Chapter 11 Maple Bridge Night Mooring

------------ Maple Bridge Night Mooring ------------ My father likes calligraphy very much. Calligraphy is always hung in the alcove, and paintings are rarely hung. The calligraphy he hangs is mainly rubbings of Chinese inscriptions, or written for him by friendly Chinese.Until now, I still remember that one axis is the rubbings of the ancient Hanshan Temple inscriptions, and several places are probably blank due to incomplete steles. My father filled in the blanks and taught me the poem "Night Mooring at Maple Bridge" by Zhang Ji of the Tang Dynasty.Until now, I can recite it very fluently, and I can write it down freely.

Later we had a banquet in some elegant restaurant where hung in an alcove this poem, written in such masterful style, that I read it unconsciously.Actor Kayama Yuzo heard this, stared at me in surprise, and said repeatedly: "Sir, you are really amazing." When filming "Tsubaki Thirty Lang", there was a line that was "waiting behind the stable", but Kashan actually said "waiting behind the toilet".So it is only natural that he was surprised when he heard me read "Fengqiao Night Mooring".But I also have to reveal this secret: I can read it aloud just because it is the poem "Night Mooring at the Maple Bridge". If it is any other Chinese poem, then I don't know anything about it.

The evidence is that among the Chinese poems, calligraphy and paintings written by Chinese that my father has always liked, I still remember to this day that there is a sentence that reads "The sword uses the Qinglong Yanyue knife, and the book reads the biography of the Zuo family in the Spring and Autumn Period", but I don't understand its meaning. I dragged my words away again.I was puzzled: Since my father loves calligraphy so much, why did he let me learn calligraphy from such a teacher? There may be two reasons: one is that the teacher lives in this street, and the other is that my brother has studied with him.I remember that when my father took me to apprentice, the calligraphy teacher asked about my brother and advised my father to let him continue his studies.I heard that my brother is also a scholar here.

But I'm really not interested in the teacher's writing.His handwriting, at best, is upright and serious, but at worst, it has no characteristics, just like movable type for printing.Since my father's order is so, I have no choice but to arrive on time every day, sit at the same table with other students, and practice calligraphy according to the teacher's model. My father had a beard that was popular in the Meiji era, and this teacher also wore the same beard.The difference is that my father has the mustache and mustache of a military official in the Meiji era, while the teacher wears the mustache of an official in the Meiji era.

The teacher always sat at the desk opposite to the students and looked at us with a serious face. I could see the yard behind him, where the multi-tiered bonsai racks took up a lot of space.The bonsai on the shelf are all ancient roots and twigs, old-fashioned.I looked at these bonsai, and felt that the students sitting in front of the teacher also resembled those bonsai. If a student thinks that he has written a good word, he will bring it to the teacher and ask him to read it respectfully.After reading it, he used a red pen to correct what he thought was inappropriate. If the teacher is satisfied, he uses his stamp—because it is a seal of official script, and the characters cannot be identified—to press on the blue printing pad, and then stamp it next to the words written by the students.

Everyone calls it a blue stamp.Anyone who has been stamped with a blue stamp can go back in advance. I wholeheartedly want to leave here early and go to Mr. Lichuan's house, so although I have been reluctant to learn his fonts, I still have to copy them. However, if you don't like it, you can't learn it.After half a year, I suggested to my father that it was really impossible to continue learning this calligraphy.In addition, my brother said many good things from the sidelines, so I was allowed to suspend school. I can’t remember exactly what my brother said at that time, but I just remember that he gave me a clear explanation for my indifference to that teacher’s calligraphy, and finally came to the conclusion that it is natural not to continue learning.I was stunned by my brother's well-organized argumentation, as if listening to him talking about other people's affairs, I listened carefully.

Although I didn't go to that private school anymore, my father asked me to continue learning regular script and stipulated that I could write four characters on a piece of imitation paper.Until now, I can write this kind of characters well.Anything smaller than that, such as cursive script, is terrible. Later, when I entered the film industry, a senior once said: "Kurosawa's characters are not characters, they are paintings."