- Yumiko, I said. This was the name of the heroine of the novel Asakusa Kurenaidan, which Kawabata had written when—twenty years before, at about the same age as I was now, and just as enraptured with the place—he had walked the labyrinth and seen the jazz reviews, the kiss-dances, the White Russian girls parading, and the passing Japanese flappers with their rolled stockings. It was here on this roof where we were standing that Yumiko had confronted the gangster, crushed an arsenic pill between her teeth, then kissed him full on the lips.
Perhaps he was thinking of his lost heroine—tough, muscled, beautiful. Or, as he gazed at that blackened landscape under this huge white winter sky, perhaps he was feeling a great sorrow. All those lives lost.
I looked at that birdlike profile. It did not seem sad. In fact, he smiled, peering over the parapet and pointing at the river.
This was where Yumiko, having given the man the kiss of death, slipped through the porthole of a waiting boat and sped away just as the river police arrived. I knew this without knowing any Japanese because as a member of the Allied Occupation forces I had translators at my command and had asked for an English précis of the novel. Now, looking at the author leaning over the railing, as Left-Handed Hiko had done when he saw Yumiko making her escape, I thought about Kawabata's love for Asakusa.
He had begun his book with the intention of writing "a long and curious story set in Asakusa ... in which vulgar women predominate." It had perhaps been for him, as it was for me, a place that allowed anonymity, freedom, where life flowed on no matter what, where pleasure could casually be found, and where small rooms with paper flowers were rented by the hour.
Did he, I wondered, find freedom in flesh, as I had learned to? It was here, on the roof of the terminal, that Oharu had permitted herself to be kissed—and more—by members of the gang and had thus earned the title of the Bride of the Eiffel Tower. It was here that the Akaobikan, that group of red-sashed girls who in the daytime worked in respectable department stores, boasted about the bad things they did at night. Here that Umekichi disclosed that he had been raped at the age of six by a forty-year-old woman.
I wondered about all of this but had no way of asking. And soon, chilled by that great sky, we went down the steep stairs, companionable but inarticulate. I had given him an outing, he had given me his bird's eye view of Asakusa.
I did not see Kawabata again for over ten years, and then, at a P.E.N. conference, with the sun reflecting off the Sukiyabashi Canal just outside the big French windows, I was introduced to the white-haired man who had been presiding.
- Oh, but we know each other, he said: We spent a very cold afternoon together ten years or so ago. I caught a cold. Was in bed for a week.
He looked at me, kindly, inquisitively, and released my hand: I imagine he doesn't even remember me.
- But I do, I said.
- He speaks, said the writer in surprise. Then, to the others: There we were, stuck up there, the old subway tower in Asakusa, and I didn't know what to do about him. He was so enthusiastic and kept pointing things out. And we couldn't talk.
- Tell me, I said, a decade-old curiosity surfacing: What were you thinking of that day up on the roof ?
- I don't remember.
- But how did you feel about Asakusa's being burned to the ground? You were seeing it for the first time since the end of the war.
- I'm not sure. Surprise maybe. Sadness probably."
He had gotten over it. I wasn't over it, even yet, and doubted I ever would be. For me Asakusa had spread over the entire city, the country, maybe even the whole world.
- And you, did you ever try translating Asakusa Kurenaidan? he asked.
- I never learned to read.
- Well, at least you learned to speak. We can talk, finally.
And he smiled, his white head birdlike against the light of the slow canal and the distant clamor of Tokyo traffic.
But we did not continue the conversation. People were now pushing, wanting to have a word with the famous novelist. We had already had our talk. And whenever we met thereafter, Kawabata would cock his head on one side and look at me quizzically, humorously, as though we had something in common.
Ten years later, the translation of House of the Sleeping Beauties appeared and I saw that Kawabata had been as true to his vision of Asakusa as I had been to mine. Yumiko, or her daughter, was now in this strange house in Kamakura where old men found their youth again in sleeping girls, in firm, dormant flesh.
And, later still, one day in 1972, a quarter of a century after we had stood on the tower and thought of Yumiko, I saw his face flash onto the television screen. Noted author dead, a suicide.
I could not believe it. Dead, yes, but not a suicide. How could anyone who so loved life, and sex, and Asakusa, kill himself? No, it was an accident. The body had been found in the bathroom, the water running. He had been going to take a bath. He had used the gas hose as a support, pulled it loose, was overcome. This I wanted to believe. I could hear the water running, and I remembered the silver of the Sumida, the muddy bronze of the Sukiyabashi Canal.
But in time I too came to believe that his was a suicide. The kiss of death—not arsenic but gas—had been chosen. Naked, Kawabata had stepped into the water just as Yumiko had slipped into the boat and got away.
Shozo Kuroda
Old Mr. Kuroda—Shozo his nicely old-fashioned given name, a neighbor—blinks. Old men blink like babies, as though not yet used to their eyes. His eyes widen, contract, then blink, each sight as though astonishing. He stares at me, stunned.
I stare back. Old people are faintly disreputable. We may feel sorry for them but at the same time we condemn, as if being this old, lasting this long, were somehow a social fault, a breach of etiquette.
His daughter sighs and wipes his chin, as she would that of a small child. And what is it now? she asks, turning, hearing his yammering: Oh, I see. That's nice. Then she looks away. She is speaking to him as he must have spoken to her when she was very young.
Later, while he is lying down, taking his childlike afternoon nap, she says that he has no darashi. Strong words: darashi ga nai. I know perfectly well what it means, but am not sure what it specifies.
Let me look it up in the dictionary. There. Slovenly, untidy, sloppy, disheveled, unkempt, slipshod, etc.—a list of attributes ending with, oddly: a loose fish. What could that be? One always learns something about one's own language from the Japanese-English dictionary.
And we have no comparable phrase in the West, where sloppiness is considered less of a sin and can even be seen as attractive, a sign, in young people, of naturalness, spontaneity, freedom from conservative restraint.
No virtue here, however, even—or particularly—among the young. No, certainly not attractive, here where everyone must pull his own weight, where nothing too different is tolerated for too long, where appearances are so much more important than truths.
Strong words, but she smiled as she said them, as one might when speaking of a child, someone you understand, forgive, love. And—she continued—he wet his bed the other night again. Talk about darashi ga nai koto. And who had to get up and change the bedding so that he wouldn't be lying in it the whole night long? Another sigh—a fat forty, hopes blasted.
A situation reminiscent of an Ozu film—Late Spring, perhaps. But there the daughter still has her life before her. And there he is still a fine figure of a man. Ozu, being an artist, knew where to stop. No point in showing Setsuko Hara blowsy; no point in revealing Chishu Ryu drooling and incontinent. We already know. We sense the years ahead. Ozu need show us nothing more.
With Shozo, however, the disaster has already occurred. He has become disreputable, the way that accident victims appear. I remember an ex-landlady idly turning over the pages of a photography book and discovering a picture of survivors from the Hindenburg, dazed, clothes burned away. How horrid, she said, then, peering more closely: And what a way to appear in public!
A snort, a gurgle from the n
ext room. Miss Kuroda knows all these signs as though they were a language. Oh, dear, she says: He's woken up. And here I was hoping he would sleep for an hour.
A shuffling sound. Then he reappears, kimono disheveled, sash dragging. A loose fish. Is surprised to see me. Blinks. Thinks I come every day. Is told it is the same day. Oh.
- Not long for this world. (This she says in front of him, and his trembling makes it seem that he is nodding in shocked agreement. Actually, he appears not to hear.)
I look at him and think of the brave days of Meiji when he was probably a fine figure of a man.
- Now, Father, do sit down. Don't just stand there. You'll tire yourself. See? Mr. Donald has brought us these nice pears. I'll peel you one.
She sets to work, her strong, manly fingers expert, the peel unwinding in one long strip. He waits, the corners of his mouth moist.
Of what does he remind me? A baby watching candy being unwrapped? A dog watching its dinner being made? Me, under the Christmas tree, watching tissue paper being removed—or me at a later age watching clothes being taken off?
- There now, isn't that nice?
Prettily quartered, the pear is set before him. His hand hesitates, then conveys a chunk to his mouth. His eyes close. He seems to smile.
- Juicy, she says, wiping his lips with her handkerchief. Then she straightens his kimono, reties his sash, makes him presentable.
He blinks, gums the fruit, smiles at me. Thanking me—with his mouth, not his eyes. They are far away, looking at things long past, the blank eyes of someone who has seen everything and still continues to look.
The view is suitably autumnal, with a bright blue sky, the red of the ripe persimmon, and the light yellow of bleached grass. The pears are the very last of the season. And I remember the view half a year ago, the pale sky of summer and the deep green of the grass.
She had sat there, on the same cushion. We had been gossiping about a younger woman in the neighborhood who had lost her patron—apoplexy. She laughed lightly, then suddenly frowned.
- And what will happen to me once he goes? she wondered.
I misunderstood, thinking she might be referring to too little money, too much freedom. But this wasn't what she meant.
- What shall I do? Nani o shimashoka? (Precisely—and she could as well have asked: Who shall I be?)
Old Mr. Kuroda slowly swallows, staring at 1900. His daughter looks at her hands, spreads her fat fingers. And I gaze at them both, caught for an instant in the sunshine of a late autumn.
Mono no awaré, the pathos of things. You accept it, you even in a small way celebrate it, this evanescence. You are to observe what is happening, and be content that things are proceeding as they must, and therefore should. Very traditional this, and quite a nice idea. I wonder if it was ever anything more.
Old Shozo Kuroda looks into the sun, his eyes blinking, his lips still working, his mouth curved as though in a smile. There is no simple cut to "The End," no surge of music to indicate a final cadence. Life, not being art, knows no such conventions.
Yasujiro Ozu
Though I had met Ozu several times before, at Shochiku parties mostly, I had never watched him work. Very few had—Ozu did not like visitors. But with a kind friend's help, the director was prevailed upon to let the foreign critic visit the set.
One of the Ofuna studios was filled with a full-scale Japanese inn: two eight-mat rooms, beyond them a courtyard, and on the far side the full three floors of a wing of the inn. Here Ozu was making Late Autumn.
I knew a bit about the film. Its structure was similar to Late Spring, made eleven years before: a daughter gets married and leaves her single parent behind alone. In the earlier film (played by Setsuko Hara), she left her father on his own (Chishu Ryu). Now, the mother (Setsuko Hara) would be left behind by her daughter (Yoko Tsukasa).
Just as Ozu's themes were always much the same, so his methods had become consistent: an almost unvarying camera position, a single means of punctuation—the straight cut. And just as fades in and out and dissolves were spurned, so in these later films the camera was not allowed to turn (pan) or to move about (dolly). Out of these restrictions would come a film that was free and filled with life. I wanted to see how it was done.
When I was brought in, the actors had just completed the first part of the scene slated for that day. Chishu Ryu (this time playing Setsuko's brother-in-law, owner of the inn) had finished his lines and was sitting on one side, watching, as I had heard he often did.
After a cigarette, Ozu was ready to continue. The next episode had Setsuko and Yoko, mother and daughter, sitting opposite each other at a low table. The camera was about three feet off the floor (its habitual position—eye level when you sit down), facing one of the actresses.
Ozu's method was to do one side of the conversation and then the other. Since the alternative approach would have been to turn the cam era around for each cut, the method was logical—but Ozu's way of doing it was quite his own. Each line of dialogue was considered a unit in its own right and was to be shot with reference only to itself. This is quite different from the way such scenes are shot elsewhere. While it is common enough for the two sides of a conversation to be filmed separately, the director usually does not stop the camera after each line. The camera records the dialogue, both the feed-lines and the replies, and the whole is edited for the finished picture.
Ozu recorded each line. He started the camera, then stopped it. His script lay open before him and he used it like a blueprint, constantly referring to it and to the sketches he had made in the margins, one drawing for each line of dialogue.
The camera was turned toward Setsuko Hara. Ozu nodded at Yoko Tsukasa, sitting to one side, and she delivered her line of dialogue. Start, said Ozu, and his camera, Yuharu Atsuta, squatting behind his machine, began filming. The director nodded at Setsuko, who said her line. Cut, said Ozu, and Atsuta stopped filming.
The director was apparently satisfied with the delivery and went on to the next line. Not always, however; several times during these afternoon hours of shooting he would make one or the other of the actresses repeat her line.
One cut finished, one line of dialogue completed, Ozu began getting ready for the next. The conditions seemed in all respects identical but Ozu would nonetheless reframe each cut. Hara had not moved, yet Ozu, looking through the viewfinder, insisted on a shift of half a millimeter to the right. When I saw the finished film I noticed that in some cuts Yoko's hand towel at the bottom of the screen was more visible than in others, but generally the effect would be visible to the director alone.
Reframing completed to his satisfaction, Ozu was ready to go on to the next line of dialogue. Cut. The camera was fiddled with. In reply to a nod from the director, Yoko made weeping sounds. Start.
- What a nice trip we've had, said Setsuko and then wiped her eyes.
That was the end of her side of the conversation. After a break for tea, the camera was reversed, Setsuko sat to one side and delivered her lines again, and all of Yoko's lines were filmed. This took the rest of the day.
Everyone was exhausted. What a way to make a film! There were no congratulations, such as are commonly given to an actor after pulling off a difficult bit of dialogue, none of the air of celebration or dejection that greets the completion of a sequence. There was no exhilaration, no despair—no visible emotion at all. It was carpentry. Yet, when I later saw this sequence in the preview room, I marveled.
Here was an assemblage of small segments made over several days at a speed so slow that any idea of pace or even performance was virtually impossible. Here were scenes of two women talking to no one, reacting to nothing. And yet, up there on the screen, one saw life itself, life with its own rhythm, its own rarefied reality. Ozu's calculations as to camera angle, camera distance, delivery, timing—everything was there, but it was no longer apparent. It had been transformed. What had been a blueprint was now a completed dwelling, lived in.
I thought of a pointillist pai
nting—a Seurat I had seen at an exhibition a few days earlier. When you viewed it up close, it was all dots of different colors. Only when you stepped back did the dots merge and the illusion of life appear. And that is what you do in an Ozu film. You step back. And paradoxically it brings you closer. Through the maintenance of distance, intimacy is achieved. Perhaps consequently, the fewer the means, the greater the effect.
Two women, mother and daughter, sitting together in 1960 in an inn at a Japanese hot-spring resort. A three-minute conversation during which nothing much gets said. But through it one comprehends filial affection as though for the first time, and gazes at the deep, hidden pattern that has been made visible.
- Don't even think of crying, I remember him telling Yoko: Just suddenly put your face in your hands—that's quite enough.
Setsuko Hara
She must be in her sixties, Japan's "eternal virgin"—so billed, even now, in the continuing references to her in magazines, newspapers; even now, more than twenty years after her disappearance.
That 1963 disappearance was a scandal. She had been the most beloved of film stars, her handsome face, accepting smile, known to all. And then, suddenly, rudely, without a word of apology, she was going to disappear—to retire.
Here, where the stars hang on, voluntary retirement is unknown, particularly for one the caliber of Setsuko Hara. She had become an ideal: men wanted to marry someone like her; women wanted to be someone like her.
This was because on the screen she reconciled her life as real people cannot. Whatever her role in films—daughter, wife, or mother—she played a woman who at the same time, somehow, was herself. Her social roles did not eclipse that individual self, our Setsuko.
Japanese Portraits: Pictures of Different People Page 2
