this scene, Kurosawa's ballpoint pen stopped working. Instead of throwing it away and getting another, he had spent all that afternoon, between takes, trying to make this particular pen work.

Mifuné was sunk up to his neck in the hot water. He had been in the offending scene. I mentioned the ballpoint pen.Yes, he said: I know what you mean. I felt just like that pen ... But did you notice? He finally got it to work.

It was a cold winter day in 1964, on the studio set for
Red Beard.
The picture was over budget and long over production schedule. Not a happy time, and Mifuné, with other contractual obligations, was still in full beard and unable to fulfill any of them.

By now it was known that I was writing a book on Kurosawa. This being so, I could approach him whenever he was free. He was sitting in a canvas chair, wearing a white cap and dark glasses, now that his eyes were giving him trouble. He looked dejected.

In order to have something to say, I told him that he didn't really look so different from the first time I had met him. Yes, he remembered the occasion, way back in the days of
Throne of Blood
, with Mr. Anderson.

- No, I said: Back in the days of
Drunken Angel
, with the now longdead Mr. Hayasaka.

He looked at me and frowned. On the Kurosawa set a mistake gets first a frown.

- I don't remember that.

I observed that there was no reason he should but that it had happened. He then set to work remembering. Nothing came of it, but
I
remembered the nails in the abandoned castle, the ballpoint pen that would not work, the unhappily bearded Mifuné. We were problems—all of us—problems to be solved.

In 1978, a summer day, I was at the Toho studios at Seijo. No film was being made but Kurosawa was there because that was where he had an office. He was now in the office, working.

The work consisted in drawing and painting. He had no money for his film—notorious as he was for going over budget, over schedule, over the wishes, the commands, of producers and production companies—all so that he could create the perfect, uncompromised film.

In order to keep firmly in mind the film he next wanted to make, he was now doing it by hand. There was picture after picture of samurai, of battles, of horses. His large craftsman's hands were painting one scene after another, the movements swift and sure. He always knew just what he was going to do. The entire film was in his head, emerging through his fingers. Since he had no money, he would make the picture on paper. What other director, I wondered, would do this, would care this much, and would be this immune to despair?

What was the name of this impossible film, I wondered aloud. Well, I was told, they were thinking of calling it
Kagemusha.

It was two years later, March 23, 1980—Kurosawa's seventieth birthday, and a party at a Chinese restaurant near Seijo: his family, his children, grandchildren, staff, a few friends. And presents, lots of presents. But the best present of all was that the money had been found. Thanks to profits from
Star Wars, Kagemusha
would become a reality.

Watching him, I thought back to the thirty-eight-year-old director on the set of
Drunken Angel.
The intervening years had not made much difference. Now he wore caps instead of floppy hats, now he wore dark glasses.

Those big, strong hands were delicately opening birthday presents, the fingers precise but very firm with unwilling knots. I thought of the will that had created those films. Kurosawa turned, smiled, and with one large hand carefully smoothed the hair of a favorite grandson.

I thought too of that now long-gone ballpoint pen, coaxed until it forgot it was broken, until it began again to write.

I look again at Mifuné. He is sixty-five now. Yet he remains much as he was at twenty-five. The face has changed but the person is the same.

His laugh, for example. The lips curve but the eyes remain serious. It is a polite laugh, one intended to bridge silences. It is also a social laugh, one intended to prevent misunderstandings. In addition it expresses agreement, concern, unease—all qualities other than humor.

Mifuné's humor consists of belittlement—of himself. He learned early on, perhaps, that making light of himself, or seeming to, was a way of earning regard. When speaking of himself he adopts that reasoned, fair, but guarded tone that some men use when speaking of their sons. He will spread his fingers and raise his eyebrows when he mentions his career, then sigh—as though it were not his own. This is charming—something he perhaps discovered long ago.

The laugh is part of the charm: it indicates that he is not taken in by himself, that he is not vain, not proud, regards his accomplishments (whatever they are, he seems to suggest) seriously but not too seriously, and is quite willing to consider himself as just another person, someone on the same level as—well, you and me.

His manner has its uses. When a famous man, and Mifuné is now world-famous, projects what is called a low profile, then the result is likability. If the actor is also a businessman, as Mifuné is, owning his own production company, the result is also productive—he is a man to be trusted.

Yet one should not consider this a veneer, a front, something he deliberately uses. The self we present is no less real because we choose to present it; it is something we come to embody. Mifuné is an actor, but in this sense we are all actors. And the qualities he embodies—hardworking, scrupulous, trustworthy,
nesshin
(doing his very best)—are real enough.

But sometimes these fall sort. Just when he is being his most reasonable and straightforward, the gaze will withdraw, the laugh will sound empty. One guesses that these distractions are personal. One feels that they are permanent.

Mifuné has had his problems: his company and its ups and downs; his divorce proceedings, messy ones; his friend—twenty-five years younger—and the child she bore him; the uproar when he took her to a 1974 state dinner attended by Gerald Ford and the emperor, and the actor was accused in the press of an act of
lèse majesté
, of flaunting his mistress in the imperial presence. All this and then the break with Kurosawa.

Yet, since he has not changed in the last forty years, since the withdrawn eyes and the empty laugh were there when he was twenty-five, the problems—if that is what they are—must be deeper, more complicated.

One of Mifuné's problems is that he wants to do the right thing in a world that is plainly wrong. I know nothing about the reasons for the divorce but I think it possible he might have infuriated his wife by trying to be good, by trying to do right, by being so eternally such a nice guy.

The world does not like nice guys. Not really. They always come in last, says Western wisdom. And Eastern wisdom acts as if they do. They are charming, fun to be with, absolutely trustworthy, and so what? So says the world.

Mifuné has been cheated in his business dealings, has been victim of fraud and misrepresentation, and, finally, has been misunderstood in the most important emotional relationship he ever had—that with Kurosawa.

In Mifuné Kurosawa found his ideal actor, one so open and so intelligent that he understood at once, instantly embodied the director's intentions. Kurosawa in his autobiography mentions this: If I say one thing to him, he understands ten. I decided to turn him loose.

And he may have thought he did. But it was always Kurosawa himself who was molding the performance.

Mifuné has appeared in almost a hundred and twenty movies by now and yet only in the sixteen Kurosawa films is he a fine actor. It was unpleasant Kurosawa who drew from pleasant Mifuné these performances—Kikuchiyo in
Seven Samurai
, Nakajima in
Record of a Living Being, Sutekichi in
The Lower Depths
, Sanjuro in
Yojimbo
and
Sanjuro.
If we do not recognize the Mifuné before us in these shadows on the screen it is because he does not either—and Kurosawa did.