This tableau made me think of my own advancing years, and the fact that, at the age of seventy-three, I do not have any grandchildren. The absence of grandchildren relates directly to my lack of immediate family. While there was, as I’ve said, an American woman with whom I was close, as well as a Japanese woman who played a significant role in my early career, the vagaries of Hollywood, and of American social norms, made all such unions impossible. My failure to marry is not something that pleases me—indeed, the absence of a family is my greatest regret. But, as with so many things that turned out differently than I’d hoped, there is nothing to be done at this late hour, and it does me no good to second-guess my choices. I cannot deny, however, that my life would now be richer if there were grown children as well as little ones, like those I saw this morning, to give my days purpose and joy.
In my youth and early adulthood, I never entertained such thoughts. My early days in Hollywood were unpredictable and heady. There was no future, only the present, and the project of the moment was everything. One tried to stay as uncommitted as one possibly could, in order to be prepared for the next development. And for the young, rising players in the early days of film, there was always a next development.
The great irony of my success in the motion picture world is that I never set out to become an actor. Such an existence seemed utterly frivolous to me. Indeed, other than my lifelong love of literature, I had no connection to the arts at all as a boy, and certainly no premonition that I myself would one day become a figure that other people paid to see. My intention when I came to America for schooling in 1907, all the way up until two days before my ship was scheduled to sail for Tokyo, was to return to Nagano Prefecture and become a schoolteacher. I had arranged to take a post at my old secondary school and teach courses in English and literature, and my time in America only added to my value as a legitimate instructor in these subjects. At the University of Wisconsin, where I was an English major, I studied the literature of Britain and France; I developed a particular love for Hardy, Eliot, Dickens, and Forster, as well as a passable knowledge of Balzac and Flaubert. I loved the Russians, whose work I read in Japanese translation—Tolstoy, Turgenev, Dostoevsky. And I read plays and watched every theater company that passed through Madison, particularly those who performed Shakespeare and other classics of the English stage. Once, I even had the good fortune to see the Kyoto Players, the Japanese company led by the young actress and playwright Hanako Minatoya, when they performed Spring Blossom at the university theater. I was able to arrange my studies to include modern Japanese authors as well, such as Mori Ogai and Natsume Soseki; it was my dream to eventually do my own translations.
So it was with the intention of boarding a ship back to Tokyo that I took a train across the country to Los Angeles. This was in the spring of 1911, just after my twentieth birthday, and I faced my trip to Japan with apprehension. Although I looked forward to seeing my homeland and my family for the first time in four years, there had been many changes while I was away. My father had died during my second year at university, and I was afraid that his sickness and passing had aged my fragile mother as well. My older brother, Akira, who was managing the farm, had married a year previously, and his wife had borne a sickly child. My younger sister, Miya, had just turned seventeen; she was finished with school and there were apparently no prospects for marriage. And my little brother, Toru, who had been a mischievous and amusing boy of eight when I left, was twelve now, and driving everyone mad with his rebellions and declarations of autonomy. My presence, although I was only the second son, was expected to bring stability. Indeed, I had always been somewhat of a calming figure in the family, despite the fact that I often lived outside of it. My mother wrote me many letters during the spring of my senior year, urging me to come home as quickly as I could.
But fate, I suppose, had something different in mind. When I arrived in Los Angeles, I stayed at the home of a Japanese-American friend, a classmate from the University of Wisconsin. His family, the Yamadas, lived in Boyle Heights, and they insisted that I experience some of the pleasures of the city and visit the center of its Japanese community. I was
