The Last Samurai (28 page)

I think spring is here.

The farmers see a crowd of people. A samurai has gone to the river’s edge to be shaved by a monk
.

A man with a moustache and a sword pushes his way through the crowd and squats scratching his chin. (It’s Toshiro Mifune)

This is really shocking. I fell asleep 10 minutes into a masterpiece of modern cinema, and when I woke up the whole recruitment section was over.

STOP. REWIND.

Signs of life in the next room.

STOP. PLAY.

The master swordsman has changed his mind, you don’t know why. 6 samurai get ready to leave for the hills in the morning
.

In comes a gambler, who says they’ve found a really tough samurai
.

Katsushiro picks up a stick and strides to the door: one last test
.

Gambler: That’s unfair

Kambei: If he’s as good as you say he’ll parry the blow

Gambler: But he’s drunk

Kambei: A good samurai would never get so drunk

A man runs through the door; Katsushiro brings down the stick hard on his head. It’s Toshiro Mifune, who falls to the ground
.

Mifune looks at the samurai. He recognises Kambei
.

You had the nerve to ask whether I was a samurai

I’m a samurai all right

Don’t go away. I’ll show you something [takes out scroll]

Look at this

Handed down in my family for generations

Mifune is making strange faces and noises now replicated in miniature by my side. Kurosawa is right, he can turn on a dime & watching quicksilver Mifune stern Shimura ardent Kimura I suddenly realise that everything is going to be all right, I am providing my fatherless uncleless boy not with 8 male role models (6 samurai 1 gatecrashing farmer’s son 1 fearless farmer) but 16 (8 characters 8 actors) 17 including Kurosawa who does not appear. Only one of the characters is a perfectionist in the practice of his art but all 8 actors & the director who does not appear show this terrible perfectionism making a total of 17 male role models (not including the extras).

[Kambei, reading] You’re this Kikuchiyo?

Born in the Second Year of Tensho
…
[bursts out laughing]

You look remarkably old for your age

Looking at you I can hardly believe that you are 13

[All the samurai burst out laughing]

L: Where did you steal this?

L: Who do you think you are, calling me a thief?

Now we are six.

After this superb battle … one might expect the picture to end with some kind of statement that he has at last grown-up, that he has arrived, that he has
become
something—the great judo champion.

Today is my sixth birthday.

I got an Oxford-Duden Japanese Pictorial Dictionary and a little book about a cat in Japanese that was all in kana and a book which I couldn’t tell what it was because it was all in Japanese, but Sibylla said it was Sugata Sanshiro by Tomita Tsuneo. She said I would have to share her kanji dictionary and her Kodansha romanised dictionary and her grammar and she said unfortunately Sugata Sanshiro was not available in English so I might find it rather hard going, but that it seemed to be a marvellous story going by what Mr. Richie says about the film and she got out a book by Mr. Richie and said look at this, can you read this? I asked if it was in English and she said yes so of course I could read it. Apparently there is quite a dramatic scene in the book when Sugata’s judo teacher tells him to kill himself. This is what Mr. Richie says about my book:

He is using all of the correct judo procedures, besting one man after the other. All of this is shown with fast cutting at its most seductive. It is an exhilarating passage. It is like something from the ordinary Japanese fight-picture, only much more skillfully done. We—not yet guessing what the picture is about—think: that Sugata is a real man, a real hero. The crowd thinks so. There are cries of how wonderful he is, how marvelous. Sugata, carried away, attacks one man after the other, always winning.

There is a cut to the judo teacher’s room. Everything is still. He does not move, there is no movement on the screen, and after the furious motion of the sequence directly before it is like an admonition. He sits there, as though waiting, the seconds pass. Then Sugata, his kimono torn, comes in.

Then Sugata does an extraordinary thing. He opens the shoji and without a look backward or below he leaps.

I am really looking forward to reading the book.

The Pictorial Dictionary had a picture of a samurai on the front so first I looked for that. It was quite hard to find because it is in Ethnology, and when I found it the only words it gave were the words for samurai and for armour, and it didn’t even give the character for samurai it just spelled it out in hiragana.

I did not want to say anything to Sibylla because I did not want to hurt her feelings but I think she guessed something because she asked what’s the matter. I said Nothing and she said Doh ka na? very sceptically. Doh ka na? means Really? in Japanese. I showed her the samurai and she said it was absolutely appalling that it did not give the kanji and that it was probably because they thought it was too hard for people, so what I should do was write a letter to the editor and sign it Ludo Age Six. I asked if I could write it on the computer and she said how will he know you are really six? She said to be sure to put the character in my letter so I am going to.

Sibylla is watching Seven Samurai again. I have seen it before several times so I decided to start reading Sugata Sanshiro. We are each going to pick a character every day and master them thoroughly on a daily basis starting tomorrow. Today I just learned two words that Sibylla gave me that come up in the book.

Ju means soft and jitsu means art or skill and do means way and apparently the characters turn up in other compounds. I already know all the hiragana and katakana.

Finally I looked at the first page of the book. Japanese is the hardest language in the world.

I did not want to colour in the characters that I knew because this is the only Japanese book that we have apart from two of Sibylla’s. So I decided to try to find another character in the dictionary and it took about an hour to find it. The characters all look quite similar so it is hard to remember anything if you do not colour them in as you go along. After a while Sibylla looked up. She stopped the video and said what’s the matter. I said Nothing. She came over and looked at the page of the book and said how are you ever going to learn this if you don’t colour in the characters? She said these little Japanese books are so cheap, it only cost a fiver, we can always get another. She said she wanted me to enjoy my birthday, and she said if anything was bothering me I should let her know.

She said I could ask as many questions as I wanted because it was my birthday. I said who is my father? Sibylla said she was sorry, but she could not tell me. She said he was a travel writer and she had only met him once.

I think maybe he is somebody famous.

Today we each picked a character. We are going to do this every day until we know them all. There are 1945 and I already know three so if we do two a day we will know them all in 971 days. I wanted to do 20 a day because then we would be finished in three months but Sibylla said no it would be terrible to wake up thinking we had to do 20 whereas we could always do more if we felt like it.

Sibylla picked
JIN person/hito person. JIN is the exogenous Chinese lexeme and hito is an indigenous Japanese lexeme.

I picked

yaku flute 17-stroke radical for musical instrument

Unfortunately Halpern does not seem to have any characters that use the radical.