Free Something Like an Autobiography by Akira Kurosawa

saying goes, “like a horse’s ears in an east wind.”
    I’m still not sure how a meal tray is supposed to be presented to someone about to commit suicide; I have yet to put a scene of ritual suicide in one of my films. But when you are served a fish on a meal tray, usually its head points to the left and its belly is toward you to make it easy to reach. If you are going to commit suicide, I gather that it is served with its head pointing to the right and its belly away from you, because it would be insensitive to place a cut fish belly directly facing someone who is about to cut open his own abdomen. This is my assumption, but it is no more than an assumption.
    And yet I can’t imagine that my mother would do something no Japanese would ever think of, like serving a fish in such a way as to make it difficult to reach, with its belly away from the person about to eat it. So she must have mistaken only the part about pointing the head to the left or right. And this alone made my father angry with her.
    I, too, received my share of scoldings on the subject of mealtime etiquette. If I held my chopsticks the wrong way, my father would take his chopsticks by the points and rap me on the knuckles with the heavy ends. My father was very strict about these things, and yet, as I mentioned earlier, he frequently took us to the movies.
    They were mostly American and European movies. There was a theater on Kagurazaka hill called the Ushigomekan that showed nothing but foreign films. Here I saw a lot of action serials and William S. Hart movies. Among the serials I remember especially
The Tiger’s Footprints, Hurricane Hutch, The Iron Claw
and
The Midnight Man
.
    The William S. Hart movies had a masculine touch like that of later films directed by John Ford, and more of them seemed to be set in Alaska than in the Wild West. An image remains emblazoned in my mind of William S. Hart’s face. He holds up a pistol in each hand, his leather armbands decorated with gold, and he wears a broad-brimmed hat as he sits astride his horse. Or he rides through the snowy Alaskan woods wearing a fur hat and fur clothing. What remains of these films in my heart is that reliable manly spirit and the smell of male sweat.
    It’s possible that I had already seen some Chaplin films, but since I don’t remember doing Chaplin imitations at this age, it may not have been until later. Something else that may have taken place around this time or a little later remains an indelible movie memory. It happened when my oldest sister took me to the Asakusa district of Tokyo to see a movie about an expedition to the South Pole.
    The leader of the sled dogs falls ill, and the exploration party has to leave him behind and drive on with the rest of the team. But the lead dog follows them, staggering, on the verge of death, and resumes his place at the head of the team. Seeing the faltering legs of this lead dog, I felt as if my heart would break. His eyelids were stuck together with pus; his tongue hung lolling from his mouth as he panted in pain for breath. It was a pathetic, gruesome and noble face. My eyes overflowed so with tears that I could hardly see.
    On the blurry screen, one of the expedition members led the dog away across a slope. Finally he must have killed the beast, because a rifle report sounded loudly enough to frighten the other dogs and make them jump out of line. I burst out crying. My sister tried to comfort me, but it was no use. She gave up and took me out of the movie theater. But I kept on crying. I cried in the streetcar all the way home; I cried after I got inside the house. Even when my sister said she’d never take me to the movies again, I kept on crying. To this day I can’t forget that dog’s face, and whenever I think of it, I am overcome with reverence.
    At this time of my life I did not have a great deal of enthusiasm for Japanese movies, in comparison with foreign pictures. But my interests were still those of a child.
    My