Rashōmon and Seventeen Other Stories

by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa

  This was all Hanzaburō remembered—or at least, all he remembered with the same clarity as the events to that point. He seemed to recall arguing with the two Chinese men. Then he seemed to recall falling down a steep stairway. He could not be sure about either of those memories. In any case, when he regained consciousness after wandering through some kind of strange vision, he was lying in a coffin in his company-owned house in XX Lane. This occurred just at the moment that a young Honganji Buddhist missionary from Japan was reciting something like the last rites in front of the coffin.

  Hanzaburō’s sudden resurrection caused a sensation, of course. The Shuntian Times2 ran a three-column article with a big photo of him. Tsuneko in her mourning outfit was smiling even more than usual, said the report. And, instead of “wasting” the traditional monetary offerings that had been donated for the funeral, a company executive and colleague of Hanzaburō’s used the substantial sum to hold a “Resurrection Celebration” for the would-be mourners. Dr. Yamai’s credibility came dangerously close to collapsing, to be sure, but he resuscitated it with great skill, blowing cigar smoke rings in a lordly manner. Hanzaburō’s resurrection, he insisted, was a mystery of nature that transcended the powers of medicine. Which is to say, he restored his own personal credibility by sacrificing that of the medical profession.

  The only person without a smile at Hanzaburō’s “Resurrection Celebration” was Hanzaburō himself. And no wonder: with his resurrection his legs had changed to horse legs—chestnut horse legs with hooves instead of toes. Every time he saw them, he felt an indescribable wave of self-pity. For he knew that the day his legs were discovered, the company would let him go, his colleagues would turn their backs on him, and Tsuneko—oh, “Frailty, thy name is woman!”—Tsuneko would almost certainly refuse to stay married to a man who had suddenly grown two horse legs. Whenever such thoughts crossed his mind, he resolved anew to keep his legs hidden. He gave up wearing Japanese clothing. He started wearing boots. He always locked the bathroom window and door. Yet despite such precautions, he was continually anxious. And not without reason:

  Hanzaburō had to remain on guard, first of all, against arousing the suspicions of his colleagues. This was perhaps among the less taxing of his efforts, but if we examine his diary, we find that he was continually struggling with some threat.

  July –. Damn that young Chinese guy for sticking me with these damn legs. I’m walking around on two fleas’ nests! The itching drove me crazy today at work. I can see all my energy going into this for a while: I have to rig up something to get rid of these fleas.

  August –. Went to the manager’s office to talk about sales today. Manager sniffing the whole time. I guess the smell is seeping out of my boots.

  September –. Controlling horse legs is a lot harder than horseback riding itself. Had a rush job before noon today, trotted down the stairway. Like anyone at a time like this, I was only thinking about the job, forgot about my horse legs. Next thing I know, my hoof goes straight through the seventh step.

  October –. I’m finally getting my horse legs to behave the way I want them to. It’s all in the balance of the hips. I botched things today, though. Not that it was entirely my fault. I caught a rickshaw to work around nine o’clock this morning. The fare should have been 12 sen, but the rickshaw man insisted on 20. Then he grabbed me and wouldn’t let me go in through the company gate. I got furious and gave him a quick kick. He flew through the air like a football. I was sorry about that, of course, but at the same time I couldn’t help laughing. I really have to be more careful when I use my legs….

  Avoiding Tsuneko’s suspicions, however, provided far greater sources of hardship than deceiving his colleagues, as Hanzaburō continually lamented in his diary:

  July –. My greatest enemy is Tsuneko. I finally managed to convince her that we should be living a “modern, cultured” life, so we turned our only Japanese matted room into a wood-floored Western room. That way, I can get by without taking my shoes off in front of her. She’s upset at the loss of the tatami, but there is no way I can walk on a matted floor with these legs—even with socks on.

  September –. Sold our double bed to a used-furniture dealer today. I remember the day I bought it at an American’s auction. On the way home, I walked under the row of pagoda trees in the foreign settlement. The trees were in full bloom. The soft glow of the canal was beautiful. But— No, this is no time for me to be clinging to such memories. I almost kicked Tsuneko in the side last night….

  November –. Took the washing to the laundry myself today. Not our usual laundry: the one over by Dongan Market. This is a chore I will have to take care of from now on. There’s always horse hair stuck to my long johns, underpants, and socks.

  December –. I’m constantly wearing holes in my socks. It’s not easy putting together the money to buy new socks without Tsuneko finding out.

  February –. I never take off my socks or underclothes, even in bed. Plus it’s always a risky venture to keep my legs hidden from Tsuneko with a blanket. Before we got in bed last night, Tsuneko said, “I never realized how sensitive you are to cold! Have you got a pelt wound all the way up to your hips?” Maybe the time has come for the secret of my horse legs to come out.

  Hanzaburō encountered many other threats besides these. Recounting each of them would be more than I can manage. Here, though, I will record the one event in his diary that shocked me the most:

  February –. Went to have a look at the used-bookstore near Longfu Temple today on my lunch break. A horse-drawn cart was parked in a sunny spot in front of the shop. This was not a Western-type horse cart, but a Chinese cart with an indigo canopy. The driver must have been resting up there, but I didn’t pay that any mind as I started into the bookstore. And then it happened. The driver snapped his whip and yelled to the horse, “Suo! Suo!” “Suo” is the word that Chinese use to make a horse back up. Even before the driver’s words had ended, the wagon started creaking backward. And—could I have been any more shocked at what happened at that very moment?—with my eyes on the bookstore in front of me, I, also, started backing up a step at a time! There is no way I can describe here what I felt then: Terror? Horror? I tried without success to move forward—even a single step if I could—but under the influence of some terrifying, irresistible power, I could only move backward. Then, fortunately—for me, at least—the driver gave a long “Suooo!” When the cart came to a stop, I was finally able to stop moving backward. But this was not the only amazing thing that happened. With a sigh of relief, I half-consciously turned toward the cart. At that moment the horse—the dapple-gray horse that was pulling the cart—came out with an indescribable whinny. Indescribable? No, it was not indescribable. When I heard that shrill whinny, I knew without a doubt that the horse was laughing. And it was not alone: I felt something like a whinny rising in my own throat. I knew I could not allow this sound to emerge from my throat. I slapped my hands over my ears and ran away as fast as I could.

  But destiny was still preparing its final blow for Hanzaburō. One noontime near the end of March, he noticed that his legs were suddenly beginning to dance and leap. Why, at this time, should his horse legs have suddenly started acting up? To find the answer to that question, we would have to examine Hanzaburō’s diary. Unfortunately, however, the diary ends on the day before Hanzaburō suffered the final blow. We can, however, make an informed guess based upon events immediately preceding and following the day in question. Having examined the leading Chinese source books in the field (Annals of Horse Governance; Horse Records; Yuan and Heng’s Collection of Cures for Cows, Horses, and Camels; and Bo Le’s Manual for Judging the Quality of Horses),3 I believe I know exactly what caused his horse legs to become excited when they did.

  That day, there was a terrible Yellow Dust, the notorious storm that blows into Beijing from Mongolia every year at springtime. According to the Shuntian Times, that day’s Yellow Dust was the worst in well over a decade: “Walk five steps from the Zhengyan
g Gate, look up, and you can no longer see the gate’s superstructure.” In other words, it must have been an exceptionally severe storm. Hanzaburō’s legs had originally been attached to a horse that died at the market in Desheng Menwai. The animal must have been a Mongolian Kulun horse that came through Zhangjiakou and Jinzhou on its way to Beijing. The conclusion seems almost inescapable, then, that Hanzaburō’s horse legs began to dance and leap the moment they sensed the Mongolian air moving in. This was the season when horses beyond the Great Wall begin galloping around in all directions, frantic to mate. Hanzaburō’s horse legs thus were incapable of remaining still, for which Hanzaburō surely merits our sympathy.

  Whether or not the reader finds my interpretation persuasive, we know from his colleagues that, at work that day, Hanzaburō was continually leaping about as if in a dance. And that in a mere three-block stretch on his way back to his house, he trampled seven rickshaws to bits. Things were no better when he reached home. According to Tsuneko, Hanzaburō staggered in, panting like a dog. And when he finally managed to stretch out on the sofa, he ordered his dumbfounded wife to bring him a length of cord. Tsuneko of course imagined from his appearance that something terrible had happened to him. His color was bad, for one thing. And he kept moving his boot-shod legs as if he found something unbearably irritating. Even Tsuneko forgot her usual smile, and she begged him to tell her what he was planning to do with the cord, but he would only wipe the sweat from his brow in apparent agony and repeat over and over, “Do it. Hurry. Hurry. You have to do it now.”

  Tsuneko had no choice but to bring her husband a bunch of the cords she used for tying packages. Boots and all, he started winding a cord around his legs. It was then that the fear began to germinate in her heart that Hanzaburō might be going mad. She stared at her husband and, with a quavering voice, urged him to call Dr. Yamai. He ignored her entreaties and went on winding the cord.

  “What the hell does that quack know? That bandit! That swindler! Forget about him. Just come over here and hold me down.”

  They locked their arms around each other on the sofa. The Yellow Dust that blanketed Beijing seemed to be growing ever more intense. Now even the setting sun could do no more than lend a lightless muddy redness to the air beyond the window. Hanzaburō’s legs were never still throughout this time, of course. Bound as they were, they continued to move as if pumping invisible pedals. Tsuneko tried to soothe him and encourage him as best she could:

  “Hanzaburō, Hanzaburō, why are you shaking like this?”

  “It’s nothing. It’s nothing.”

  “But look how you’re sweating. —Let’s go home to Japan this summer, Hanzaburō. Please, we’ve been away so long.”

  “Good. We’ll do that. We’ll go back to live in Japan.”

  Five minutes, ten minutes, twenty minutes: time moved over the couple in slow, painful steps. Tsuneko later told a woman reporter for the Shuntian Times that she felt all the while like a prisoner in chains. After thirty minutes, however, the chains were ready to snap—not Tsuneko’s chains but the human chains that bound Hanzaburō to the household. Fanned, perhaps, by the flowing wind, the window with its muddy red view began to rattle. At that moment Hanzaburō released some kind of enormous cry and flew three feet into the air. Tsuneko says that she saw his bonds snap in that instant. Hanzaburō then—now, this is no longer Tsuneko’s account. The last thing she saw was her husband flying up into the air, after which she fainted on the couch. Their Chinese houseboy, however, told the same reporter what happened next. Hanzaburō leaped to the entryway as if something were pursuing him. For a brief moment, he stood outside the door, but then, with a great shudder, he let out a long, eerie cry like the whinnying of a horse as he plunged straight into the Yellow Dust that enveloped the street.

  What became of Hanzaburō after that? Even now, no one knows for sure. The journalist from the Shuntian Times reported that sometime around eight o’clock that evening, in the smoky moonlight of the Yellow Dust, a man without a hat was seen galloping along the railroad tracks below Mt. Badaling, famous for its view of the Great Wall. This article, however, may not be entirely reliable. For in fact another journalist for the same newspaper reported that sometime around eight o’clock that evening, in the rain drenching the Yellow Dust, a man without a hat was seen galloping past the rows of stone men and animals on the Sacred Way to the thirteen Ming Tombs. This leads us to the inescapable conclusion that we have no idea where Hanzaburō went or what he did after he ran away from his company house on XX Lane.

  Needless to say, Hanzaburō’s disappearance caused as great a sensation as his resurrection had. Tsuneko, the company manager, Hanzaburō’s colleagues, Dr. Yamai, and the editorin-chief of the Shuntian Times all ascribed his disappearance to sudden insanity. No doubt this was simpler than blaming it on horse legs. For such is the Way of the World: to reject the difficult and go with the easy. One representative of this Way, Editor-in-Chief Mudaguchi of the Shuntian Times, brandished his lofty pen in the following editorial:

  Yesterday at 5:15 p.m. Mitsubishi employee Oshino Hanzaburō appears to have gone suddenly insane and, ignoring his wife Tsuneko’s attempts to hold him back, ran away from home alone. According to Dr. Yamai, director of the Universalist Hospital, Mr. Oshino has been exhibiting somewhat abnormal psychological symptoms ever since he suffered a cerebral hemorrhage last summer and remained unconscious for three days. Judging also from a diary discovered by Mrs. Oshino, Mr. Oshino was continually experiencing strange obsessions. What we would like to ask, however, is not “What is the name of Mr. Oshino’s malady?” but rather “What is Mr. Oshino’s responsibility to his wife?”

  Like an unblemished golden jar, our glorious National Essence stands upon a foundation of belief in the family. We need not ask, then, how grave the responsibilities of the head of any one family might be. Does the head of a family have the right to go mad any time he feels like it? To this question we must offer a resounding ‘‘No!’’ Imagine what would happen if the husbands of the world suddenly acquired the right to go mad. All, without exception, would leave their families behind for a happy life of song on the road, or wandering over hill and dale, or being kept well fed and clothed in an insane asylum. Then our 2,000-yearold belief in the family—our very pride in the eyes of the world—could not fail to collapse. As the ancient records4 have taught us, ‘‘Hate the crime, not the criminal.’’ We are not, of course, urging that Mr. Oshino be treated harshly. We must, however, loudly beat the drum5 to condemn his rash crime of having gone mad. No, let this not be limited to Mr. Oshino’s crime alone. We must also condemn the utter misfeasance of successive administrations for having neglected our urgent need for a law prohibiting insanity.

  Mrs. Oshino tells us that she intends to go on living in the company house on XX Lane for at least one year in the hopes that Mr. Oshino will come home during that period. We express our wholehearted sympathy to this faithful wife, and we sincerely hope that the wise leaders of Mitsubishi will spare no expense in seeing to it that Mrs. Oshino is afforded every opportunity to accomplish her goal.

  Six months later, however, Tsuneko, at least, had a new encounter that made it impossible for her to go on contenting herself with this grave misconception. It happened one October twilight as Beijing’s willows and pagoda trees were beginning to drop their yellowing leaves. She was sitting on the sofa, sunk in her memories of the past. Her lips no longer wore her eternal smile. Her cheeks had lost their former plumpness. She went on thinking of her vanished husband, the double bed he had sold, those bedbugs of long ago… Just then, someone came to the entryway and, after a moment of apparent hesitation, rang the doorbell. She decided not to concern herself with this but to let the houseboy take care of it. He made no appearance, however: perhaps he had gone out. Soon the bell rang again. Tsuneko at last moved away from the sofa and stepped quietly to the entryway.

  Stray withered leaves dotted the floor of the entryway, in the dim light of which stood a man without a hat. T
his lack was not his only distinguishing characteristic, however. He was wearing a torn and dust-smeared suit coat. Tsuneko felt something close to fear at the sight of this man.

  ‘‘Yes? Can I help you?’’ she asked.

  The man said nothing but stood there with head bowed, his long hair hanging down. Tsuneko peered through the darkness and again said with trepidation, ‘‘Can… can I help you?’’

  The man finally raised his head.

  ‘‘Tsuneko…’’

  This one word was all he spoke. But it was enough to reveal his true form to her as clearly as if he had been bathed in moonlight. Tsuneko caught her breath and went on staring at him as if she had lost her voice. Not only had he let his hair grow long, but he was so emaciated he looked like a different person. The eyes that were focused on her now, however, were undeniably the ones that she had been longing to see.

  ‘‘Hanzaburō! It’s you!’’

  Tsuneko cried out and began to fly into his arms. No sooner had she taken the first step toward him, however, than she leaped back as if she had stepped on red-hot iron. Beneath the cuffs of his torn trousers, her husband revealed two hairy horse legs. Even in the dim light she could see their chestnut color.

  ‘‘Hanzaburō!’’

  Tsuneko felt an indescribable revulsion toward the horse legs, but she also felt that if she missed her chance now, she might never see her husband again. He, meanwhile, went on staring at her with a sorrowful look in his eyes. Again she tried to fly to him. But again her revulsion overwhelmed her courage.

  ‘‘Hanzaburō!’’

  The third time she cried out his name, Hanzaburō turned his back to her and started out of the entryway. Tsuneko whipped up her last ounce of courage and tried desperately to cling to him. But before she could take a single step in his direction, she heard the clip-clop of hooves. Utterly pale now, she stared at him moving away from her; she no longer had even the courage to call him back. Finally, she sank down among the entryway’s fallen leaves in a swoon…