Tales grotesque and curious
veranda, with its glass windows wide open, there was yet no sign of
darkness falling. The professor, with his left knee crossed over his
right and his head resting on the back of the chair, was gazing at the
tassels of the Gifu lantern in the dim light. Though he had that same
book of Strindberg’s in his hand, he appeared not yet to have read
another page of it. That was natural. His head was still full of the
brave behavior of Nishiyama Atsuko.
During supper, he had told his wife the whole story. And he had praised
it as an illustration of the Bushidō of the women of Japan. On hearing
it, this lover of Japan and the Japanese could not but sympathize. He
had been pleased to find an eager listener in her. His wife, the lady
and the Gifu lantern--these three now floated in his consciousness with
a certain ethical background.
I do not know how long he was absorbed in such agreeable reflections.
But while still in their grasp, he suddenly remembered that he had been
asked to send a contribution to a certain magazine. Under the caption,
“Letters to the Youth of Today,” that magazine was getting together the
opinions on general morality of distinguished men all over the country.
Using that day’s incident as material, he would write and send his
impressions at once, he thought, and scratched his head a little.
The hand with which the professor scratched his head was the one in
which he held the book. Becoming aware of the book, which he had up
till now neglected, he opened it where he had inserted the card a while
before at the page he had already begun to read. Just then the maid
came and lighted the Gifu lantern above his head, so it was not very
difficult for him to read the fine type. He cast his eyes casually on
the page without any great desire to read. Strindberg said,
“In my youth, people told about Madame Heiberg’s handkerchief, a
story which had probably come out of Paris. It was about her double
performance of tearing her handkerchief in two with her hands while a
smile played over her face. Now we call this claptrap.”
The professor put the book down on his knees. As he put it down open,
the card with the name Nishiyama Atsuko on it still lay between its
pages. But what was in his mind was no longer the lady. Nor was
it either his wife or Japanese civilization. It was a nondescript
something that threatened to break the calm harmony of these. The stage
trick that Strindberg had scorned was not, of course, the same thing
as a question of practical morality. But in the hint he had got from
what he had just read, there was something threatening to disturb the
care-free feeling he had had since taking his bath. Bushidō and its
mannerisms--
The professor shook his head unhappily two or three times and then,
with upturned eyes, began again to gaze intently at the bright light of
the Gifu lantern covered with pictures of autumn flowers.
RASHŌMON
It was evening. A solitary lackey sat under Rashōmon waiting for the
rain to clear.
Beneath the broad gate, there was not another soul. Only, on a big
round pillar, from which the vermilion lacquer had peeled off here
and there, sat one lone cricket. Since Rashōmon was in the great
thoroughfare Sujaku Ōji, it would seem that there should also have been
two or three tradeswomen in wide straw hats and men in citizen’s caps
sheltering there from the rain. All the same, besides this single man,
there was no one.
This was because for the past two or three years in Kyōto one calamity
after another--earthquakes, cyclones, fires and famines--had followed
each other in rapid succession. Wherefore, throughout the capital the
desolation was extraordinary. According to the old records, things
had come to such a pass that Buddhist images and temple furniture
were broken up and, with their red lacquer and gold and silver foil
clinging to them, were heaped along the streets and sold for fire wood.
With the whole town in such a state, of course no one took the least
thought for the upkeep of Rashōmon. So turning its abandonment to their
profit, foxes and badgers found habitation there. Thieves abode there.
And finally it even became a custom with men to bring unclaimed bodies
there and leave them in the gate. Whence, when day had closed his
eye, the place was abhorred of all, and no man would set foot in the
neighborhood.
Instead, swarms of ravens from nobody knows where congregated there.
By day the innumerable rout described a circle and wheeled crying
about the ornamental grampuses high on the roof. Especially when the
sky above the gate was aflare with the sunset glow, did they stand
out distinctly like a scattering of sesamum seeds. Of course, they
were there to pick the flesh from the corpses up in the gate. However,
on this day, perhaps because of the lateness of the hour, not a bird
was to be seen. Only here and there on the crumbling stone steps,
where grass grew long in the crevices, their droppings shone in white
splashes. The lackey sat in a threadbare coat of dark blue on the
topmost of the seven steps and, fingering a great carbuncle on his
right cheek, looked vacantly at the falling rain.
I have said that he was waiting for the rain to clear. But even if it
did clear, he had nothing in particular he wished to do. Ordinarily, of
course, he must have gone back to his master’s house. But four or five
days before, he had been turned out. As I have already said, Kyōto was
in unprecedented decay. And the dismissal of this man by a master whom
he had served for years was one small ripple on this sea of troubles.
Wherefore, rather than that he was waiting for the rain to clear, it
would be more to the point to say that, driven to shelter by the storm,
this lackey who had no place to go was at a loss what to do. Besides,
the gloomy sky that day had no small effect on the sentimentalism of
this man of the Heian period. The rain, which had been falling since a
little after the hour of the monkey, still showed no sign of letting
up. So the servant sat following a rambling train of thought on the
one vital and immediate question of how he could ever manage to live
through the morrow--that is, how he could ever do the impossible--and
listened listlessly to the long rain that kept pounding down in Sujaku
Ōji.
The rain, enveloping Rashōmon, mustered a rattling roar from afar.
Darkness gradually lowered in the sky, and overhead the roof of the
gate supported a heavy leaden cloud on a point of its obliquely
projecting tiles.
For the accomplishment of the impossible, there was no time left in
which to choose a plan. If he took time, he could but choose between
starvation under some wall and starvation by some road. And then he
would simply be brought to the loft in this gate and thrown away like
a dog. If he did not choose,--again and again the man’s thoughts went
over the same winding way and arrived finally at this same place. But
no matter how often this “if” came up, it remained still in the end
but “if.” Even though he did not choose any plan, yet he had not the
courage to make the positive admission naturally necessary to the
settlement of the “if,” that there was nothing for it but to turn thief.
He sneezed a great sneeze and then got up laboriously. Night-chilled
Kyōto was cold enough to suggest the comfort of a fire. The pitiless
wind swept with the deepening darkness between the pillars of the gate.
And the cricket that had clung to the red lacquer of one of them had
disappeared.
Drawing in his neck and lifting his shoulders high in the bright
yellow shirt which he wore under his dark blue coat, the lackey looked
all about the gate. If he could find a place, out of the wind and
rain and free from the gaze of men, where he could pass one night in
peaceful sleep, there anyway, he fain would rest until the dawn. Then
fortunately his eyes fell upon a wide ladder, likewise red, mounting up
into the tower of the gate. Above, though there might be men, they were
but dead men after all. Then, taking heed lest the great plain-handled
sword swinging at his side should slip in its scabbard, he planted a
straw-sandaled foot on the bottom step of the ladder.
A few minutes elapsed. In the middle of the wide ladder leading to the
tower of Rashōmon the man crouched like a cat and, holding his breath,
took in the state of affairs above. A ray of light shining from the
tower faintly illumined his right cheek. It was the cheek on which the
festering red carbuncle gleamed in his short beard. He had lightly
calculated from the first that everybody up there was dead. But when he
had climbed up two or three steps, it appeared that not only had some
one above struck a light but that he was moving it to and fro. This was
at once made evident by the dull yellow gleam that danced in reflection
on the cobwebs hanging in the corners of the ceiling. Whoever had
struck this light in Rashōmon on this rainy night was surely no
ordinary being!
At last, stealing up with muffled steps like a gecko, the lackey,
crouching, scaled the ladder to the topmost step. Then lying as flat
as he could and craning his neck forward as far as it would go, he
peered with dread into the loft.
He peered, and the loft, as rumor had it, was full of corpses flung
carelessly away, but, the circle illuminated by the light being smaller
than had at first seemed apparent, he was not able to judge how many
there might be. Only, he could make out vaguely that there were among
them both clothed and unclothed cadavers. Of course, men and women
appeared all to be jumbled up together. And like so many dolls of
kneaded clay, these bodies sprawled on the floor with open mouths and
out-thrown arms in such confusion as to make one doubt even that they
had once been living beings. Moreover, while the wan light played on
their shoulders, breasts and more elevated parts, the shadows of their
depressions were intensified, and they lay in silence like eternal
mutes that had never known speech.
In the stench of decaying flesh, the lackey involuntarily covered his
nose. But the next moment his hand had forgotten its work. Excess of
feeling had almost completely deprived him of his olfactory sense.
For the first time he had just caught sight of a living mortal
squatting down among the dead. It was a monkey-like old hag in a dark
brown kimono, short, skinny and white-headed. With a blazing splinter
of pine in her right hand, she was peering fixedly into the face of one
of the corpses. From its long hair, it seemed to be the body of a woman.
For a space, the lackey, moved by six parts of horror and four of
curiosity, forgot even to breathe. To borrow the words of an old
writer, he felt that “the hair on his head and body swelled.” Then
sticking the pine splinter into a crack in the floor, the hag took the
head at which she had been gazing and, just like an old monkey picking
lice from its young, began to pull out the long hairs one by one. They
seemed to yield to her pull.
With every hair that came out, the dread seemed to depart appreciably
from the heart of the lackey. And at the same time, intense hatred of
the old hag was little by little engendered. No, “of the old hag” may
not be just the right words. Rather his antipathy to all evil grew
stronger every minute. If some one at that time had broached afresh the
question which this man had been considering under the gate a little
while before, whether he should starve or turn thief, in all likelihood
he would have unhesitatingly chosen starvation. Thus fiercely, like the
splint of pine the old hag had stuck in the floor, blazed up this man’s
detestation of evil.
The lackey, of course, did not know why the old hag was pulling out the
hair of the dead. Consequently, he did not know, rationally, whether