Rashomon by Akutagawa Ryunosuke (best book clubs .TXT) 📖

the piece of pine wood which the old woman had stuck in the floor.

He did not know why she pulled out the hair of the dead. Accordingly, he did not know whether her case was to be put down as good or bad. But in his eyes, pulling out the hair of the dead in the Rashoømon on this stormy night was an unpardonable crime. Of course it never entered his mind that a little while ago he had thought of becoming a thief.

Then, summoning strength into his legs, he rose from the stairs and strode, hand on sword, right in front of the old creature. The hag turned, terror in her eyes, and sprang up from the floor, trembling. For a small moment she paused, poised there, then lunged for the stairs with a shriek.

“Wretch! Where are you going?” he shouted, barring the way of the trembling hag who tried to scurry past him. Still she attempted to claw her way by. He pushed her back to prevent her… they struggled, fell among the corpses, and grappled there. The issue was never in doubt. In a moment he had her by the arm, twisted it, and forced her down to the floor. Her arms were all skin and bones, and there was no more flesh on them than on the shanks of a chicken. No sooner was she on the floor than he drew his sword and thrust the silver-white blade before her very nose. She was silent. She trembled as if in a fit, and her eyes were open so wide that they were almost out of their sockets, and her breath come in hoarse gasps. The life of this wretch was his now. This thought cooled his boiling anger and brought a calm pride and satisfaction. He looked down at her, and said in a somewhat calmer voice:

“Look here, I’m not an officer of the High Police Commissioner. I’m a stranger who happened to pass by this gate. I won’t bind you or do anything against you, but you must tell me what you’re doing up here.”

Then the old woman opened her eyes still wider, and gazed at his face intently with the sharp red eyes of a bird of prey. She moved her lips, which were wrinkled into her nose, as though she were chewing something. Her pointed Adam’s apple moved in her thin throat. Then a panting sound like the cawing of a crow came from her throat:

“I pull the hair… I pull out the hair… to make a wig.”

Her answer banished all unknown from their encounter and brought disappointment. Suddenly she was only a trembling old woman there at his feet. A ghoul no longer: only a hag who makes wigs from the hair of the dead Ñ to sell, for scraps of food. A cold contempt seized him. Fear left his heart, and his former hatred entered. These feelings must have been sensed by the other. The old creature, still clutching the hair she had pulled off the corpse, mumbled out these words in her harsh broken voice:

“Indeed, making wigs out of the hair of the dead may seem a great evil to you, but these that are here deserve no better. This woman, whose beautiful black hair I was pulling, used to sell cut and dried snake flesh at the guard barracks, saying that it was dried fish. If she hadn’t died of the plague, she’d be selling it now. The guards liked to buy from her, and used to say her fish was tasty. What she did couldn’t be wrong, because if she hadn’t, she would have starved to death. There was no other choice. If she knew I had to do this in order to live, she probably wouldn’t care.”

He sheathed his sword, and, with his left hand on its hilt, he listened to her meditatively. His right hand touched the big pimple on his cheek. As he listened, a certain courage was born in his heart-the courage which he had not had when he sat under the gate a little while ago. A strange power was driving him in the opposite direction of the courage which he had had when he seized the old woman. No longer did he wonder whether he should starve to death or become a thief. Starvation was so far from his mind that it was the last thing that would have entered it.

“Are you sure?” he asked in a mocking tone, when she finished talking. He took his right hand from his pimple, and, bending forward, seized her by the neck and said sharply:

“Then it’s right if I rob you. I’d starve if I didn’t.”

He tore her clothes from her body and kicked her roughly down on the corpses as she struggled and tried to clutch his leg. Five steps, and he was at the top of the stairs. The yellow clothes he had wrested off were under his arm, and in a twinkling he had rushed down the steep stairs into the abyss of night. The thunder of his descending steps pounded in the hollow tower, and then it was quiet.

Shortly after that the hag raised up her body from the corpses. Grumbling and groaning, she crawled to the top stair by the still flickering torchlight, and through the gray hair which hung over her face, she peered down to the last stair in the torch light.

Beyond this was only darkness… unknowing and unknown.

YAM GRUEL

THIS STORY MIGHT have taken place about eleven hundred years ago. The exact time does not matter. All that the reader has to know is that the remote past of the Heian period forms its background. In those days there lived in Kyoto a certain samurai in the service of Regent Fujiwara Mototsune. I would specify his name, but unfortunately it is not recorded in the ancient chronicles. Probably he was so ordinary a man as to be unworthy of recording in a chronicle. The writers of these works evidently took very little interest in the lives or stories of common people. In this respect they differ greatly from the present-day writers of the naturalist school. However, the novelists of the Heian period were not as leisurely as might be expected. Anyway, among the samurai in the service of Fujiwara Mototsune there was an official of fifth class court rank. He is the hero of this story. In those days an official of fifth class court rank was a low official. The Japanese word for that rank is “goi.” So in this story he will be called “Goi.”

Goi was a very plain-looking man. His hollow cheeks made his chin seem unusually long. His lips… if we mentioned his every striking feature, there would be no end. He was extremely homely and sloppy in appearance.

No one knows how he came to serve the Regent. Still it is certain that he had gone about his daily chores for a long time, in his discolored silk robe and soft headgear. From his mannerisms and his unkempt dress, it was hard to believe he had ever been a young man. He was well past forty. His face gave the impression that ever since birth he had had his cold-looking red nose and unshapely mustache exposed to the wind blowing down the Sujaku Avenue. Everyone from the Regent to the herdsmen believed so and had no doubt about it.

You can easily imagine the kind of treatment Goi received from those around him. His fellow samurai did not care a straw for him. His subordinates, with or without court rank, nearly twenty altogether, were also amazingly indifferent to him. When he was supposed to give them instructions, they disregarded him and carried on with their idle chatter and gossip. His existence no more entered their vision than the air itself. His appearance caused no more ripple of unrest than a drop of water in the Japan Sea. The backwash of this man’s helplessness was felt in the samurai’s hall, where the Steward, the Chief and all his superiors would have nothing to do with him. They gave him all their commands by visual signs.

It is not by accident that man has a voice. Human speech was not made by a simple process. So sometimes they failed to make themselves understood by him. Then they seemed to attribute their failure to defects in his own understanding. Whenever they could not make themselves understood, they would glare at him as if it were his fault. Then, after eyeing him from the top of his headgear, which was bent out of shape, to the tip of his worn-out straw sandals, they would suddenly turn their backs on him. For all that, Goi never took offence. He was such a timid and unspirited man that he was impervious to all injustice.

His fellow samurai thought it great sport to make him the butt of their jokes. The older men constantly made off-color remarks about his personal appearance; this prompted the younger men to practise all their wit on the helpless Goi. In his presence they would never tire of making critical comments about his nose, mustache, headgear, and silk robe. Moreover, they would often talk of his hare-lipped wife from whom he had separated five or six years ago, and of a drunken Buddhist priest who was said to have been intimate with his wife. And not only that. Now and again without reason. But one day he happened to hear Goi’s question, “Why did you do that?” and the words stuck in his mind. From that time on he saw Goi in a different light, because he saw a blubberer, persecuted by a hard life, peeping from the pale and stupid face of the undernourished Goi. This samurai could never think of Goi without being impressed by his accusing protest against the hard and heartless realities of life. At the same time Goi’s frost-bitten red nose and mustache, the hairs of which might be counted on one’s fingers, somehow seemed to give him a touch of consolation.

But this young samurai was an exception. Aside from a few such people, Goi had to continue his dog’s life amid the contempt of everyone around him. First of all, he had no clothes worthy of the name. He had only a dark blue coat and a pleated gown of the same color. But these clothes had faded into what could be called neither indigo nor blue. As for his gown, it was exceedingly worn. His thin legs under this gown, without even drawers, were no more presentable than the plodding legs of a lean ox pulling the cart of a poor courtnoble. His sword was nondescript, with doubtful metal fittings and with the lacquer on its hilt beginning to wear off. The red-nosed Goi used to walk about with short steps, his round shoulders all the more stooped under a cold sky, and cast covetous looks right and left. So he was naturally made a fool of even by passing peddlers. The following instance may be mentioned.

One day on his way from Sanjoømon to Shinsen-en, he saw several children gathered at the roadside. Thinking they might be spinning tops, he watched them, from behind, and found them thrashing a stray, shaggy dog, held by a rope fastened round his neck. The shy Goi had almost always been too timid to translate into action whatever he might have really felt. But on this occasion, since they were children, he could muster up some courage.

“Please spare him,” he said, smiling as broadly as possible and patting the shoulder of the boy who seemed the oldest of the group. “If you hit the dog, you’ll hurt him.”

The boy looked back, and turning up his eyes, stared at him contemptuously. “Mind your own business,” he retorted. And, taking a step backward,