The Brothers Cash & Kurosawa

For Christmas I received 5 books for various family members. Three of them are about artists, though they range pretty widely: an American country singer (Johnny Cash), a Japanese film director (Akira Kurosawa), and a Russian film director (Andrei Tarkovsky). Did I say "about"? All three books were written by the artists, the first two being autobiographies (Cash: The Autobiography, and Something Like an Autobiography). (The third is about films, though it's somewhat autobiographical.)

I certainly would not have chosen these books to read, but I find much of interest in them. Because of the way I think about things, perhaps, my first thoughts while reading Kurosawa after reading Cash were about similarities, or at least one in particular that really stood out. They both had older brothers. Both older brothers died young. And they were haunted by their dead brothers.

Cash's older brother Jack died at 14 (Cash was 12) from a table-saw accident. As depicted in the film, Walk the Line, Cash went fishing while his brother went to work to earn some money for the family. Cash's father met him on the way back home to tell him about the accident. He drove him home, then took a brown grocery sack from the back of the car to show John: inside was his brother's blood-soaked clothing. Jack died a week later from the horrible injuries. Cash:

After Jack's death I felt like I'd died, too. . . . I was terribly lonely without him. I had no other friend. . . .

Jack isn't really gone, anyway, any more than anyone is. For one thing, his influence on me is profound. When we were kids he tried to turn me from the way of death to the way of life, to steer me toward the light, and since he died his words and his example have been like signposts for me. The most important question in many of the conundrums and crises of my life has been, "Which is Jack's way? Which direction would he have taken?" . . . . Jack was stayed with me.

Kurosawa's story is darker, but not without its parallels, though, as you will see, in the negative. Akira's brother Heigo was four years older. Unlike Jack Cash, who read his Bible regularly and intended to be a preacher, Heigo had a very dark outlook: he would surely die before the age of 30 because "he claimed that when human beings live past thirty, all they did was become uglier and meaner, and he had no intention of doing so." He was a devoteé of some Russian literature, particularly Mikhail Artsybashev, whose The Last Line he called "the best book in the world." It's hero had a creed of "weird death," which Kurosawa doesn't explain. (I haven't read Artsybashev). But you get the idea, or will.

Akira lived with his older brother and a woman his brother had moved in with. Then, at 27 Heigo committed suicide. Akira, too, saw his brother and the blood of his death. He was devastated. He writes that a friend said this to him: "You're just like your brother. But he was negative and you're positive."

He went on to say that our appearance was exactly the same, except that my brother had had a kind of dark shadow in his facial expression and that his personality, too, had seemed clouded. . . . I prefer to think of my brother as a negative strip of film that led to my own development as a positive image.

In both cases, the surviving brothers in a sense played off their dead brothers. Cash, who often felt pulled into the darkness, reached toward the light from which his brother seem to beckon him. He often failed, but he always came back as well; his brother gave his conscience clarity.

Kurosawa's brother represented a darkness from which Akira recoiled, striving toward the light. While Kurosawa never embraced Christianity, his films do not flinch from showing the dark mystery of evil in the human heart, a mystery he puzzles over in his book on several occasions. Heigo gave him a reference point that essentially said, "Don't go there."

We are all influenced by those around us, and often especially by the dead. I know that I have been haunted, if that is the right word, by relatives who have died; their absence has become a fixed presence, my memory distilling their essential qualities, virtues, and examples that they effectively left behind and that speak more eloquently now than when they were on this earth. Indeed, what you leave behind by way of example, charity, love, kindness (or their opposites) is truly left behind and present in the living memory of those who yet walk the earth.

Comments

[John Hetman]

What a beautiful piece of writing, James! And a distillation of the truth that the dead are as Christ said, "just asleep."

Not long ago, I was at a 5:00 pm mass at St. John Brebeuf in Niles. I noticed (as always) that the majority of the congregation were elderly, but that their declining numbers were now very noticeable in how empty the church seemed. But all of a sudden, it felt full again, just for a moment, as I could sense the souls of all those who had once attended this mass, as filled the church's empty pews, and were here somehow with us all.

[Carol]

Sounds like a good read. I've been meaning to find a book to tag along for our vacation next month. This should be perfect.