As he went down, I lowered my bloody sword and turned toward the woman. But she was gone! I looked for her among the cedars, but the bamboo leaves on the ground showed no sign she’d ever been there. I cocked my ear for any sound of her, but all I could hear was the man’s death rattle.
Maybe she had run through the underbrush to call for help when the sword fight started. The thought made me fear for my life. I grabbed the man’s sword and his bow and arrows and headed straight for the mountain road. The woman’s horse was still there, just chewing on grass. Anything else I could tell you after that would be a waste of breath. I got rid of his sword before coming to Kyoto, though.
So that’s my confession. I always knew my head would end up hanging in the tree outside the prison some day, so let me have the ultimate punishment. (Defiant attitude.)
Penitent Confession of a Woman in the Kiyomizu Temple
After the man in the dark blue robe had his way with me, he looked at my husband, all tied up, and taunted him with laughter. How humiliated my husband must have felt! He squirmed and twisted in the ropes that covered his body, but the knots ate all the deeper into his flesh. Stumbling, I ran to his side. No—I tried to run to him, but instantly the man kicked me down. And that was when it happened: that was when I saw the indescribable glint in my husband’s eyes. Truly, it was indescribable. It makes me shudder to recall it even now. My husband was unable to speak a word, and yet, in that moment, his eyes conveyed his whole heart to me. What I saw shining there was neither anger nor sorrow. It was the cold flash of contempt—contempt for me. This struck me more painfully than the bandit’s kick. I let out a cry and collapsed on the spot.
When I regained consciousness, the man in blue was gone. The only one there in the grove was my husband, still tied to the cedar tree. I just barely managed to raise myself on the carpet of dead bamboo leaves, and look into my husband’s face. His eyes were exactly as they had been before, with that same cold look of contempt and hatred. How can I describe the emotion that filled my heart then? Shame… sorrow… anger… I staggered over to him.
“Oh, my husband! Now that this has happened, I cannot go on living with you. I am prepared to die here and now. But you—yes, I want you to die as well. You witnessed my shame. I cannot leave you behind with that knowledge.”
I struggled to say everything I needed to say, but my husband simply went on staring at me in disgust. I felt as if my breast would burst open at any moment, but holding my feelings in check, I began to search the bamboo thicket for his sword. The bandit must have taken it—I couldn’t find it anywhere—and my husband’s bow and arrows were gone as well. But then I had the good luck to find the dagger at my feet. I brandished it before my husband and spoke to him once again.
“This is the end, then. Please be so good as to allow me to take your life. I will quickly follow you in death.”
When he heard this, my husband finally began moving his lips. Of course his mouth was stuffed with bamboo leaves, so he couldn’t make a sound, but I knew immediately what he was saying. With total contempt for me, he said only, “Do it.” Drifting somewhere between dream and reality, I thrust the dagger through the chest of his pale blue robe.
Then I lost consciousness again. When I was able to look around me at last, my husband, still tied to the tree, was no longer breathing. Across his ashen face shone a streak of light from the setting sun, filtered through the bamboo and cedar. Gulping back my tears, I untied him and cast the rope aside. And then—and then what happened to me? I no longer have the strength to tell it. That I failed to kill myself is obvious. I tried to stab myself in the throat. I threw myself in a pond at the foot of the mountain. Nothing worked. I am still here, by no means proud of my inability to die. (Forlorn smile.) Perhaps even Kanzeon,5 bodhisattva of compassion, has turned away from me for being so weak. But now—now that I have killed my husband, now that I have been violated by a bandit—what am I to do? Tell me, what am I to… (Sudden violent sobbing.)
The Testimony of the Dead Man’s Spirit Told through a Medium
After the bandit had his way with my wife, he sat there on the ground, trying to comfort her. I could say nothing, of course, and I was bound to the cedar tree. But I kept trying to signal her with my eyes: Don’t believe anything he tells you. He’s lying, no matter what he says. I tried to convey my meaning to her, but she just went on cringing there on the fallen bamboo leaves, staring at her knees. And, you know, I could see she was listening to him. I writhed with jealousy, but the bandit kept his smooth talk going from one point to the next. “Now that your flesh has been sullied, things will never be the same with your husband. Don’t stay with him—come and be my wife! It’s because I love you so much that I was so wild with you.” The bandit had the gall to speak to her like that!
When my wife raised her face in response to him, she seemed almost spellbound. I had never seen her look so beautiful as she did at that moment. And what do you think this beautiful wife of mine said to the bandit, in my presence—in the presence of her husband bound hand and foot? My spirit may be wandering now between one life and the next, but every time I recall her answer, I burn with indignation. “All right,” she told him, “take me anywhere you like.” (Long silence.)
And that was not her only crime against me. If that were all she did, I would not be suffering so here in the darkness. With him leading her by the hand, she was stepping out of the bamboo grove as if in a dream, when suddenly the color drained from her face and she pointed back to me. “Kill him!” she screamed. “Kill him! I can’t be with you as long as he is alive!” Again and again she screamed, as if she had lost her mind, “Kill him!” Even now her words like a windstorm threaten to blow me headlong into the darkest depths. Have such hateful words ever come from the mouth of a human being before? Have such damnable words ever reached the ears of a human being before? Have such— (An explosion of derisive laughter.) Even the bandit went pale when he heard her. She clung to his arm and screamed again, “Kill him!” The bandit stared at her, saying neither that he would kill me nor that he would not. The next thing I knew, however, he sent my wife sprawling on the bamboo leaves with a single kick. (Another explosion of derisive laughter.) The bandit calmly folded his arms and turned to look at me.
“What do you want me to do with her?” he asked. “Kill her or let her go? Just nod to answer. Kill her?” For this if for nothing else, I am ready to forgive the bandit his crimes. (Second long silence.)
When I hesitated with my answer, my wife let out a scream and darted into the depths of the bamboo thicket. He sprang after her, but I don’t think he even managed to lay a hand on her sleeve. I watched the spectacle as if it were some kind of vision.
After my wife ran off, the bandit picked up my sword and bow and arrows, and he cut my ropes at one place. “Now it’s my turn to run,” I remember hearing him mutter as he disappeared from the thicket. Then the whole area was quiet. No—I could hear someone weeping. While I was untying myself, I listened to the sound, until I realized—I realized that I was the one crying. (Another long silence.)
I finally raised myself, exhausted, from the foot of the tree. Lying there before me was the dagger that my wife had dropped. I picked it up and shoved it into my chest. Some kind of bloody mass rose to my mouth, but I felt no pain at all. My chest grew cold, and then everything sank into stillness. What perfect silence! In the skies above that grove on the hidden side of the mountain, not a single bird came to sing. The lonely glow of the sun lingered among the high branches of cedar and bamboo. The sun—but gradually, even that began to fade, and with it the cedars and bamboo. I lay there wrapped in a deep silence.
Then stealthy footsteps came up to me. I tried to see who it was, but the darkness had closed in all around me. Someone—that someone gently pulled the dagger from my chest with an invisible hand. Again a rush of blood filled my mouth, but then I sank once and for all into the darkness between lives.
(December 1921)
THE NOSE
You just had to mention “Zenchi Naigu’s nose,” and everyone in Ike-no-o knew what you were talking about. Never mind that his name ascribed to him the “wisdom of Zen” (Zenchi) or that he was one of only ten priests honored to “minister within” (Naigu) the imperial palace in Kyoto: all that mattered was that nose of his. Uniform in thickness from base to tip, it hung a full six inches from above his upper lip to below his chin, like a sausage dangling down from the middle of his face.
The nose had been a constant source of torment for the Naigu from his earliest days as a young acolyte until now, past the age of fifty, when he had reached his present lofty post. On the surface, of course, he pretended it did not bother him—and not only because he felt it wrong for a priest to worry over his nose when he should be thirsting exclusively for the Pure Land to come. What he hated most of all was for other people to become aware of his concern over his nose. And what he feared most of all was that the word “nose” would come up in conversation.
There were two reasons why his nose was more than the Naigu could manage. One was that it actually got in his way much of the time. He could not eat by himself; whenever he tried to, the tip of his nose would touch the rice in his metal bowl. To deal with this problem, he had a disciple sit across from him at mealtime and hold his nose up with a long, narrow wooden slat, an inch wide and two feet long. This was not an easy thing to do—either for the slat-wielding disciple or for the Naigu himself. A temple page who stood in for the disciple at one meal sneezed and let the nose drop into the rice gruel. The story immediately spread across the river to Kyoto. Still, this was not the main reason the Naigu was troubled by his nose. He suffered most because of the harm it was doing to his self-esteem.
The people of Ike-no-o used to say that Zenchi Naigu was lucky to be a priest: no woman would ever want to marry a man with a nose like that. Some even claimed it was because of his nose that he had entered the priesthood to begin with. The Naigu himself, however, never felt that he suffered any less over his nose for being a priest. Indeed, his self-esteem was already far too fragile to be affected by such a secondary fact as whether or not he had a wife. And so, by means both active and passive, he sought to repair the damage to his self-esteem.
He tried first of all to find ways to make his nose look shorter. When there was no one around, he would hold up his mirror and, with feverish intensity, examine his reflection from every angle. Sometimes it took more than simply changing the position of his face to comfort him, and he would try one pose after another—resting his cheek on his hand or stroking his chin with his fingertips. Never once, though, was he satisfied that his nose looked any shorter. In fact, he sometimes felt that the harder he tried, the longer it looked. Then, heaving fresh sighs of despair, he would put the mirror away in its box and drag himself back to the scripture stand to resume chanting the Kannon Sutra.1
The second way he dealt with his problem was to keep a vigilant eye out for other people’s noses. Many public events took place at the Ike-no-o temple—banquets to benefit the priests, lectures on the sutras, and so forth. Row upon row of monks’ cells filled the temple grounds, and each day the monks would heat up bath water for the temple’s many residents and lay visitors, all of whom the Naigu would study closely. He hoped to gain peace from discovering even one face with a nose like his. And so his eyes took in neither blue robes nor white; orange caps, skirts of gray: the priestly garb he knew so well hardly existed for him. The Naigu saw not people but noses. While a great hooked beak might come into his view now and then, never did he discover a nose like his own. And with each failure to find what he was looking for, the Naigu’s resentment would increase. It was entirely due to this feeling that often, while speaking to a person, he would unconsciously grasp the dangling end of his nose and blush like a youngster.
And finally, the Naigu would comb the Buddhist scriptures and other classic texts, searching for a character with a nose like his own in the hope that it would provide him some measure of comfort. Nowhere, however, was it written that the nose of either Mokuren or Sharihotsu was long. And Ryūju and Memyoō, of course, were Bodhisattvas with normal human noses. Listening to a Chinese story once, he heard that Liu Bei, the Shu Han emperor,2 had long ears. “Oh, if only it had been his nose,” he thought, “how much better I would feel!”
We need hardly mention here that, even as he pursued these passive efforts, the Naigu also took more active steps to shorten his nose. He tried everything: he drank a decoction of boiled snake gourd; he rubbed his nose with rat urine. Nothing did any good, however: the nose continued to dangle six inches down over his lips.
One autumn, however, a disciple of his who had gone to Kyoto—in part on an errand for the Naigu himself—came back to Ike-no-o with a new method for shortening noses that he had learned from a doctor friend. This doctor was a man from China who had become a high-ranking priest at a major Kyoto temple, the Chōrakuji.
Pretending, as usual, that he was unconcerned about his nose, the Naigu would not at first agree to submit to the new treatment. Instead, at mealtimes he would offer a casual expression of regret that the disciple had gone to so much trouble. Inwardly, of course, he was hoping that the disciple would press him to try the treatment. And the disciple must have been aware of the Naigu’s tactics. But his master’s very willingness to employ such tactics seemed to rouse the aide to sympathy more than resentment. Just as the Naigu had hoped, the disciple used every argument he could think of to persuade his master to adopt the treatment. And, as he knew he would, the Naigu finally submitted to the disciple’s fervent exhortations.
The treatment itself was actually quite simple: boil the nose and have someone tread on it.
Boiling water could be had any day at the temple bathhouse. The disciple immediately brought a bucket full of water that was too hot for him to touch. If the Naigu simply dipped his nose straight into the bucket, however, his face might be scalded by the rising steam. So they bored a hole in a tray, set the tray on the bucket, and lowered the nose through the hole into the boiling water. The nose itself felt no heat at all.
After the nose had been soaking for a short while, the disciple said, “I believe it has cooked long enough, Your Reverence.”
The Naigu gave him a contorted smile. At least, he thought with some satisfaction, no one overhearing this one remark would imagine that the subject was a nose. The boiled nose itself, however, was itching now as if it had been bitten by fleas.
The Naigu withdrew his nose from the hole in the tray, and the disciple began to tread on the still-steaming thing with all his might. The Naigu lay with his nose stretched out on the floorboards, watching the disciple’s feet moving up and down before his eyes. Every now and then, the disciple would cast a pitying glance down toward the Naigu’s bald head and say, “Does it hurt, Your Reverence? The doctor told me to stamp on it as hard as I could, but… does it hurt?”
The Naigu tried to shake his head to signal that it did not hurt, but with the disciple’s feet pressing down on his nose, he was unable to do so. Instead, he turned his eyes upward until he could see the raw cracks in the disciple’s chapped feet and gave an angry-sounding shout: “No, it doesn’t hurt!”
Far from hurting, his itchy nose almost felt good to have the young man treading on it.
After this had been going on for some time, little bumps like millet grains began to form on the nose until it looked like a bird that had been plucked clean and roasted whole. When he saw this, the disciple stopped his treading and muttered as if to himself, “Now I’m supposed to pull those out with tweezers.”
The Naigu puffed out his cheeks in apparent exasperation as he silently watched the disciple proceed with the treatment. Not that he was ungrateful for the efforts. But as much as he appreciated the young man’s kindness, he did not like having his nose handled like some kind of thing. The Naigu watched in apprehension, like a patient being operated on by a doctor he mistrusts, as the disciple plucked beads of fat from th
e pores of his nose with the tweezers. The beads protruded half an inch from each pore like stumps of feathers.
Once he was through, the disciple said with a look of relief, “Now we just have to cook it again.”
Brows knit in apparent disapproval, the Naigu did as he was told.
After the second boiling, the nose looked far shorter than it ever had before. Indeed, it was not much different from an ordinary hooked nose. Stroking his newly shortened nose, the Naigu darted a few timid glances into the mirror the young man held out to him.
The nose—which once had dangled down below his chin—now had shrunk to such an unbelievable degree that it seemed only to be hanging on above his upper lip by a feeble last breath. The red blotches that marked it were probably left from the trampling. No one would laugh at this nose anymore! The face of the Naigu inside the mirror looked at the face of the Naigu outside the mirror, eyelids fluttering in satisfaction.
Still, he felt uneasy for the rest of that day lest his nose grow long again. Whether intoning scriptures or taking his meals, he would unobtrusively reach up at every opportunity and touch his nose. Each time, he would find it exactly where it belonged, above his upper lip, with no sign that it intended to let itself down any lower. Then came a night of sleep, and the first thing he did upon waking the next day was to feel his nose again. It was still short. Only then did the Naigu begin to enjoy the kind of relief he had experienced once before, years ago, when he had accumulated religious merit for having copied out the entire Lotus Sutra by hand.
Rashōmon and Seventeen Other Stories Page 7