As a young man, Tsuburaya had been struck by how different the Japanese hand was from the big, untrained hands of the other races. Masano had a calligrapher’s hands, long-fingered and tapering, and he’d been seduced by their dexterity and sensitivity when watching her set out her simple gifts for him in the hospital. The daughter of a Kyoto engineering magnate, she was fond of movie stars and thanks to her father’s influence, was touring the studio when the camera crane Tsuburaya had invented collapsed and he crashed to the floor in front of her. The shattered lens shield had slightly cut her forehead but even so she cradled his face and neck while his assistants came running. She later claimed he’d reached up to touch her injury, but he had no memory of that. On the same afternoon she’d appeared in his hospital room, bearing her gifts, and remaining behind after everyone else had left. They’d married a year later, when she was nineteen.
Their courtship had mostly taken the form of long-distance love notes, in which Tsuburaya found a courage of expression based on longing and the safety of isolation. All of us, he wrote later: when we make a little progress, we’re captivated by our cleverness.
Their feelings were an act of faith, just as the sublimity of an artisan’s pot was a gift and not a calculation. They gave themselves over to those feelings the way lips kissed the thickness of a tea bowl’s rim.
They honeymooned in the old Okinawa, which was now gone. Its capital had been a dream city, its narrow streets mossy and hushed, over which dark leaves threw down their shade. Eaves on the ancient red-tiled roofs featured heraldic animals fired from clay.
But lately it seemed to him that their minds were bound by obsessions that deprived them of freedom. They each put in longer days, he in his innovations and his wife in her grieving. All the rituals that had solidified their happiness now reflected back its opposite. In Masano’s photo albums of her loss, baby girls on their thirty-third day were taken to the shrine in thanksgiving by their grandmothers, who prayed for their welfare. As always, the tinier the tot, the more brilliantly it was dressed. Some photographs of these celebrations were prominently displayed on the family altar. Or, in the event of the child’s death, on the grave.
Tsuburaya’s experience was that one who was gone was forgotten, day by day. As his grandmother put it, “Destiny’s in heaven, and rice dumplings are on the shelf.”
But Masano knew spilt water never returned to the tray. And if she forgot, she said, Tsuburaya reminded her by going on with his life. She said that in the face of her unhappiness, he was like a blind man peeping through a fence.
“I’m sorry for my myopia,” he told her after the Obon had concluded, and after she’d followed some late-night tenderness with despair. He once again had come home nearly at dawn and she’d risen to meet him, backing him across the room with her beautiful hands.
“I suppose it’s like that old saying that the lighthouse doesn’t shine on its own base,” she’d remarked some hours later, while each still smelled of the other’s touch.
Before getting fired, Kayama suggested that the comic-book artist Abe should design the creature. Abe had been the illustrator for Kenya Boy, a series about an orphaned Japanese boy who was lost in Africa and continually had to fight off prehistoric monsters. Why Africa was overrun with prehistoric monsters was never explained. Abe produced a month’s worth of designs, each of which was less useful than the previous one. He was finally let go when he put forward a proposal that featured a giant frog’s body and a head shaped like a mushroom cloud. With no time to hire another designer, Honda and Tsuburaya decided to simply hybridize a dinosaur of their own conception. Various illustrations were pulled from libraries and children’s books and mixed and matched on the drafting table. Of course it would have a tyrannosaur’s head, but an Iguanodon’s body seemed an easier fit for a stuntman’s requirements, in terms of operating the suit. And Honda added a stegosaur’s back plates along the spine to ensure their creature would appear distinct from any recorded species.
During the clay-rendering stage they had his staff experiment with scaly, warty, and alligator skin before settling on the last. And with that decided, one whole unit was turned over to the suit’s construction.
The first version was framed in cloth-covered wire, over which rubber that had been melted in a steel drum was applied in layers. The result was immobile and weighed three hundred and fifty-five pounds. In the next attempt, the cloth itself was painted with the base coat, so only two layers of rubber were necessary, but the result was still a staggeringly heavy two hundred and twenty pounds. But after a month of further futility, they had to concede that rubber applied any less thickly would crack at the joints, so the second version would have to do.
To minimize the length of time the poor stuntman would have to spend in the thing, another suit was produced and cut into two sections for shots requiring only part of the monster, waist-up or waist-down. For screen tests of the latter, Nakajima, the stuntman, galumphed around in his heavy suspenders like someone wearing clown pants or waders, his great rubber feet crushing the rough models they’d arranged around the stage.
They chose Nakajima not only for his height and physical conditioning but also for his dogged determination. To prepare for his role, he’d taken a projector home with him and worn out Tsuburaya’s print of King Kong, and he told anyone who would listen that he’d spent two full weeks of evenings observing bears at the Ueno Zoo.
Another unit had successfully produced a smaller-scale, hand-operated puppet of the head that could spray a stream of mist from its jaws, for close-ups of the creature’s radioactive breath.
“So is your monster ready to go?” Masano asked the night before shooting was set to commence, out of the dark, when Tsuburaya had thought she was asleep.
“I think he is, yes,” Tsuburaya answered, surprising even himself.
One of the first recitations that he remembered from primary school involved the five terrors, in ascending order: “earthquake, storm, flood, fire, father.” It surprised no one that “father” was judged the most dangerous. As preoccupied as their fathers were, when it came to their sons they still found time for disappointment and punishment. And waiting to see that disappointment coalesce on his father’s face, during those rare occasions in which Tsuburaya spent time with him: those were some of his unhappiest memories.
His academic performance was always adequate but his father was particularly unhappy about his refusal to moderate the time he devoted after school to airplane building, and in the event of a harsh report on this from his grandmother, his father gave him the option of having his most recent model-building efforts reduced to kindling or having his hand burned. Like many before him, his father believed in the deterrent effect of burning rolled wormwood fibers on the clenched fist of a misbehaving boy. Once lit, the fibers lifted off from their own convection currents after a moment or two, but even so always left behind a white scar.
Afterwards his father treated the burn himself, with a cooling paste, and talked about the lessons his own father had taught him. He always began with the maxim that with either good acts or bad, the dust thus amassed would make a mountain. He had other favorites as well. When addressing elders or the opposite sex, the mouth was the entrance to calamity. Hard work in school had its usefulness, because what seemed stupid now might prove useful later. We should love our children with a stick. And it was always better not to say than to say.