Synopsis: A boy’s journey to find his father.
Key Takeaways
I got home and I thought I should stop leading so aimless an existence. It is harder than you might think to stop leading an existence, & if you can’t do that the only thing you can do is try to introduce an element of purposefulness….and though I might have to wait another 30 or 40 years for my body to join the non-sentient things in the world at least in the meantime it would be a less absolutely senseless sentience. OK
Buddy said to my father: You know at the time I didn’t want to upset my father, I didn’t want to make a big thing of it, I thought who am I to say I could be a singer, but then all the others gave in without an argument. I keep thinking, what if it’s my fault? If I’d put my foot down maybe my father would have gotten used to the idea whereas instead they all thought they didn’t have a choice, I keep thinking what if its all my fault?
An idea has only to be something you have not thought of before to take over the mind, and all afternoon I kept hearing in my mind snatches of books which might exist in three or four hundred years
But of course if you’ve worked on a piece and thought about it you don’t just (you hope) play it more intelligently you hear it more intelligently, and if you’re the only person in the room really able to hear it that’s horrible
I once read somewhere about some research that was done on baby monkeys who were given cloth surrogate mothers which became monsters: one expelled jets of air – one had an embedded wire frame that sprang out and threw the baby to the floor – another ejected sharp brass spikes on commend. The response of the baby monkeys was always the same: they clung ever more tightly to the monster, or if thrown off waited for spikes to disappear & returned to cling to their mother.
Kurosawa, however, has seen that this cannot be true. A hero who actually becomes is tantamount to a villain – for this was the only tangible aspect of the villain’s villainy. To suggest that pace, contentment, happiness, follows a single battle, no matter how important, is literally untrue – and it would limit Sugata precisely because of the limitations suggested in the words “happiness” or Judo champions
You think you know what something is about and that’s why you do it but then when you do it you realise it’s about something else. What it’s saying is thats why it’s important to study judo.
There is a strange taboo in our society against ending something merely because it is not pleasant– life, love, a conversation, you name it, the etiquette is that you must begin in ignorance & persevere in the face of knowledge, & though I naturally believe that this is profoundly wrong it’s not nice to go around constantly offending people
A good samurai will parry the blow
Final Thoughts: I loved where this book went in with Ludo and his father. It’s interesting take. 7/10
Stranger in Sydney 