Pearl Buck - Bridge for Passing

The rains fell, it seemed endlessly. It poured for three days without letting up. The mountains were hidden in rain and the sea roared against the rocks. We looked at one another in alarm. What if this went on and on?

“I thought you said June was the rainy season and this is September,” the American said to me reproachfully.

I myself was somewhat startled by the downpour, and referred the matter to the Japanese maître d’hôtel , who said that June was always the rainy season.

“Then what is this?” I asked.

“It is just rain,” the Japanese replied.

No one could deny the fact and so we passed on to more disputable matters. We decided to work on the script, planning each day’s schedule, in case the rain stopped some day. Scene by scene and shot by shot we planned and we planned. It was necessary and constructive work, and I also learned what I did not know before, that for a motion picture one does not tell the story in time sequence. One shoots all the scenes at each location, regardless of where these belong in the narrative. Thus for the first four days we would stay at the farmhouse, shooting everything that had to do with the farmhouse and its family of four, Father, Mother, Yukio and Setsu. This seemed a confusing business to me, but I could see its logic.

We sat around the long low Japanese table together with our cameraman and our Japanese sound man and assistant to the director. We sat on the floor, of course, and the cameraman was so unwise as to choose one end of the low table. I say unwise because he has long legs, very long, and he could not stretch his legs out when he was tired of sitting on them, because I had already grown tired and my legs were already stretched out, crosswise, under the table.

Here I pause for a moment to discuss the matter of sitting on one’s folded legs. Before I came to Japan this year, after so long a time away, I practiced faithfully every day folding my legs and sitting on my feet. It is not easy and at first I could only do it for three minutes and at best only got to twenty minutes, which does not last through a Japanese dinner, at least not the kind my friends give me. I was ashamed, but it was the best I could do. What was my pleasure, therefore, to discover that in the years I had been away, the Japanese have all but given up prolonged sitting on their legs! Instead they sit on chairs whenever possible, and the children, many of them, do not sit on their legs at all and even my friend said frankly that she could not sit for long in the Japanese fashion and anyway she thought it bad for the circulation. She attributed the surprising increase in height of this generation of young adults to the fact that they have not had to sit for hours on their folded legs. It may be the reason. Certainly I noticed the new height of the Japanese. The people are better looking and they have straighter legs.

Now let me speak of the cameraman. First I must say that he was charming, kind, temperamental and, in his field, an artist. He spoke little English but he understood much more than we thought he did. He was obviously devoted to his work, and wanted us to know that he had a special devotion to The Big Wave , which I believed he had, else why should he have worked with us? He was famous and could easily have earned as much on an easier job. But I was enchanted with him for other reasons. He was the most spectacular-looking human being that I had ever seen, very tall and very narrow in the feet, legs, body, arms, and hands, neck and especially face. He had a long, low-slung jaw and — but I cannot explain his anatomy. I do not know how he came to look like that. All I know is that I liked him, and I enjoyed his spectacular looks. There was so much in that long face of his that I looked at him again and again across the table. It was a sad face, I thought, and then again I thought it was not, so I kept looking at it. And our Japanese assistant was such a contrast, a very modern young woman in shirt and slacks and with a beehive arrangement of hair. She spoke foreign languages and she had studied ballet in Europe and she was newly married to our leading young actor, the grown-up Toru. His motion picture commitments prevented his being with us until the twenty-first, and so this was their first separation. She was teased a good deal by other members of the cast, and they forced her to write hourly postcards to her bridegroom, addressing them for her, and so on. She lent herself good humoredly to their fun, a calm young woman, intelligent and efficient and, incidentally, but importantly, very much in love.

Alas, upon the very day when it stopped raining and we had begun filming our first scenes at the farmhouse, our cameraman fell into a rice paddy. This was not as mild an event as it sounds, for it came at the end of a twelve-hour day. I had left location a little early in order to attend to some Tokyo business by telephone and was summoned to the hospital. There I beheld the elongated cameraman stretched on a bench in the hall, waiting to be X-rayed. We feared the worst, for he fell not only into the rice paddy outside the farmhouse, but the rice paddy was at the foot of a stone wall upon which the road ran, and he fell not as I had imagined, into soft mud and high rice, but upon rocks at the bottom of the paddy. His frame could best be defined at any time as a collection of very long thin bones connected loosely by withered brown skin, and lying on the bench he looked eight feet long.

We exclaimed our alarm but he refused to share it, and was carried into the X-ray room against his will. In half an hour the doctor reported no broken bones, only a bruise. The cameraman himself came out looking as gay as possible with his sort of a face, expecting our admiration, which we gave. He looked very smart in a clean black-and-white yukata, he had also permitted the doctor to put his right arm into a sling but only until he got out of the hospital, for he insisted upon returning to the job. We rode back to the hotel with him and gave him numerous orders, through our interpreter, that he was to have an attendant who would carry his chair everywhere for him to sit upon, together with a fan, an umbrella, cool drink and fruit.

The cameraman listened to this without change of expression and added, “And beddo.”

We laughed and the indomitable old figure sat very straight on the front seat. We bade him good night at his hotel and so ended that day.

Here I must consult my notes, scratched on the pages of my script, and written everywhere and anywhere in the farmhouse, wherever the scene was being played.

The first note says, “Feather—”

Feather?

Ah yes, that is the scene where Toru lay in the long stupor after the tidal wave had struck, and mischievous little Setsu stole into the room and tickled him with a feather to wake him up. It was a pretty scene, interrupted by Mother who came in with eggs in a small basket, followed by our last addition to the cast, a small, very intelligent dog. A duck was the really last addition but he had not yet appeared on the set.

While this scene was taken, I saw Father in another corner rehearsing his big scene with Yukio. Father is a good farmer, his face an honest brown. Our make-up man, the best in Japan — or did I say that before? — was dabbing at Father’s face and delicately wiping away the sweat of concentration. Mother’s personal attendant was doing the same to her in another corner. The attendant provided us with laughter. She was so very efficient, rushing in at last moments before the camera began to call them, in order to set straight a hair on Mother’s head and to add a touch of make-up to the corner of her eye or the edge of her lip.

“When work is over,” my notes tell me, “it is a sight to see Mother in her elegant gray silk kimono wending her dignified way along the dirt road at the top of the wall above the paddy field. She is an actress of some distinction in Japan, Father acted in Teahouse of the August Moon , and Toru and Yukio are both child stars. I am proud of our Big Wave family.”