“I’m a bad father,” Tsuburaya told Honda before his unit got started the next morning. His friend seemed unfazed by the news, so he added, “A bad husband, too.”
“Supposedly the cat forgets in three days the kindnesses of three years,” Honda answered.
They shot the scene of the creature crashing through the rail yards at Shinagawa. The suit’s rubber feet were continually torn up by even the thinnest steel of the model rails, and shot after shot after shot proved unsatisfactory. Some of their work was as repetitive as a carpenter’s hammering. But the house still had to be built.
Tsuburaya repaired the feet himself with cotton swabs and a glue pot and a fine brush while Nakajima drank tea and enjoyed the break. Handcraftsmanship justified itself as an expression of intimacy with the world. Honda made jokes about the number of people standing around on salary, but Tsuburaya reminded him that the potter accepted long hours at the kiln with his body and soul.
“That’s good to know,” Honda responded. “But in the meantime, nobody gets to eat.”
Mori mounted a publicity blitz four full weeks before the release, including an eleven-installment radio serial, and by the premiere their monster’s face glowered down from every bus and tramway stop, and a nearly full-sized Gojira balloon swayed and bowed in the wind over an automobile dealership in the Ginza district.
It worked: Gojira recorded the best opening-day ticket sales in Tokyo’s history and had a better first week than Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai. “It’s like a dream!” Akira shrieked at the showing his family attended, and Masano watched the destruction in respectful silence. Some of the older audience members left the theater in tears.
Mori had already begun to arrange the sequel. Since Gojira ended with the scientist’s warning that if the world continued with nuclear weapons there would someday appear another such monster, the sequel would involve two: Gojira and his bitter enemy, yet to be designed. One possibility for the latter appeared to Tsuburaya in a dream the night after the premiere, a gigantic tussock moth rendered with enough scientific accuracy that its face and mouth parts were horrific. In the dream it was obsessed with two magical little girls. Tsuburaya even glimpsed the teaser line: “The Mightiest Monster in All Creation — Ravishing a Universe for Love.”
American investors had already won the auction for Gojira’s international rights and decided to add new footage involving an American reporter trapped in Tokyo during the rampage, in order to give Western audiences someone for whom to care. They announced they were also going to tone down the nuclear references. They retitled it Godzilla, and added the subtitle King of the Monsters.
A month after the premiere, Tsuburaya walked home alone late one December night, bundled against the cold. In the fishmonger’s shop the dried bonito looked like whetstones in the window. He stopped at a sushi stall for some boiled rice with vinegar.
The boy who served him had a bamboo crest motif on his coat and he asked why Tsuburaya was smiling. Tsuburaya nearly told him that in all of his work he’d always been looking for the patterns that were an object’s essence, and that on the boy’s coat the bamboo was an emblem of the living bamboo there inside it. The best patterns became the nation’s communal property, like that bamboo or England’s lion. Or his monster.
The boy suddenly asked why he was weeping. He said he was weeping for all that he’d been granted, and for everything he’d thrown away, then thanked the boy for his concern.
In his toast at the dinner following the premiere, Honda had noted that Tsuburaya’s success was centered around his talent for developing a team and uncaging each member’s skills. He joked that Tsuburaya led by example and cajoling and intimidation, that for him nothing was ever perfect and no one was ever finished, and he got a laugh by concluding that a day with Tsuburaya was like four with Kurosawa, in terms of consigning someone ever more irrevocably to misery.
For Tsuburaya on nights like that December night, a long walk meant an even later arrival. In his father’s childhood, after sunset, villages were dark and quiet and cold. A gong might call worshippers to the candlelit temple. A dog might bark. Otherwise what one saw and heard was up to the moonlight and wind.
Masano hadn’t spoken to him about the movie, though she had told Hajime that by the end she’d been moved by how profoundly it had affected the other patrons her age. That December night, the moment Tsuburaya finally arrived at home, Hajime announced he was leaving to work on a picture in Malaysia. Masano stopped serving from her platter and looked at her husband as though all had been fine before he’d come in. “There he is with his warm smile,” she finally said to Hajime. “Orchestrating his catastrophes.”
“This wasn’t his idea; it was mine,” Hajime answered.
Akira stood up from the table and ran from the room, distraught at his brother’s announcement.
“We’ll be sorry to see you go,” Tsuburaya told his son.
“The only thing you’re sorry about is a production delay,” Masano told him, and Tsuburaya remembered that crows supposedly couldn’t feel the sun’s heat because they’d already been scorched black.
She went off to see to Akira, and Hajime finished his meal in silence. Tsuburaya retired to his study and noted that the nowhere in which he chose to dwell was the abode of perfect focus. He was like the blind old teacher who never knew to stop lecturing when the breeze blew out the light.
He told Hajime this story at the station the next day while they waited for the train. That he had difficulty keeping his son’s attention made him as sad as the departure. Hajime finally said that he’d rarely heard Tsuburaya talk so much before. The train pulled in, and they were silent while the arriving passengers streamed off. They might both have been imagining Akira, back in his room alone.
“Your brother’s going to be very sad to see you go,” Tsuburaya finally said.
This seemed to irk Hajime. “When did I become the villain?” he asked.
“No one’s calling you a villain,” Tsuburaya told him.
Hajime handed his bag up to the porter. “You know who you’ve always reminded me of?” he asked. “Prince Konoye. The two of you, actually.” Then he climbed the steps to the car.
Tsuburaya was too surprised to respond. He did manage to ask Hajime if he had enough money, but the porter’s departure call distracted them both and the train pulled out. Once it gathered some momentum Hajime waved, once, before his car passed out of sight around the curve with surprising speed.
Tsuburaya was left on the platform, where he remained after the other well-wishers had left. The wind swept a seed pod of some sort onto his foot.
Konoye had been Prime Minister before the attack on Pearl Harbor. He’d always understood what war with America would mean but with each new step toward destruction had lacked the will to insist that the nation do what was right. The joke about him had been that he was so perpetually unsure of his intentions he sometimes got lost en route to the toilet.
Tsuburaya and Masano had talked about Konoye more than once, especially after his death. She’d been very upset about it, in fact. He had poisoned himself before his arrest by the Americans, leaving behind in his room only his family seal and a book, the newspapers had reported. In the book, written by the Englishman Oscar Wilde, Konoye had underlined a single passage, as if he’d hoped to make his amends in penciclass="underline" Nobody great or small can be ruined except by his own hand, and terrible as was what the world did to me, even more terrible still was what I did to myself.