Free Something Like an Autobiography by Akira Kurosawa Page A

father didn’t just take us to the movies. He quite often took us to listen to storytellers in the music halls around Kagurazaka. The ones I remember are Kosan, Kokatsu and Enyu. Enyu was probably too subtle for my childish mind to find entertaining. I enjoyed Kokatsu’s introductions, but Kosan, who was called a master of the storytelling art, was one I really liked. I can’t forget two of his routines,
Yonaki udon (Nighttime Noodles)
and
Uma no dengaku (The Horse in Miso Sauce)
. Kosan would pantomime the noodle vendor pulling his cart and lifting his voice in a whining refrain, and I remember how quickly I was swept into the mood of a frosty winter evening.
    I never heard anyone but Kosan tell the
Horse in Miso Sauce
story. A pack-horse driver stops at a roadside teahouse to have some saké. He leaves his horse, which is carrying a load of miso salted-bean paste, tethered outside. But while he drinks, the horse gets loose and wanders off, and he sets out to look for it. As he asks everyone he comes across, his speech becomes sloppier and more hurried. Finally he asks a drunk by the road if he has “seen my horse with miso on it.” The drunk replies, “What? I’ve never even heard of horse cooked that way, much less seen it.” Then the pack-horse driver goes off down the tree-lined road, a dry wind blowing as he continues his search. I practically shuddered at the feeling of dusk on my skin, and I thought it was wonderful.
    I liked the stories I heard the masters tell in the storytelling halls, but I liked the tenpura on buckwheat noodles we had on the way home even better. The flavor of this tenpura-soba on a cold night remains especially memorable. Even in recent years when I am coming home from abroad, as the plane nears the Tokyo airport I always think, “Ah, now for some tenpura-soba.”
    But lately tenpura-soba doesn’t taste like it used to. And I miss something else. The old noodle shops used to pour out the day’s broth in front of the entrance in order to dry the bonito flakes used to make it; they could be reused. When you walked past, the flakes gave off a familiar fragrance. I remember this with great nostalgia. This is not to say that noodle shops never pour out the broth in front any more, but if they do, the smell is completely different.

The Goblin’s Nose
    IT WAS NEARING graduation time. I was going down the steep street called Hattorizaka in front of our school on a “Taishō skate.” It was like a giant skateboard or a scooter, with one wheel in front and two in the back. You put your right foot on it, grabbed the handle and pushed with your left foot. I was careening down the hill, holding my breath, when the front wheel hit the metal cover of a gas main. I felt myself somersaulting through the air.
    When I woke up, I was stretched out in the police box at the bottom of Hattorizaka hill. My right knee was badly hurt, and for some time I was virtually crippled and had to stay home from school. (My right knee is still bad to this day. Trying to protect it, I seem to do the opposite—I am constantly bumping it on things and hurting it. This knee is the reason I’m no good at putting in golf. It’s painful for me to bend over, so I can’t anticipate the undulations of the putting green very well. Otherwise I would no doubt be an expert putter.)
    Around the time my knee healed, I went with my father to a public bathhouse. There we met an elderly gentleman with white hair and a white beard. My father seemed to know him, and exchanged greetings with him. The old man looked at me in my nakedness and asked, “Your son?” My father nodded. “He seems to be pretty weak. I’ve opened a fencing school near here—send him over.” When I asked my father later who that man had been, he explained he was the grandson of Chiba Shŭsaku.
    Chiba Shŭsaku was a famous fencer of the late feudal age who had had a school at Otama-ga-ike and left behind many a tale of his prowess. Hearing that this