Bridge for Passing (24 page)

Our days fell into the pattern of work. We rose early, breakfasted, and left the hotel at seven. A quarter of a mile away we took ship, and were carried swiftly to the village. Once there each person proceeded to his individual preparation for the day’s scene. For an hour there was no need for me and I walked along the beach, past the stone break-water to the foot of a steep hill. Some steps led up this hill for an eighth of a mile or so, and at the top was a little empty stone temple, once a Shinto shrine. A low wall surrounded it, and the view was sea and mountains and sky.

I found my own niche, however, behind the shrine. At the edge of the high cliff there was a hollow in the rocks which exactly fitted my body. There I went every morning and, held in this hollow as though in his arms, I lay at rest. It was not the rest of sleep. It was the rest of the mind emptied, the spirit freed. He and I had never been here together. In the years when I had lived upon Kyushu I did not know that he existed, nor did he dream of me. Nor was there communication between us now—I cannot pretend that I heard his voice or even was aware of his presence. What did take place gradually as the days passed was a profound insurge of peace. No one became part of me, but I became part of the whole. The warm rock bed in which I lay, the wind rising cool from the sea, the sky intensely blue and the drifting white clouds, the gnarled pine tree bent above my head—of these I was a part, and beyond these, of the whole world. Myself ceased to be, at least for a time, a lonely creature with an aching heart. I was aware of healing pouring into me. It is a fact that at the end of the hour when the conch shell blew, I was able to rise refreshed to join my fellow workers.

The stone steps? I saw them again last night in the dark theater when Old Gentleman came down to warn the villagers, his faithful servant following. Yes, those are the same steps I climbed every morning, thirsting for the peace I found in the shelter of the rock. It became a habit, I woke eager for the hour and savored it deeply and with new zest each day. Then I discovered that something of each day’s peace was left as residue for the night. I did not use it all up, there was an accumulation. I became stronger. I was able to miss a day, then two days, then more. Gradually I was established in myself and I needed no more to climb to that high lonely place and wait to receive. I was able to manufacture peace within myself merely by recalling the sweep of sea and mountain and sky and myself curled into the hollow rock. I had the peace inside me then, and the place became a shrine in my memory. I do not know how this healing came about. I did not pray, if prayer be words or pleading or searching. If the process must be explained, it was simply that I gave myself wholly to a universe which I do not understand but which I know is vast and beautiful beyond my comprehension, my place in it no more than a hollow in a rock. But there is the hollow and it is mine and there is the rock.

This chronicle, if it is to be worth anything, must be truthful. We were approximately one-fourth of the way through the making of the picture and we had arrived at the desert which lies in the middle half of every creative project. The desert begins at that point where progress is too far to consider giving up, and so far from completion that the end is invisible and can be contemplated only by faltering faith. How well I know the bleak prospect! I face it in every book I write. The first quarter of it goes like a breeze from the sea. The work is pure joy. It is sure to be the best book I have ever written. Then I enter upon the middle half of the book and joy departs. The characters refuse to move or speak or laugh or cry. They stand like pillars of salt. Why, oh, why was the book begun? Too much work has been done to cast it aside, yet the end is as far off as the end of a rainbow. There is nothing to do but plod ahead, push the characters this way and that, breathe on them hotly in the hope of restoring life, use every means of artificial respiration. Somewhere, some day, though it is unbelievable for weeks and months or even years, they do begin to breathe. What relief! The desert is past, the last quarter of the book breezes again.

On a morning in the middle of the desert period of the picture I sat on the edge of a fishing boat and watched our star, Sessue Hayakawa. With grim patience he was waiting to be called to the set. The scene had to be repeated because the sound man reported a fly on the microphone which nobody had noticed. There were flies in spite of the repellent which one of the crew sprayed zealously on the just and the unjust alike, and one fly had cunningly concealed himself on the microphone and buzzed enough to outsound everything else. Our star waited and his secretary-maid fanned him under his heavy robes.

“Why doesn’t someone fan me so strategically?” the American director demanded.

No one answered and no one fanned him. Only the star sat patiently on. In his hand he held a tiny transistor radio. He was listening to a fight and when I smiled he explained that only thus could he find life endurable under the circumstances. Meanwhile, the make-up man ran to apply iced towels to his wrists and neck and to touch up his face and the star lit a large cigar to the infinite terror of the make-up man who feared for the beard he had so carefully applied. No one dared to suggest anything to the star, however, and he smoked in peace, his eyes closed as he listened to the fight.

On the set the director struggled with our grandfather, who though actually old, had too young a voice. The director illustrated how an old man’s voice should sound. I held my peace. I know that old men’s voices are high and shrill, not low and husky, but I held my peace. I had learned the first day to hold my peace—“for God’s sake!”

Somehow we struggled through the middle desert, getting up early every morning, crowding exhausted into the boats at night, assuaged only by the beauty of the sunset sky. There were nights when we worked so late that it was dark when we took ship and the sea sparkled with tiny phosphorescent fish, outdoing the stars in the heavens.

And Sessue Hayakawa, advanced to the last day of his contract with us, was finishing his scenes as Old Gentleman and we were still in the desert. Make-up man had done rather a skillful job of aging him the ten years for which the script called, but the same wind which had made the surf too high for the boats one morning blew off his left eyebrow. Makeup man was fit to be tied, because he did not bring an extra eyebrow with him from the hotel. There was nothing to be done except to make an eyebrow from white hairs left over from the beard. … Everything continued to go wrong. The cakes the kindhearted citizens of the town left with us as a treat for the crew turned out to be of an undesirable variety and nobody would eat them. We were all morose. The rushes had been delayed that we hoped to see a week ago. A Japanese holiday had intervened, and a Sunday, and we had seen very few rushes, so that we were at least three days behind schedule. We drew apart and pondered dark thoughts. Could anybody understand the English our actors speak? We were trying the impossible—Japanese actors playing in English! Young Yukio and young Toru, our farm mother, among others, spoke little or no English, and now they spoke it, but was it good enough? How would it sound, even when our star spoke, to an American audience?

In the midst of the desert of pessimism we had a letter from our business manager in Tokyo. She had seen the rushes of Old Gentleman and they were superb, she said, including dialogue. They made her cry, she reported. For that young sophisticate to cry means something. We had not supposed it possible, so cool and collected was she, so chary of praise. Our hopes soared. Perhaps we were almost out of the desert.

In renewed spirits we gave a dinner for Sessue Hayakawa in honor of his leaving us. He was in a fine mood and drank a mixture of cold beer and sake, which he sustained admirably, and his stories were as good as his plays. Fifty years in theater in many countries made a lifetime of stories worth telling. We were sorry to see him go, and I think he was sorry to leave us, but there is nothing permanent in theater life. We work together closely for a few days and weeks and months, growing fond of one another, we part and forget. Nothing goes deep—it is the only way to bear it.

The rushes arrived and we went to the theater across the street after the evening show was over. They did not make me cry but I was pleased with them. Then suddenly I saw our young star, our grown-up Toru. He was sitting in the row ahead of me, heavily asleep. My heart sank under the seat. Could he sleep? Yes, he could and did. I turned to my companion.

“Look at that!”

“He is drunk,” was the indignant reply.

Yes, there was a party tonight and our young star was drunk. It was all too obvious when the rushes ended and we left the theater. He could not stand up. Nevertheless, I felt chilled. Drunk or sober, how could he sleep? No, we were still in the desert and we could only plod on.

There was one more moment in the day. It was the last glimpse, the final close-up, of Old Gentleman’s servant. We took it in front of the hotel, and the crowd gathered, a prosperous holiday crowd with cameras and gaiety. Old Gentleman’s servant was of course the little ancient wardrobe man but he had gained a new dignity. He had achieved a lifelong dream. He was now an actor. All these years he had only been making clothes and finding costumes for others to wear upon the stage. But now he had worn a costume of his own, he had had his face made up—only a little, for it was such a perfect face for the part. That night he stood in the presence of the crowd with calm and dignity and the cameraman took the close-ups we needed for the final film. When they were finished, we bowed and shook hands, we thanked him and he bowed in return. He told us that this was the greatest year of his life. He had become an actor, he had played a part with Sessue Hayakawa, and next month he was to marry off his daughter.

So the day ended.

“Otsukaresama!”

It is a word meaning, “You are tired,” a gentle Japanese way of saying, “You may quit for the day.”

It was true. We were tired.

We were now well past the desert. There was one big scene left for Kitsu, the coming of the tidal wave. While we had been working around this scene, our special-effects man had been creating it in the special-effects studio in Tokyo. Twice he had come to Obama to consult and to take hundreds of pictures of Kitsu and the empty beach beyond. We knew that we were in safe hands, the tidal wave would be perfect, but we could not see it until we returned to the city. Ours was the task of creating the approach to the wave, and the recovery from it.

An air of tensity and dread crept into the village as we prepared for the scene of the tidal wave. This was cutting near the bone. Every man, woman and child feared above all else in their beautiful precarious life the ungovernable tidal wave striking with no warning except the low and ominous roar over the horizon, the muddied water of the well, the quiver of the earth. Even to imagine the horror was almost more than they could bear as they set themselves doggedly to the task of acting the dread reality. Farm and fisher families played their parts well, and we drew near to the final evening, when in the darkness the torches flamed before Old Gentleman’s house and the panic-stricken Kitsu families fled from their ancestral homes up the narrow winding mountain path to safety at the top of the cliff.

Toru was for that evening the star, the boy Toru. Our part of the scene was to bring him to the moment when he sees the village swept away, and we see it in his face. The tidal wave was to be inserted here and after it we took over again when Toru, in agony and madness and all but swept away himself, was saved only by a strong kind hand put out to seize him as he clung to the cliff. He acted the part superbly but I remember especially the people swarming up the hillside, the dogged frightened people taking the path their ancestors had trodden so often before them, but in reality.

That night when it was all over and we went away soberly, we gained a new understanding of the incomparable courage of the Kitsu folk, the unswerving devotion to the sea and to their way of life, a clean good way, but perilous. We said good-by with tender regret. I have memories of a crowd of kind faces in the lantern light, of the headman proudly receiving our praise and thanks, saying the only reward he wished was to know when the picture would be shown in Japan.

“We will put on our best clothes and go even to Tokyo,” he told us.

At last on the mountain the flames of the torches at Old Gentleman’s gate died into final darkness. It was over, the picture was made, and never shall I forget the long beautiful days of sea, wind and sunshine, of meals shared on the beach, and the great pewter pots of tea, nor shall I ever forget the hours of rest I spent lying half asleep in an empty boat drawn up on the shore, the drowsy sound of waves in my ears, the heat of noon upon me. I had put away in those days and for the time being the waiting shadows of loss and loneliness. I lived for the day, the hour, the work, the deep organic healing of the warmth of the sun, the driving rain, and the stormy sea.

We were so near the end of the picture now that we could plot the design of our days. After Kitsu came the empty beach of Chijiwa and here was the great shark-catching scene and the last scene with the children now grown and finding love and life, joy and sorrow. Last of all at Kitsu was the scene with Old Gentleman, Toru and Setsu. After that there remained only the volcano scene at Oshima to be shot and inserted at its proper place in the film.

I am going too fast. Let me remember first Chijiwa itself. In a crowded country, on a matchless shore, this wide and beautiful beach is left unpopulated. It is empty and has been for centuries. Go there any day and you will see fishing nets spread out to dry but no people. Chijiwa faces the sea at a peculiar angle so that typhoons and tidal waves strike it with a devastating force, and the fisherfolk, after the often repeated experience of total destruction, have listened at last to the threatening sea and live there no more.

It is a supremely fine beach, nevertheless, stretching two miles long and reaching deep into the land, its boundaries, east and west, huge and handsome rocks. My life in Asia and my love of Asian art has conditioned me to rocks. They add stability to the landscape, and the shapes they take from age and weather express the moods of nature. They signify strength and resistance and eternal values. At the far end of Chijiwa there were such rocks, and against them as backdrop we played the final love scene with Toru and Setsu, grown-up. It was toward the rocks Old Gentleman went when he bade them his last farewell.