Then one day, as Yoshihide’s daughter was gliding down a long outdoor corridor to deliver a note gaily knotted on a branch of red winter plum, the monkey Yoshihide darted in through the sliding door at the far end, in full flight from something. The animal was running with a limp and seemed unable to climb a post as it often did when frightened. Then who should appear chasing after it but the Young Master, brandishing a switch and shouting, “Come back here, you tangerine thief! Come back here!” Yoshihide’s daughter drew up short at the sight, and the monkey clung to her skirts with a pitiful cry. This must have aroused her compassion, for, still holding the plum branch in one hand, she swept the monkey up in the soft folds of her lavender sleeve. Then, giving a little bow to the Young Master, she said with cool clarity, “Forgive me for interfering, my young lord, but he is just an animal. Please pardon him.”
Temper still up from the chase, the Young Master scowled and stamped his foot several times. “Why are you protecting him?” he demanded. “He stole my tangerine!”
“He is just an animal,” she repeated. “He doesn’t know any better.” And then, smiling sadly, she added, “His name is Yoshihide, after all. I can’t just stand by and watch ‘my father’ being punished.” This was apparently enough to break the Young Master’s will.
“All right, then,” he said with obvious reluctance. “If you’re pleading for your father’s life, I’ll let him off this time.”
The Young Master flung his switch into the garden and stalked back out through the sliding door.
3
After this incident, Yoshihide’s daughter and the little monkey grew close. The girl had a golden bell that her young mistress had given her, which she hung from the monkey’s neck on a pretty crimson cord. And he, for his part, would almost never leave her side. Once, when she was in bed with a cold, the monkey spent hours by her pillow, biting its nails, and I swear it had a worried look on its face.
Then, strangely enough, people stopped teasing the monkey. In fact, they began treating it with special kindness, until even the Young Master would occasionally throw it a persimmon or a chestnut, and I heard he once flew into a rage when one of the samurai kicked the animal. Soon after that, His Lordship himself ordered the girl to appear before him with the monkey in her arms—all because, in hearing about the Young Master’s tantrum, I am told, he naturally also heard about how the girl had come to care for the monkey.
“I admire your filial behavior,” His Lordship said. “Here, take this.” And he presented her with a fine scarlet underrobe. They tell me that his Lordship was especially pleased when the monkey, imitating the girl’s expression of gratitude, bowed low before him, holding the robe aloft. And so His Lordship’s partiality for the girl was born entirely from his wish to commend her filial devotion to her father and not, as rumor had it, from any physical attraction he might have felt for her. Not that such suspicions were entirely groundless, but there will be time for me to tell you about that later. For now, suffice it to say that His Lordship was not the sort of person to lavish his affections on the daughter of a mere painter, however beautiful she might be.
Well, then, having been singled out for praise this way, Yoshihide’s daughter withdrew from His Lordship’s presence, but she knew how to avoid provoking the envy of the household’s other, less modest, ladies-in-waiting. Indeed, people grew fonder than ever of her and the monkey, and the Young Mistress almost never let them leave her side, even bringing them with her in her ox-drawn carriage when she went to observe shrine rituals and the like.
But enough about the girl for now. Let me continue with my story of her father, Yoshihide. As I have said, the monkey Yoshihide quickly became everyone’s little darling, but Yoshihide himself remained an object of universal scorn, reviled as “Monkeyhide” by everyone behind his back. And not only in the Horikawa mansion. Even such an eminent Buddhist prelate as the Abbot of Yokawa hated Yoshihide so much that the very mention of his name was enough to make him turn purple as if he had seen a devil. (Some said this was because Yoshihide had drawn a caricature ridiculing certain aspects of the Abbot’s behavior, but this was merely a rumor that circulated among the lower classes and as such can hardly be credited.) In any case, Yoshihide’s reputation was so bad that anyone you asked would have told you the same thing. If there were those who spoke kindly of Yoshihide, they were either a handful of the brotherhood of painters or else people who knew his work but not the man himself.
His appearance was not the only thing that people hated about Yoshihide. In fact, he had many evil traits that repelled them even more, and for which he had only himself to blame.
4
For one thing, Yoshihide was a terrible miser; he was harsh in his dealings with people; he had no shame; he was lazy and greedy. But worst of all, he was insolent and arrogant. He never let you forget that he was “the greatest painter in the land.” Nor was his arrogance limited to painting. He could not be satisfied till he displayed his contempt for every custom and convention that ordinary people practiced. A man who was his apprentice for many years once told me this story: Yoshihide was present one day in the mansion of a certain gentleman when the celebrated Shamaness of the Cypress Enclosure was there, undergoing spirit possession. The woman delivered a horrifying message from the spirit, but Yoshihide was unimpressed. He took up a handy ink brush and did a detailed sketch of her wild expression as if he viewed spirit possession as mere trickery.
No wonder, then, that such a man would commit acts of sacrilege in his work: in painting the lovely goddess Kisshōten, he used the face of a common harlot, and to portray the mighty flame-draped Fudō, his model was a criminal released to do chores in the Magistrate’s office. If you tried to warn him that he was flirting with danger, he would respond with feigned innocence. “I’m the one who painted them, after all,” he would say. “Are you trying to tell me that my own Buddhas and gods are going to punish me?” Even his apprentices were shocked by this. I myself knew several of them who, fearing for their own punishment in the afterlife, wasted no time in leaving his employ. The man’s arrogance simply knew no bounds. He was convinced that he was the greatest human being under heaven.
It goes without saying that Yoshihide lorded it over the other painters of his time. True, his brushwork and colors were utterly different from theirs, and so the many painters with whom he was on bad terms tended to speak of him as a charlatan. They rhapsodized over the work of old masters such as Kawanari or Kanaoka5 (“On moonlit nights you could actually smell the plum blossoms painted on that wooden door,” or “You could actually hear the courtier on that screen playing his flute”), but all they had to say about Yoshihide’s work was how eerie and unsettling they found it. Take his Five Levels of Rebirth on the Ryuōgaiji temple gate,6 for example. “When I passed the gate late at night,” one said, “I could hear the dying celestials sighing and sobbing.” “That’s nothing,” another claimed. “I could smell the flesh of the dead rotting.” “And how about the portraits of the household’s ladies-in-waiting that His Lordship ordered from Yoshihide? Every single woman he painted fell ill and died within three years. It was as if he had snatched their very souls from them.” According to one of his harshest critics, this was the final proof that Yoshihide practiced the Devil’s Art.
But Yoshihide was so perverse, as I’ve said, that remarks like this only filled him with pride. When His Lordship joked to him one time, “For you, it seems, the uglier the better,” old Yoshihide’s far-too-red lips spread in an eerie grin and he replied imperiously, “Yes, My Lord, it’s true. Other painters are such mediocrities, they cannot appreciate the beauty of ugliness.” I must say, “Greatest Painter in the Land” or not, it was incredible that he could spout such self-congratulatory nonsense in His Lordship’s presence! No wonder his apprentices called him Chira Eiju behind his back! You know: Chira Eiju, the long-nosed goblin who crossed over from China long ago to spread the sin of arrogance.
But still, even Yoshihide, in all his incred
ible perversity—yes, even Yoshihide displayed human tenderness when it came to one thing.
5
By this I mean that Yoshihide was truly mad about his only daughter, the young lady-in-waiting. The girl was, as I said before, a wonderfully kind-hearted young creature deeply devoted to her father, and his love for her was no less strong than hers for him. I gather that he provided for her every need—every robe, every hair ornament—without the slightest objection. Don’t you find this incredible for a man who had never made a single contribution to a temple?
Yoshihide’s love for his daughter, however, remained just that: love. It never occurred to him that he should be trying to find her a good husband someday. Far from it: he was not above hiring street thugs to beat up anyone who might make improper advances to her. So even when His Lordship honored her with the position of junior lady-in-waiting in his own household, Yoshihide was far from happy about it, and for a while he always wore a sour expression whenever he was in His Lordship’s presence. I have no doubt that people who witnessed this display were the ones who began speculating that His Lordship had been attracted to the girl’s beauty when he ordered her into service despite her father’s objections.
Such rumors were entirely false, of course. It was nothing but Yoshihide’s obsessive love for his daughter that kept him wishing to have her step down from service, that is certain. I remember the time His Lordship ordered Yoshihide to do a painting of Monju7 as a child, and Yoshihide pleased him greatly with a marvelous work that used one of His Lordship’s own boy favorites as a model. “You can have anything you want as your reward,” said His Lordship. “Anything at all.”
Yoshihide should have been awestruck to hear such praise from His Lordship’s own lips, and he did in fact prostrate himself in thanks before him, but can you imagine what he asked? “If it please Your Lordship, I beg you to return my daughter to her former lowly state.” The impudence of the man! This was no ordinary household, after all. No matter how much he loved his daughter, to beg for her release from service in privileged proximity to the great Lord of Horikawa himself—where in the world does one find such audacity? Not even a man as grandly magnanimous as His Lordship could help feeling some small annoyance at such a request, as was evident from the way he stared at Yoshihide for a while in silence.
Presently he spoke: “That will not happen,” he said, all but spitting out the words, and he abruptly withdrew.
This was not the first nor the last such incident: I think there might have been four or five in all. And with each repetition, it seemed to me, His Lordship gazed on Yoshihide with increasing coldness. The girl, for her part, seemed to fear for her father’s welfare. Often she could be seen sobbing quietly to herself in her room, teeth clamped on her sleeve. All this only reinforced the rumor that His Lordship was enamored of the girl. People also said that the command to paint the screen had something to do with her rejection of His Lordship’s advances, but that, of course, could not be so.
As I see it, it was entirely out of pity for the girl’s situation that His Lordship refused to let her go. I am certain he believed, with great generosity, that she would be far better off if he were to keep her in his mansion and enable her to live in comfort than if he sent her back to her hardheaded old father. That he was partial to her, of course, there could be no doubt: she was such a sweet-tempered young thing. But to assert that he took his lustful pleasure with her is a view that springs from twisted reasoning. No, I would have to call it a groundless falsehood.
At any rate, owing to these matters regarding his daughter, this was a period when Yoshihide was in great disfavor with His Lordship. Suddenly one day, for whatever reason, His Lordship summoned Yoshihide and ordered him to paint a folding screen portraying scenes from the eight Buddhist hells.
6
Oh, that screen! I can almost see its terrifying images of hell before me now!
Other artists painted what they called images of hell, but their compositions were nothing like Yoshihide’s. He had the Ten Kings of Hell and their minions over in one small corner, and everything else—the entire screen—was enveloped in a firestorm so terrible you thought the swirling flames were going to melt the Mountain of Sabers and the Forest of Swords. Aside from the vaguely Chinese costumes of the Judges of the Dark, with their swatches of yellow and indigo, all you saw was the searing color of flames and, dancing wildly among them, black smoke clouds of hurled India ink and flying sparks of blown-on gold dust.
These alone were enough to shock and amaze any viewer, but the sinners writhing in the hellfire of Yoshihide’s powerful brush had nothing in common with those to be seen in ordinary pictures of hell. For Yoshihide had included sinners from all stations in life, from the most brilliant luminary of His Majesty’s exalted circle to the basest beggar and outcast. A courtier in magnificent ceremonial vestments, a nubile lady-in-waiting in five-layered robes, a rosary-clutching priest intoning the holy name of Amida, a samurai student on high wooden clogs, an aristocratic little girl in a simple shift, a Yin-Yang diviner swishing his paper wand through the air: I could never name them all. But there they were, human beings of every kind, inundated by smoke and flame, tormented by wardens of hell with their heads of bulls and horses, and driven in all directions like autumn leaves scattering before a great wind. “Oh, look at that one,” you would say, “the one with her hair all tangled up in a forked lance and her arms and legs drawn in tighter than a spider’s: could she be one of those shrine maidens who perform for the gods? And, oh, that fellow there, hanging upsidedown like a bat, his breast pierced by a short lance: surely he is supposed to be a greenhorn provincial governor.” And the kinds of torture were as numberless as the sinners themselves—flogging with an iron scourge, crushing under a gigantic rock, pecking by a monstrous bird, grinding in the jaws of a poisonous serpent…
But surely the single most horrifying image of all was that of a carriage plummeting through space. As it fell, it grazed the upper boughs of a sword tree, where clumps of corpses were skewered on fang-like branches. Blasts of hell wind swept up the carriage curtains to reveal a court lady so gorgeously appareled she might have been one of His Imperial Majesty’s own Consorts or Intimates, her straight black hip-length hair flying upward in the flames, the full whiteness of her throat laid bare as she writhed in agony. Every detail of the woman’s form and the blazing carriage filled the viewer with an agonizing sense of the hideous torments to be found in the Hell of Searing Heat. The sheer horror of the entire screen—might I say?—seemed to be concentrated in this one figure. It had been executed with such inspired workmanship, you’d think that all who saw it could hear the woman’s dreadful screams.
Oh yes, this was it: for the sake of painting this one image, the terrible event occurred. Otherwise, how could even the great Yoshihide have painted hell’s torments so vividly? It was his cruel fate to lose his life in exchange for completing the screen. In a sense, the hell in his painting was the hell into which Yoshihide himself, the greatest painter in the realm, was doomed one day to fall.
I am afraid that, in my haste to speak of the screen with its unusual images of hell, I may have reversed the order of my story. Now let me continue with the part about Yoshihide when he received His Lordship’s command to do a painting of hell.
7
For nearly six months after the commission, Yoshihide poured all his energy into the screen, never once calling at His Lordship’s residence. Don’t you find it strange that such a doting father should abandon all thought of seeing his daughter once he had started on a painting? According to the apprentice I mentioned earlier, Yoshihide always approached his work like a man possessed by a fox spirit.8 In fact, people used to say that the only reason Yoshihide was able to make such a name for himself in art was that he had pledged his soul to one of the great gods of fortune; what proved it was that if you peeked in on him when he was painting, you could always see shadowy fox spirits swarming all around him. What this means, I suspect, is that,
once he picked up his brush, Yoshihide thought of nothing else but completing the painting before him. He would spend all day and night shut up in his studio out of sight. His concentration seems to have been especially intense when he was working on this particular screen with its images of hell.
This is not merely to say that he would keep the latticed shutters pulled down and spend all day by the tripod oil lamp, mixing secret combinations of paint or posing his apprentices in various costumes for him to sketch. No, that was normal behavior for the working Yoshihide, even before this screen. Remember, this was the man who, when he was painting his Five Levels of Rebirth on the Ryūgaiji temple gate, went out specially to inspect a corpse lying on the roadside—the kind of sight from which any ordinary person would recoil—and spent hours sitting before it, sketching its rotting face and limbs without missing a hair. I don’t blame you, then, if you are among those who cannot imagine what I mean when I say that his concentration during his work on the hell screen was especially intense. I haven’t time now to explain this in detail, but I can at least tell you the most important things.
One day an apprentice of Yoshihide’s (the one I’ve mentioned a few times already) was busy dissolving pigments when the master suddenly said to him, “I’m planning to take a nap but, I don’t know, I’ve been having bad dreams lately.”
There was nothing strange about this, so the apprentice merely answered, “I see, Sir,” and continued with his work.
Yoshihide, however, was not his usual self. Somewhat hesitantly, and with a doleful look on his face, he made a surprising request: “I want you to sit and work beside me while I sleep.”
The apprentice thought it rather odd that his master should be worrying about dreams, but it was a simple enough request and he promptly agreed to it.
Rashōmon and Seventeen Other Stories Page 10