When later 1 discovered that the bridge was nothing more than a utilitarian device, I lost all interest in it. Again, when as a child 1 saw photographs of subway trains in picture books, it never occurred to me that they had been invented out of practical neces- sity; I could only suppose that riding underground instead of on the surface must be a novel and delight- ful pastime.
I have been sickly ever since I was a child and have frequently been confined to bed. How often as I lay there I used to think what uninspired decora- tions sheets and pillow cases make. It wasn't until I was about twenty that I realized that they actually served a practical purpose, and this revelation of human dullness stirred dark depression in mc. Again, I have never known what it means to be hungry.
I don't mean by this statement that I was raised in a well-to-do family—I have no such banal intent. I mean that I have had not the remotest idea of the nature of the sensation of "hunger. We remem- ber what it's like, h o w terribly hungry you feel by t h e time y o u get h o m e from school. How about some jelly beans? There's cake and biscuits too. Of course I do eat a great deal all the same, but I have almost no recollection of ever having done so out of hunger. Unusual or extravagant things tempt me, and when I go to the house of somebody else I eat almost everything put before me, even if it takes some effort.
As a child the most painful part of the day was unquestionably mealtime, especially in m y own home. I dreaded mealtime more each day. I would sit there at the end of the table in the dimly lit room and, trembling all over as with the cold, I would lift a few morsels of food to my mouth and push them in.
What extraordinarily solemn faces they all make as they eat! It seems to be some kind of ritual. Three times every day at the regulated hour the family gathers in this gloomy room.
T h e places are all laid out in the proper order and, re- gardless of whether we're hungry or not, wc munch our food i n silence, with lowered eyes. Who knows? It may be an act of prayer to propitiate whatever spirits m a y be lurking around the house.
Eat or die, the saying goes, but to my ears it sounded like just o n e more unpleasant threat. Never- theless this superstition I could only think of it as such always aroused doubt and fear in me. Nothing was so hard for me to understand, so baffling, and at the same time so filled with menacing overtones as the commonplace remark, "Human beings work to earn their bread, for if they don't eat, they die.
It drove me indeed to the brink of lunacy. I wonder if I have actually been happy. People have told me, really more times than I can remember, ever since I was a small boy, how lucky I was, but I have always felt as if I were suffering in hell. It has seemed to me in fact that those who called me lucky were incomparably more fortunate than I. I have sometimes thought that I have been bur- dened with a pack of ten misfortunes, any one of which if borne by my neighbor would be enough to make a murderer of him.
I simply don't understand. I have not the remotest clue what the nature or extent of my neighbor's woes can be. Practical troubles, griefs that can be assuaged if only there is enough to eat—these may be the most intense of all burning hells, horrible enough to blast to smithereens my ten misfortunes, but that is precisely what I don't understand: if my neighbors manage to survive without killing themselves, without going mad, maintaining an interest in political parties, not yield- ing to despair, resolutely pursuing the fight for exist- ence, can their griefs really be genuine?
If that is the case, their sufferings should be easy to bear: they are the common lot of human beings and perhaps the best one can hope for.
I don't know. If you've slept soundly ut night the morning is exhilarating, I suppose. What kind of dreams do they have? What do they think about when they walk along the street? Hardly—it couldn't only be that. I seem to have heard the theory advanced that human beings live in order to cat, but I've never heard anyone say that they lived in order to make money. And yet, in some instances. No, I don't even know that.
The more 1 think of it, the less I understand. All I feel are the assaults of ap- prehension and terror at the thought that I am the only one who is entirely unlike the rest. It is almost impossible for me to converse with other people. What should I talk about, how should I say it?
This was how I happened to invent my clowning. It was t h e last quest for love I was to direct at hu- man beings. Although I had a mortal dread of human beings I seemed quite unable to renounce their society. I managed to maintain on the surface a smile which never deserted my lips; this was the accommodation I offered t o others, a most precarious achievement performed b y me only at the cost of excruciating efforts within.
I was aware only of my o w n unspeakable fears and embarrass- ments. Before anyone realized it, I had become an accomplished clown, a c h i l d who never spoke a single truthful word.
I have noticed that in photographs of m e taken about that time together with my family, t h e others all have serious faces; only mine is invariably con- torted into a peculiar smile. This was one more variety of my childish, pathetic antics. Again I never once answered back anything said to m e by my family. The least word of reproof struck me with the force of a thunderbolt and drove me almost out of my head. Answer back! Far from it, I felt convinced that their reprimands were without doubt voices of human truth speaking to m e from eternities past; I was obsessed with the idea that since I lacked the strength to act in accordance with this truth, I might already have been disqualified from living among human beings.
This belief made me incapable of arguments or self-justification. When- ever anyone criticized me I felt certain that I had been living under the most dreadful misapprehension.
I always accepted the attack in silence, though inwardly so terrified as almost to be out of my mind. People normally seem to be hiding this true nature, but an occasion will arise as when an ox sedately ensconced in a grassy meadow suddenly lashes out with its tail to kill the horsefly on its flank when anger makes them reveal in a flash human nature in all its horror. Seeing this hap- pen has always induced in me a fear great enough to make my hair stand on end, and at the thought that this nature might be one of the prerequisites for survival as a human being, I have come close to des- pairing of myself.
I have always shook with fright before human beings. Unable as I was to feel the least particle of confidence in my ability to speak and act like a human being, I kept my solitary agonies locked i n m y breast. I kept my melancholy and my agitation hidden, careful lest any trace should be left exposed. I feigned an innocent optimism; I gradually perfected myself in t h e role of the farcical eccentric.
I thought, "As long as I can make them laugh, it doesn't matter how, be all right. If I succeed in that, the human beings probably won't mind it too much if I remain outside their lives. In the summer I made everybody laugh by saun- tering through the house wearing a red woolen sweater under my cotton kimono. Even my elder brother, who was rarely given t o mirth, burst out laughing and commented in intolerably affectionate tones, "That doesn't look so good on you, Yozo.
I had pulled my little sister's leggings over my arms, letting just enough stick out at the opening of the sleeves to give the impression that I was wear- ing a sweater. My father frequently had business in Tokyo and maintained a town house for that reason.
He spent two or three weeks of the month at a time in the city, always returning laden with a really staggering quantity of presents, not only for members of our immediate family, but even for our relatives. It was a kind of hobby on his part. It was most unusual for Father to behave so affectionately with the children. Whenever I was asked what I wanted my first im- pulse was to answer "Nothing.
At the same time I was congenitally unable to refuse anything offered to me by another person, no matter how little it might suit my tastes. W h e n I hated something, I could not pronounce the words, "I don't like it.
In either case I was torn by unspeakable fear. In other words, I hadn't the strength even to choose between two alternatives. In this fact, I believe, lay one of the characteristics which in later years was to develop into a major cause of my "life of shame. My father lost a little of his good humor. Or h o w about a mask for the New Year lion dance? They sell them n o w in children's sizes. Wouldn't y o u like o n e? The jester had completely failed.
He snapped his notebook shut without writing anything. What a failure. Now I had angered my father and I could be sure that his revenge would be something fearful. That night as I lay shivering in bed I tried to think if there were still not some way of redressing the situation. I crept out of bed, tiptoed down to the parlor, and opened the drawer of the desk where my father had most likely put his notebook.
I found the book and took it out. I riffled through the pages until I came to the place where he had jotted down our requests for presents.
This accomplished I returned to my bed. I had not the faintest wish for a lion mask. In fact, I would actually have preferred a book. But it was obvious that Father wanted to buy me a mask, and my frantic desire to cater to his wishes and restore his good humor had emboldened me to sneak into the parlor in the dead of night.
This desperate expedient was rewarded by the great success I had hoped for. See, somebody has written here 'lion mask. For a minute I couldn't figure it out, then it came to me. This was some of Yozo's mischief. You know, I asked h i m what he wanted from Tokyo, but he just stood there grinning without saying a word.
Later he must have got to wanting that lion mask so badly he couldn't stand it. He's certainly a funny kid. Pretends not to know what h e wants and then goes and writes it.
If h e wanted the mask so much all he had to do was tell me. I burst out laughing in front of everybody in the toy shop. Ask him to come here at once. I got one of the menservants to bang at random on the keys of the piano our house was well equipped with most amenities even though we were in the country , and I made everyone roar with laughter b y cavorting in a wild Indian dance to his hit and miss tune. My brother took a flashbulb photograph' of m e performing my dance.
When the picture was developed you could see my peepee through the opening between the two handkerchiefs w h i c h served for a loincloth, and this too occasioned much merriment. It was perhaps to be accounted a triumph which surpassed my own ex- pectations. I became a n adept in the exploits of Dr. Nonsentius and Dr. Know- itall, and was intimately acquainted with all manner of spooky stories, tales of adventure, collections of jokes, songs and the like.
I was never short of material for the absurd stories I solemnly related t o make t h e members of m y family laugh. But what of my schooling? I was well on the way to winning respect. But the idea of being respected used to intimidate me exces- sively. My definition of a "respected" man was one who had succeeded almost completely in hoodwinking people, but who was finally seen through by some omniscient, omnipotent person who ruined him and made him suffer a shame worse than death.
Even sup- posing I could deceive most human beings into respect- ing me, one of them would know t h e truth, and sooner or later other human beings would learn from him. What would be the wrath and vengeance of those who realized how they had been tricked! That was a hair- raising thought. I acquired my reputation at school less because I was the son of a rich family than because, in the vulgar parlance, I had "brains.
Dur- ing recitation time at school I would draw cartoons and in the recess periods I made the other children in the class laugh with the explanations to my draw- ings. In the composition class I wrote nothing but funny stories. My teacher admonished me, but that didn't make me stop, for I knew that he secretly en- joyed my stories. One day I submitted a story written in a particularly doleful style recounting how when I was taken by my mother on the train to Tokyo, I had made water in a spittoon in the corridor.
But at the time I had not been ignorant that it was a spit- toon; I deliberately made my blunder, pretending a childish innocence. I was so sure that the teacher would laugh that I stealthily followed him to the staff room. As soon as he left the classroom the teacher pulled out my composition from the stack written by my classmates.
H e began t o read as he walked down the hall, and was soon snickering. H e went into the staff room and a minute or so later—was it w h e n he finished it?
I watched h i m press my paper on the other teachers. I felt very pleased with myself. A mischievous little i m p. I had succeeded in escaping from being respected. My report card was all A's except for deportment, where it was never better than a C or a D. This too was a source of great amusement to my family. My true nature, however, was one diametrically opposed to the role of a mischievous i m p.
Already by that time I had been taught a lamentable thing b y the maids and menservants; I was being corrupted. I now think that to perpetrate such a thing on a small child is the ugliest, vilest, crudest crime a human being can commit.
But I endured it. I even felt as if it enabled me to see one more particular aspect of human beings. I smiled in my weakness. If I had formed the habit of telling the truth I might perhaps have been able to confide unabashedly to my father or mother about the crime, but I could not folly understand even my own parents.
To appeal for help to any human being —I could expect nothing from that expedient. Sup- posing I complained to my father or my mother, or to the police, the government—I wondered if in the end I would not be argued into silence by someone in good graces with the world, by the excuses of which the world approved.
It is only too obvious that favoritism inevitably exists: it would have been useless to complain to human beings. So I said nothing of the truth. Some perhaps will deride me. When did you become a Christian anyway? There was something that happened when I was a small boy.
A celebrated figure of the political party to which my father belonged had come to deliver a speech in our town, and I had been taken by the servants to the theatre to hear him. The house was packed. Everybody i n town who was especially friendly to my father was present and enthusiastically applauding. When t h e speech was over t h e audience filtered out in threes and fives into the night.
As they set out for home on t h e snow-covered roads they were scathingly commenting on the meeting. I could dis- tinguish among the voices those of my father's closest friends complaining i n tones almost of anger about h o w inept my father's opening remarks had been, and h o w difficult it was to make head or tail out of the great man's address.
Even the servants, when asked b y my mother about the meeting, an- swered as if it were their spontaneous thought, that it h a d been really interesting. These were the self- same servants w h o had been bitterly complaining on the way home that political meetings are the most boring thing in the world.
This, however, is only a minor example. I am convinced that human life is filled with many pure, happy, serene examples of insincerity, truly splendid of their kind—of people deceiving one another with- out strangely enough any wounds being inflicted, of people who seem unaware even that they are de- ceiving one another.
But I have no special interest in instances of mutual deception. I myself spent the whole day long deceiving human beings with my clowning. I have not been able to work up much con- cern over the morality prescribed in textbooks of ethics under such names as "righteousness. Human beings never did teach me that abstruse secret.
In short, I believe that the reason why I did not tell anyone about that loathesome crime perpetrated on me by the servants was not because of distrust for human beings, nor of course because of Christian leanings, but because the human beings around me had rigorously sealed me off from the world of trust or distrust.
Even my parents at times displayed at- titudes which were hard for me to understand. I also have the impression that many women have been able, instinctively, to sniff out this loneliness of mine, which I confided to no one, and this in later years was to become one of the causes of my being taken advantage of in so many ways.
Women found in me a man who could keep a love secret. Every April when the new school year was about to begin these trees would dis- play their dazzling blossoms and their moist brown leaves against the blue of the sea. Soon a snowstorm of blossoms would scatter innumerable petals into the water, flecking the surface with points of white which the waves carried back to the shore. Stylized cherry blossoms flowered even on the badge of the regulation school cap and on the buttons of our uniforms.
A distant relative of mine had a house nearby, which was one reason why my father had especially selected for me this school of cherry blossoms by the sea. I was left in the care of the family, whose house was so close to the school that even after the morning bell had rung I could still make it to my class in time if I ran.
That was the kind of lazy student I was, but I nevertheless managed, thanks to my accustomed antics, to win popularity with my schoolmates. This was my first experience living in a strange town. I found it far more agreeable than my native place. One might attribute this, perhaps, to the fact that my clowning had by this time become so much a part of me that it was no longer such a strain to trick others.
I wonder, though, if it was not due instead to the incontestable difference in the problem in- volved in performing before one's own family and strangers, or in one's own town and elsewhere.
This problem exists no matter how great a genius one may be. An actor dreads most the audience in his home town; I imagine the greatest actor in the world would be quite paralyzed in a room where all his family and relatives were gathered to watch him. I h a d moreover been quite a success.
It was inconceivable that so talented an actor would fail away from home. The fear of human beings continued to writhe in my breast—I am not sure whether more or less intensely than before—but m y acting talents h a d un- questionably matured.
I could always convulse the classroom with laughter, and even as t h e teacher pro- tested what a good class it would be if only I were not in it, h e would be laughing behind his hand. At a word from me even the military drill instructor, whose more usual idiom was a barbarous, thunderous roar, would burst into helpless laughter. Just when I had begun to relax m y guard a bit, fairly confident that I had succeeded by now in con- cealing completely my true identity, I was stabbed in the back, quite unexpectedly.
The assailant, like most people w h o stab in the back, bordered on being a simpleton—the puniest boy in the class, whose scrof- ulous face and floppy jacket with sleeves too long for him was complemented by a total lack of profi- ciency in his studies and by such clumsiness in military drill and physical training that he was perpetually designated as an "onlooker. Deliberately assuming as solemn a face as I could muster, I lunged overhead at the bar, shouting with the effort. I missed the bar and sailed on as if I were making a broad jump, landing with a thud in the sand on the scat of my pants.
This failure was entirely premeditated, but everybody burst out laughing, exactly as I had planned. I got to m y feet with a rueful smile and was brushing the Hand from my pants when Takeichi, who had crept up from somewhere behind, poked me in the back.
H e mur- mured, "You did it on purpose. I might have guessed that someone would detect that I had deliberately unused the bar, but that Takeichi should have been the one came as a bolt from the blue. I felt as if I h a d seen the world before me burst in an instant into the rag- ing flames of hell. It was all I could do to suppress a wild shriek of terror. T h e ensuing days were imprinted with my anxiety and dread. I continued on the surface making every- body laugh with my miserable clowning, but n o w and then painful sighs escaped my lips.
Whatever I did Takeichi would see through it, and I was sure he would soon start spreading the word to everyone he saw. If it were possible, I felt, I would like to keep a twenty-four hours a day surveillance over Takeichi, never stirring from him, morning, noon or night, to make sure that he did not divulge the secret.
I brooded over what I should do: I would de- vote the hours spent with h i m to persuading h i m that my antics were not "on purpose" but the genuine article; if thing9 went well I would like to become his inseparable friend; but if this proved utterly im- possible, I had no choice but to pray for his death.
Typically enough, t h e one thing that never occurred to me was to kill him. During the course of my life I have wished innumerable times that I might meet with a violent death, but I have never once desired to kill anybody. I thought that in killing a dreaded adversary I might actually be bringing h i m happiness. In order to win over Takeichi I clothed my face in the gentle beguiling smile of the false Christian.
I strolled everywhere with him, my arm lightly around his scrawny shoulders, my head tilted affectionately towards him. I frequently would invite him in honeyed, cajoling tones to come and play in the house where I was lodging. But instead of an answer h e al- ways gave m e only blank stares in return. One day after school was let out—it must have b e e n in the early summer—there was a sudden down- pour. Ju6t as I was about to rush outside, I noticed Takeichi hovering dejectedly in the entrance way.
I said, "Let's go. I'll lend you my umbrella. W h e n we arrived home I nuked my aunt to dry our jackets. I had succeeded in luring Takeichi to m y room. The household consisted of my aunt, a woman in h e r fifties, and my two cousins, the older of whom was a tall, frail, bespectacled girl of about thirty she h a d been married at one time but was later separated , and the younger a short, round-faced girl who looked fresh out of high school.
The ground floor of the house was given over to a shop where small quantities of stationery supplies and sporting goods were offered for sale, but the principal source of income wag the rent from the five or six tenements built by my late uncle. Takeichi, standing haplessly in my room, said, "My ears hurt. The lobes seemed filled to the bursting with pus. I simulated an exaggerated concern. It must hurt. Takeichi lay on the floor with his head on my lap, and I painstakingly swabbed his ears.
Even Takeichi seemed not to be aware of the hypocrisy, the scheming, behind my actions. Far from it—his comment as he lay there with his head pillowed in my lap was, " bet lots of women will fall for you! This, I was to learn in later years, was a kind of demoniacal prophecy, more horrible than Takeichi could have realized. Once these expressions put in an appearance, no matter how solemn the place, the silent cathedrals of melancholy crumble, leaving nothing but an im- pression of fatuousness.
It is curious, but the cathe- drals of melancholy are not necessarily demolished if one can replace the vulgar "What a messy business it is to be fallen for" by the more literary "What un- easiness lies in being loved. No, to speak in those terms of the atmosphere engendered by so vulgar an expression as "to fall for" is to betray a precocity of sentiment not even worthy of the dialogue of the romantic lead in a musical comedy; I certainly was not moved by the farcical, self-satisfied emotions suggested b y the phrase "to have a faint inkling.
In m y immediate family women outnum- bered the men, and many of my cousins were girls. There was also the maidservant of the "crime. Never- theless, it was with very much the sensation of tread- ing on thin ice that I associated with these girls.
I could almost never guess their motives. I was in the dark; at times I made indiscreet mistakes which brought me painful wounds. These wounds, unlike the scars from the lashing a man might give, cut in- wards very deep, like an internal hemorrhage, bring- ing intense discomfort. Once inflicted it was extremely hard to recover from such wounds. Women sleep so soundly t h e y seem to b e dead. W h o knows? Women may l i v e in order to sleep.
These and various other generalizations were products of an observation of women 6ince boyhood days, but m y conclusion was that though women appear to belong to the same species as man, they are actually quite different creatures, and these incomprehensible, insidious beings have, fantastic as it seems, always looked after me.
In m y case such an expression as "to b e fallen for" or even "to b e loved" is not in the least appropriate; perhaps it describes the situation more accurately to say that I was "looked after. When I played the jester men did not go on laughing indefinitely. I knew that if I got carried away by m y success in entertaining a man and overdid the role, m y comedy would fall flat, and I was always careful to quit at a suitable place. Women, on the other hand, have no sense of modera- tion.
No matter how long I went on with my antics they would ask for more, and I would become ex- hausted responding to their insatiable demands for encores. They really laugh an amazing amount of the time.
I suppose one can say that women stuff them- selves with far more pleasures than men. Their knock on my door, no matter how often it came, never failed to startle me so that I almost jumped in fright. I would launch into some silly story, miles removed from what I was thinking. Put them on. Here, take these glasses. The clown meekly put on the older girl's glasses. My cousins were convulsed with laughter. Exactly like Harold Lloyd. I stood up. They laughed all the harder.
From then on whenever a Harold Lloyd movie came to town I went to see it and secretly studied his expressions. One autumn evening as I was lying in bed reading a book, the older of my cousins—I always called her Sister—suddenly darted into my room quick as a bird, and collapsed over my bed.
She whispered through her tears, "Yozo, you'll help me, I know. I know you will. Let's run away from this terrible house together. Oh, help me, please. This was not the first time that a woman had put on such a scene before me, and Sister's excessively emotional words did not surprise me much. I felt instead a certain boredom at their banality and emptiness.
I slipped out of bed, went to my desk and picked up a persimmon. I peeled it and offered Sister a section. She ate it, still sobbing, and said, "Have you any interesting books? Lend me something. Long personal experience had taught me that when a woman suddenly bursts into hysterics, the way to restore her spirits is to give her something sweet.
Her younger sister, Setchan, would even bring friends to my room, and in my usual fashion I amused them all with perfect impartiality. As soon as a friend had left Setchan would tell me disagreeable things about her, inevitably concluding, "She's a bad girl. You must be careful of her. This, however, by no means implies that Takei- chi's compliment, "Womenll fall for you" had as yet been realized.
I was merely the Harold Lloyd of North- east Japan. Not for some years would Takeichi's silly statement come palpitatingly alive, metamorphosed into a sinister prophecy. Takeichi made one other important gift to me. One day he came to my room to play.
He was waving a brightly colored picture which he proudly displayed. I was startled. That instant, as I could not help feeling in later years, determined my path of escape. I knew what Takeichi was showing me. When we were children the French Impressionist School was very popular in Japan, and our first introduction to an appreciation of Western painting most often began with such works. T h e paintings of van Gogh, Gauguin, Cezanne and Renoir were familiar even to students at country schools, mainly through photo- graphic reproductions.
I myself had seen quite a few colored photographs of van Gogh's paintings. His brushwork and the vividness of his colors h a d in- trigued me, but I had never imagined his pictures to be of ghosts. I took from my bookshelf a volume of Modigliani reproductions, and showed Takeichi the familiar nudes with skin the color of burnished copper.
Do you suppose they're ghosts t o o? There are some people whose dread of human beings is so morbid that they reach a point where they yearn to see with their o w n eyes monsters of ever more horrible shapes.
And the more nervous they are —the quicker to take fright—the more violent they pray that every storm will be. And they did not fob people ofif with clowning; they did their best to depict these monsters just as they had appeared. Takcichi was right: they h a d dared to paint pictures of devils. These, I thought, would be my friends in the future. I was so excited I could have wept. I'm going to paint pic- tures of ghosts and devils and horses out of hell.
Ever since elementary school days I enjoyed draw- ing and looking at pictures. But my pictures failed to win the reputation among my fellow students that my comic stories did.
I have never had the least trust in the opinions of human beings, and my stories represented to me nothing more than the clown's gesture of greeting to his audience; they enraptured all of my teachers but for me they were devoid of the slightest interest. Only to my paintings, to the depic- tion of the object my cartoons were something else again did I devote any real efforts of my original though childish style.
I sought to model my techniques on those of the Impressionist School, but my pictures remained flat as paper cutouts, and seemed to oflfer no promise of ever developing into anything. But Takeichi's words made me aware that my mental at- titude towards painting had been completely mistaken. What superficiality—and what stupidity—there is in trying to depict in a pretty manner things which one has thought pretty.
The masters through their sub- jective perceptions created beauty out of trivialities. They d i d not hide their interest even in things which were nauseatingly ugly, but soaked themselves in the pleasure of depicting them. In other words, they seemed not to rely in the least on the misconceptions of others.
Now that I had been initiated by Takeichi into these root secrets of the art of painting, I began to do a few self-portraits, taking care that they not be seen b y my female visitors. T h e pictures I drew were so heart-rending as to stupefy even myself. Here was the true self I had so desperately hidden. I had smiled cheerfully; I had made others laugh; but this was the harrowing reality.
I disliked the thought that I might suddenly be subjected to their suspicious vigilance, when once the nightmarish reality under the clowning was detected. On the other hand, I was equally afraid that they might not recog- nize my true self when they saw it, but imagine that it was just some new twist to my clowning—occasion for additional snickers.
This would have been most painful of all. I therefore h i d the pictures in the back of my cupboard. In school drawing classes I also kept secret my "ghost-style" techniques and continued to paint as before i n the conventional idiom of pretty things. To Takeichi and to h i m alone I could display m y easily wounded sensibilities, and I did not hesitate now to show him m y self-portraits.
He was very en- thusiastic, and I painted two or three more, plus a picture of a ghost, earning from Takeichi the predic- tion, "You'll be a great painter some day. On my forehead were imprinted the two prophecies uttered b y half-wit Takeichi: that I would be "fallen for," and that I would become a great painter. I wanted to enter an art school, but my father put me into college, intending eventually to make a civil servant out of me.
At my father's suggestion I took the college entrance examinations a year early and I passed. By this time I was really quite weary of my high school by the sea and the cherry blossoms. Once in Tokyo I immediately began life in a dormitory, but the squalor and violence appalled me. This time I was in no mood for clowning; I got the doctor to certify that my lungs were affected.
I left the dormi- tory and went to live in my father's, town house in Ueno. Communal living had proved quite impossible for me. It gave m e chills just to hear such words as "the ardor of youth" or "youthful pride": I could not by any stretch of the imagination soak myself in "college spirit. When the Diet was not in session my father spent only a week or two of the month at the house. While he was away there would be just three of us in the rather imposing mansion—an elderly couple who looked after the premises and myself.
I frequently cut classes, but not because I felt like sightseeing in Tokyo. Instead I would spend whole days in the house reading and painting. When my father was in town I set out for school promptly every morning, although sometimes I actually went to an urt class given by a painter in Hongo, and practiced sketching for three or four hours at a time with h i m. Having been able to escape from the college dormitory I felt rather cynically—this may have been my own bias—that I was now in a rather special position.
Even if I attended lectures it was more l i k e an auditor than a regular student. Attending classes became all t h e more tedious. You want to deliver a thrilling finale your audience remembers while wrapping up all of the emotional beats of the film. Coco does both with gusto. But we know from the beginning that Miguel will return home. Instead, we have another plot that needs to be resolved. Miguel needs to return to Mama Coco and make her remember Hector or else he will go through the Final Death.
Come on. It hits all the right emotional notes. Coco ends with some fun spectacle followed by genuine emotion, leaving the audience content no matter what they want out of a film. Coco is a great addition to Pixar's long list of great and memorable screenplays and movies.
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Coco Script Download. Click above to read and download the entire Coco script PDF. Adrian Molina and Matthew Aldrich.
Matthew Aldrich got his start writing the thriller Cleaner , starring Samuel L. Battle monsters while checking out legendary treasures. Gain experience and power as you trek across uncharted lands along with your companions. Those are just a couple of the character options available. The choices you create and therefore the story you tell are all yours.
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