“This is what I’m talking about,” the young warrior sneered. “Here we are, slaving away, doing menial labor and getting covered with all this disgusting blood and grease, and we aren’t allowed to go to the bathhouse to get cleaned up. So after we deliver these heavy buckets to the old guy in the kitchen, we have to trudge back down to the valley, and then we have to wash ourselves off in the cold river, with the dogs right next to us, gobbling up the filthy offal. But it’s a very different story for you two, isn’t it? You have nothing to do but take refreshing hot-spring baths, and eat and drink till you’re full. And after you’ve carefully washed everything, right down to your assholes, it’s ‘Wondafuu, sankyuu beriberi maachi,’ am I right?” The next-to-last phrase was rendered, with maximum contempt, in phonetic English.
The young warriors, including the one who had just delivered this diatribe, burst out laughing, but there was something childish about their merriment. It seemed to have an edge of hostility, yet beneath the alcohol-fueled bravado there was a vestigial element of bashfulness, as well. The truculent remarks and derisive laughter gave Kogito a disheartening sense of the mean-spiritedness of his countrymen. He was shaking with anger and nervous tension, but Goro showed no signs of losing his cool. Finally, unable to control his temper, Kogito lashed out.
“Hey, if that’s your lot in life, then just go ahead and wash off your dirt with the dogs! Why are you hanging around here, looking like you want something? You’re just adding to your hardships by putting down those heavy loads and then picking them up again and loitering around where you aren’t welcome.”
At this, the young men erupted in uproarious laughter. Kogito had a feeling that they were laughing because in his excitement he had spoken to them in their own dialect, and that made him even angrier. What a bunch of mean-spirited jerks! He felt somehow ashamed of the young men—and, by extension, of himself, too, since they were all from the same place—and he felt embarrassed about subjecting Goro to such an unpleasant experience. The two men who were carrying the roughly rolled-up, raw calf pelt were laughing along with the others, but they appeared to be up to something else as well. They passed right by Kogito and Goro, then stopped, ominously.
“Yeah, it’s a rough life, all right,” one of them retorted. “But the main problem now is that the drying rack we need for our dirty work is being occupied by your pristine little asses!” And then in one quick movement the young warriors unfurled the large blood-soaked pelt they were carrying and dumped it right onto Kogito’s and Goro’s heads.
Teetering atop the high, rickety platform, the two boys were enveloped in a lukewarm, bloody-smelling, disorienting darkness as they struggled to keep their balance so they wouldn’t go crashing to the ground. Their arms were pinned at their sides, and their attempts to kick the fetid calfskin off with their legs were woefully ineffectual. And as if from the other side of a thick wall, a great wave of laughter kept washing over them—now close, now far away. A hard night! Dried blood smokes on my face, and nothing lies behind me but that repulsive little tree!
Kogito had only a vague memory of what transpired immediately after he and Goro finally managed to extricate themselves from underneath the bloody calfskin, but that scene was set down with perfect clarity in the screenplay.
KOGITO: Come on, let’s cross the bridge and get out of here.
GORO: But we’re totally filthy. Even if we do decide to leave, I’m going to get cleaned up first.
In the gathering dusk, the two of them are surrounded by the young warriors, who are still laughing loudly about their prank.
GORO (ignoring the young men): Seriously, I need to go wash up. My shirt and trousers are dirty, too, so I need to rinse them out, as well. If I leave them like this, I won’t be able to put them on again.
The young men are still falling down with laughter. They crane their necks, not wanting to miss a word of this exchange between their victims.
KOGITO (more and more annoyed): Well, I’m going home.
With that, he starts walking down the slope, but when he glances back, Goro isn’t following. Kogito runs down the slope, gravity and momentum carrying him along so quickly that he stumbles from time to time. From the point of view of Goro, watching Kogito go, the camera traverses the gradually widening meadow, then takes in the entire scene as night begins to fall. Mist wells up from the bottom of the deep valley.
Encountering no resistance from the young warriors, Kogito makes his way across the unstable suspension bridge. In the opposite corner of the meadow the thick, dense tangle of shrubbery looms deep and black. Before long, in the depths of the picture plane, the three-wheeled truck can be seen intermittently through the trees as it starts to drive away from the elevated area where it was parked.
MUSIC: Akari Choko’s composition, “Sadness No. 2” (two minutes, ten seconds), can probably be used exactly as is.
This has been mentioned before, but all the scenes that Goro incorporated into this screenplay were things he had actually experienced or observed. His scrupulous use of documentary technique was evident even in his first successful movie, The Funeral. If this screenplay had ended up actually being made into a film, then Goro’s filmmaking career would have probably come full circle, ending as it began.
After the departure scene, of course, what happened to Kogito was out of Goro’s line of sight. Kogito chose to re-create this part of the story—in other words, the part that Goro didn’t write—using the novelist’s techniques that had become second nature to him, rather than continuing in the screenplay format.
When Kogito crossed the suspension bridge and climbed up to the highway, the young man who was waiting next to the three-wheeled truck climbed into the saddle (that is, the motorcycle-style driver’s seat) and started the engine without a moment’s hesitation, as if he had known all along that Kogito was going to turn up alone. Kogito hopped into the empty cargo space and grabbed hold of the metal framework of the canopy that covered the driver’s seat.
The film that Goro would have made, if he had been using the type of telescopic lens that can capture images even when there isn’t much natural light, would probably have shown a pitiful-looking schoolboy standing on the platform of the three-wheeled truck, holding on with both hands while stoically enduring the pitching and rolling of the flimsy vehicle. One minute we see him through a gap in some sparsely leafed-out trees, the next minute he disappears, then we catch another glimpse, and so on ...
After the three-wheeled truck carrying Kogito and the driver had been on the road for about twenty minutes, it came to a place about halfway to the three-road junction next to the tunnel. There, Kogito caught sight of the lights of a car descending from above. The three-wheeled truck pulled into a clearing where lumber from the forest was prepared for shipping, in order to let the oncoming car pass by on the narrow mountain road. But the vehicle that was advancing toward them turned out to be the big green Cadillac, with Peter at the wheel.
As the king-sized car approached, illuminating the road ahead with its powerful headlights, Kogito had the strange feeling that they were about to be stopped by the police and roughly frisked, just like in the movies. The Cadillac braked next to the three-wheeled truck, which had pulled over to the side of the road to avoid a collision. Kogito could tell that Peter was sticking his head out of the window, but it was already so dark that he couldn’t make out the expression on the American’s face. He imagined that Peter’s eyes were probably searching both sides of the driver and the luggage platform behind the spot where Kogito was standing.
And then, sure enough: “What are you doing here?” Peter demanded. “Where’s Goro?” Kogito raised his right arm and pointed with a grand, sweeping gesture toward some far-off place behind them. He had a feeling that he was imitating the unseemly American habit of gesticulating in a broad, exaggerated manner, but he didn’t care. Peter got the message and promptly blasted off again in the Cadillac.
When the three-wheeled truck pulled back onto the roa
d, the strong, sharp wind that had suddenly come up blew painfully into Kogito’s eyes, and he began to cry. Although it was the stinging wind that had started the initial flow of tears, he went on weeping out of concern for Goro’s welfare. And he had to admit, if only to himself, that the anger he felt at having been so rudely ignored by Peter was a factor as well.
After the truck had sputtered to a stop beside the trifurcated junction at the entrance to the near side of the tunnel, Kogito jumped off onto the edge of a field that was littered with clumps of straw and other detritus from the previous year’s harvest. “This’ll be fine, right here,” Kogito called in the direction of the driver’s cab. The young driver didn’t reply, but after Kogito had clambered up what turned out to be a rather steep incline to the highest elevation of the tiered fields, he looked back and saw that the driver had parked the truck in a small space on the side of the road along the valley and had gone around behind and let down the tailgate of the luggage platform. He was perched there now, with the air of someone hunkering down for the duration.
Kogito, too, sat down on a ridge between two fields and gazed into the distance beyond the deep, dark valley. There was still some indigo light around the margins of the mountains that were stacked up on the horizon, but the sky was an intense, tawny yellow ocher. Even as he was gazing at that vista, the world abruptly went so completely dark that he actually found himself wondering whether the faint brightness of a moment before had been some sort of illusion.
And then, after nearly two hours had passed, Goro came marching briskly along, through a darkness so dense that the road was barely distinguishable from the trees that lined it on both sides. Kogito went rushing eagerly down the hill, slipping and sliding on the loose soil, but Goro barely glanced in his direction, and he didn’t say a word to Kogito before heading for the three-wheeled truck, which was silhouetted against the dark hillside, suffused in the ambient light from the tunnel entrance.
“So where shall we go now?” Kogito called out. He was trying to emulate Goro’s cool demeanor, but even to his own ears, his voice sounded angry, repressed, and immature.
“There’s nowhere to go except back to Shindate, is there?” Goro said. (That was the section of Matsuyama where he and Chikashi rented lodgings in a temple compound.)
“Isn’t Peter going to come after you?”
Silently, Goro turned his dark face toward Kogito, and—Kogito never forgot this—only the backlit rims of his ears were glowing gold.
When the three-wheeled truck finally pulled up beside the mud-brick wall that surrounded the temple grounds, it was already the middle of the night, but Goro called out at the entrance to the subtemple, loudly enough to awaken Chikashi. Goro and Kogito went around behind the building, stripped off their clothes, and washed themselves all over. Chikashi laid two bath towels and two sets of underwear out on the verandah, then disappeared.
When Kogito and Goro had finished dressing and had gone into the temple, Chikashi appeared to be already asleep, cocooned in a futon spread out in front of the household altar (which she had claimed as her own little domain), with the quilt pulled up over her head. On one side, in a wider space, she had laid out two futons, side by side. Shivering with cold and exhaustion, the two schoolboys lay down without exchanging a single word. They had passed the entire two-hour ride on the luggage platform of the three-wheeled truck in silence, as well.
7
As has already been pointed out, more than once, the films that Goro made arose directly out of his own experiences and observations, so it’s a contradiction, by definition, to say that in this case Goro left behind two completely separate—and very different—versions of the most important scene in the entire screenplay: the ending. There was no way for Kogito to determine which was the true account of what actually happened, since he wasn’t there. Simply put, the two scenes suggest what might have happened after Kogito left the training camp in the three-wheeled truck. The first version, rendered in screenplay form with storyboard illustrations attached, goes like this:
Goro is sitting on the dark stone staircase in front of the entrance to the outbuilding that’s attached to the bathhouse. He is waiting for something. He has apparently been sitting there for quite some time, and he looks annoyed. The young disciples can be seen coming up the hill from the lower right-hand corner of the meadow, crowding around Peter in an amicable way. They head toward the training hall. Goro jumps to his feet with a decisive air and starts to return to the road that leads to the main office. Suddenly Daio appears before Goro, blocking his way. Daio is accompanied by two young girls and two boys. We have never seen any of them before.
DAIO: Good grief, Goro, you’re really a mess! (In stark contrast with the almost autistic blackness of his earlier drunken mood, he has regained his usual good humor, but for once it doesn’t go too far, to the point of buffoon-ish rudeness.)
Meanwhile, the boys and girls are making no attempt to conceal their forthright reactions to Goro’s filthy, disheveled appearance. The youngsters seem to be ignorant and unworldly, and they stare at Goro with undisguised contempt. After pointing out the path to the bathhouse and telling the four young visitors to go ahead, Daio offers Goro an ostensibly apologetic explanation, but he is clearly giving him the brush-off.
DAIO: Oh, I’ll bet you came to get the bathhouse key yourself, because I didn’t give it to you before. The thing is, the situation has changed. We can’t have you using the bathing facilities in that state—that would be a major disaster. We may call it a hot-spring bath, but it’s only designed to heat the hot water for a short time, and it’s a major undertaking to replace all the water in the tub if any dirt or grease gets in. Let’s leave it this way: if Peter turns up and says that he wants to be with Goro, and no one else will do, then we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. Till then, please wait in the office. Help yourself to doburoku, if you like.
Interior of a dark room. Goro is sitting on a wooden chair, seemingly lost in thought. (He probably hesitated to sit on the couch because he’s still covered with blood and grease from the slaughtered calf.) Just then, Daio barges in unceremoniously, picks up the two-quart bottle from the floor, and fills a teacup with home-brewed sake. He quaffs the doburoku in a single gulp. No traces remain of the stormy expression he wore earlier, but his high spirits have an edge of malice, and he comes across as a country trickster who can’t be trusted for a minute.
DAIO: Like the old proverb says, “The waiting is often the hardest part.” As it turns out, Peter seems to be quite taken with both the boys and the girls. Just peeping from the ceiling overhead was more than I could bear, and I ended up going down to the bath to join the happy little group! Choko Sensei was truly a man of foresight, wasn’t he!
Daio seems to be babbling incomprehensible nonsense. Goro is thrown into confusion and makes no attempt to reply.
DAIO (dropping all pretense of politeness and not even bothering to address Goro by name): Listen, why don’t you just run along home? The only problem is, if you head down the hill now, you’ll probably get roughed up pretty good by the young warriors. But if you go out the back of the office and follow the forestry road, you’ll come upon a narrow mountain stream just before you go into the depths of the forest. Go downhill along that stream, and you’ll come to a river that runs parallel to the road. The dogs are probably still there, rooting around for the filthy remains of the dead beast. As long as you don’t disturb them at their work, you should be able to climb up onto the road without getting mauled!
Goro climbs through the shady grove of trees as fast as his legs will carry him, then plunges toward the river in total darkness, looking extremely distressed.
Now, here’s the second version of that scene in the screenplay, with storyboards attached.
Goro is in the washing area of the bathhouse, sitting on a stool with his already hand-laundered shirt and trousers in a soggy pile next to him. Thoroughly and meticulously, he’s washing his hands and feet. He hears so
mething going on outside. Goro stands up and peers out the window. His face is in profile, looking lonely and puzzled. We switch to another camera and see Peter running up the sloping meadow. The young disciples are racing after him; it almost looks as if they’re playing a game of tag. Then Peter stops abruptly, turns, and aims his pistol at them. The young men throw themselves to the ground, facedown. Peter starts to run up the hill again. The young men get up and pursue him. Peter stops and points his gun at them. The same action is repeated over and over. By and by, instead of just pantomiming, Peter really does fire the pistol. There is an unexpectedly loud report, and the young warriors stay where they are, lying facedown in the grass. After a moment Peter appears in the bathroom, holding his pistol and looking triumphant.
GORO (standing there naked but clearly unintimidated): Are you planning to try to make me do something at gunpoint?
PETER (gently, almost deferentially): I would never do anything like that, dear Goro!
Goro is in the bathtub now, and Peter stands in front of him, his pale white body totally naked, no longer holding the pistol. There is the sound of the bathroom door being broken down. In a flash, a group of young disciples comes storming in, completely filling the room. They seize Peter and run down the sloping meadow, with the naked American held above their heads by a forest of arms, as if he were a sacred palanquin in a Shinto festival procession. One of the young men stumbles. This causes the mass of bodies to surge forward; Peter is thrown clear and lands on the ground. Peter, obviously weak with exhaustion, is once again hoisted over the heads of the young disciples; once again they begin to run, and once more the whole group collapses and Peter spills onto the ground. With each repetition, the game seems to be degenerating further, from rough horseplay into ever more barbaric violence. Finally, the entire group runs into the thicket and disappears from sight. After a brief moment, there’s a hoarse, inarticulate scream that shades into an agonized wail. Goro has thrown on his soggy shirt and trousers, and he starts to walk down the slope, through the dark, silent, deserted meadow. There isn’t another soul in sight.