Rashōmon and Seventeen Other Stories

by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa

  After this incident, Tsuneko came to believe in her husband’s diary, but all the others—the company manager, Hanzaburō’s colleagues, Dr. Yamai, and Editor-in-Chief Mudaguchi—refused to believe that Hanzaburō had developed horse legs. What they did believe was that Tsuneko had fallen prey to a hallucination when she thought she saw horse legs on Hanzaburō. While I was living in Beijing, I often met with Dr. Yamai and Mr. Mudaguchi in an attempt to break down their resistance, but derisive laughter was all I got in return. Thereafter—well, it appears that novelist Okada Saburō 6 recently heard the story from someone. He wrote to me to say he could not believe that Hanzaburō actually had horse legs. ‘‘If this happened at all,’’ he said, ‘‘they probably gave him forelegs. If the legs were the quick, agile sort that are able to perform such stunts as Spanish trotting, they might also manage the feat of kicking, which is unusual for forelegs. Without a skilled trainer such as Major Yuasa, though, I doubt the horse itself would be able to do such kicking.’’ To be sure, I have my own doubts regarding these matters, but does it not seem a bit premature to discount not only Hanzaburō’s diary but Tsuneko’s testimony as well on that basis alone? And in fact, my research has revealed the following article just a few columns down on the very same page of the very same issue of the Shuntian Times that had originally reported Hanzaburō’s resurrection:

  Henry Barrett, president of the U.S.–China Temperance Society, died suddenly aboard a train on the Beijing–Hankou Line. His hand was clutching a medicine bottle, which gave rise to a suspicion of suicide, but analysis of the bottle’s contents determined the liquid to be alcoholic in nature.

  (January 1925)

  AKUTAGAWA’S OWN STORY

  DAIDŌJI SHINSUKE: THE EARLY YEARS

  —A Mental Landscape—

  1. Honjo

  Daidōji Shinsuke was born near the Ekōin Temple in the Honjo Ward1 of Tokyo. As far as he can remember, Honjo contained not a single street—not a single house—of any beauty. His own house in particular was surrounded by drab shops—a confectionery, a cooper’s workshop, a secondhand store. The street they faced on was a permanent muddy swamp that ended at “The Big Ditch” of Otakegura. The Ditch had weeds floating on its surface and it always gave off a terrific stench. Neighborhoods like this certainly made him melancholy, but other neighborhoods only made him feel worse. The fashionable “high city” residential areas in hilly Yamanote he found just as oppressive as those “low city” streets lined with pretty little shops from the Edo Period. No, rather than Hongō or Nihonbashi, it was dreary Honjo—the Ekōin, Halt-Pony Bridge, Yokoami, the open sewers, Hannoki Horse Ground, the Big Ditch—that he loved. Perhaps what he felt was closer to pity than to love. In any case, these are the only places that often enter his dreams even now, thirty years later.

  Ever since he could remember, Shinsuke had felt love for the Honjo streets. Far from tree lined, they were always dusty, but it was those streets that taught young Shinsuke the beauty of nature. That was how he grew up: eating cheap sweets on the filthy streets of Honjo. The countryside—especially the expanse of rice paddies that opened to the east of Honjo—could never interest a boy who grew up that way. All it did was show him the ugliness of nature, not its beauty. The Honjo streets may have been wanting in nature, but blossoming roof-top grasses and spring clouds reflected in puddles displayed a sweet, sad kind of beauty. It was thanks to such beautiful things that he came to love nature. To be sure, the streets of Honjo were not the only things that gradually opened his eyes to natural beauty. Books, too, of course—Roka’s Nature and Man, which he devoured again and again during his elementary school years, and a Japanese translation of Lubbock’s The Beauties of Nature2—books enlightened him. Still, what most opened his eyes to nature were the neighborhoods of Honjo—their oddly shabby houses and trees and streets.

  Later, he took short trips to other parts of Japan. The harshness of the mountainous Kiso region made him uneasy. The softness of the sheltered Inland Sea always bored him. He loved the shabbiness of Honjo far more than either of those. He especially loved nature that lived subtly, faintly amid the artificiality of human civilization. The Honjo of thirty years before still retained this kind of natural beauty everywhere—the willows along the open sewers, the broad courtyard of the Ekōin, the deciduous woods of Otakegura. He was unable to accompany his friends on school outings to such tourist destinations as Nikkō and Kamakura, but he did go walking with his father every morning through the surrounding neighborhoods of Honjo. This was undeniably a great source of joy to Shinsuke at the time, but it was a kind of joy he could never bring himself to boast of to his friends.

  One morning, as the early glow was fading in the sky, he and his father walked to a frequent destination of theirs, the Hun-dred-Piling Bank of the Sumida River. There were always plenty of fishermen at this spot, but not on that particular morning. The only things moving were the sea lice crawling in the gaps of the bank’s broad stone wall. He started to ask his father why there were no fishermen out this morning, but before he could open his mouth, he found the answer. A shaven-headed corpse lay bobbing on the still-glowing waves of the river where smelly water weeds and garbage clung to the irregularly-spaced pilings.

  Shinsuke still vividly remembers the Hundred-Piling Bank from that morning. The Honjo of thirty years ago left numberless memorable landscapes in his impressionable heart, but at the same time that morning’s Hundred-Piling Bank—that one landscape—also stood as the sum total of all the mental shadows cast by Honjo’s many neighborhoods.

  2. Cow’s Milk

  Shinsuke was a boy who had never sucked his mother’s milk.3 A frail woman, she never gave a drop of milk to her one-andonly child, and supporting a wet nurse was out of the question for his financially straitened family. Thus, from the moment of his birth, he was raised on cow’s milk. This was a fate that the young Shinsuke could not help cursing. He despised the milk bottles that arrived in the kitchen every morning. And he envied his friends: they might know nothing else, but at least they knew their mother’s milk. Around the time he entered grammar school, the breasts of a young aunt who was staying with them over New Year’s or some such time became painfully swollen. She tried squeezing the milk into a brass bowl but could not produce any that way. She narrowed her eyes and said to him, half teasing, “How about you, little Shin? I wonder if you can suck it out for me?” Having been raised on cow’s milk, though, he would not have known how to do it. Finally, his aunt got a child from next door—the cooper’s little girl—to suck out her hardened breasts. The breasts were two swollen hemispheres stitched with blue veins. Shinsuke was such a shy little boy that he would never have been able to suck his aunt’s breasts even if he had known how. Still, he hated the girl from next door. And he hated the aunt for having the girl from next door suck her breasts. This little incident left him with an oppressive sense of jealousy—though perhaps it was also the beginning of his vita sexualis.4

  Shinsuke was ashamed both of the bottled cow’s milk and of the fact that he had never tasted his mother’s milk. This was his secret—the lifelong secret that he could never tell another soul and that carried with it a certain superstition. He was a weirdly skinny little boy with a huge head. Not only was he also shy, but his heart would start pounding at the slightest provocation—say, at the sight of a sharpened butcher’s knife. In this he differed utterly from his father, a man who prided himself on his courage and had undergone enemy gunfire in the battle of Fushimi-Toba.5 Shinsuke firmly believed—though from what age and by what reasoning, he could not be sure—that it was the cow’s milk that had made him so unlike his father. He believed just as firmly that the cow’s milk was responsible for his frail constitution. If he was right about this, then the minute he displayed the slightest weakness, he was sure, his friends would discover his secret. So he took on any challenge that his friends might throw his way. And there were plenty of challenges. One was for him to jump over the Big Ditch without a pole. Another was to
climb the big gingko tree in the Ekōin temple grounds without a ladder. And yet another was to have an all-out brawl with one of the friends. When he faced the Big Ditch, he felt his knees trembling, but he clamped his eyes shut and jumped with all his might, straight over the water weeds floating on the ditch’s surface. The same sort of fear and hesitation attacked him when he climbed the Ekōin’s gingko and when he had his fight with the friend, but he conquered his emotions each time. No matter its superstitious origin, this was Spartan training for him, training that left a permanent scar on his right knee—and possibly on his character as well. Shinsuke still remembers his father’s withering tone: “You can be pretty damned stubborn for such a sissy.”

  Fortunately, though, his superstition gradually disappeared. Moreover, in Western history he discovered something that almost seemed to dis prove his superstition—namely, a passage stating that Romulus, the founder of Rome, had been suckled by a wolf. After that, he stopped minding that he had never known his mother’s milk. Suddenly it became a point of pride for him that he had grown up on cow’s milk. Shinsuke recalls going with his old uncle, the spring he entered middle school, to visit a dairy farm that the uncle owned6 at the time. He recalls with special clarity feeding hay to a white cow that ambled right up to him when he leaned over the fence, the chest of his school uniform just barely coming to the top rail. Looking up at him, the cow quietly pressed its nose into the fistful of hay. There was something nearly human in the cow’s eyes, he felt. Was it his imagination? It could well have been. In his memory, though, he leans over a fence beneath branches filled with apricot blossoms as a big white cow looks up at him—and into him—with real fondness.

  3. Poverty

  Shinsuke came from a poor family. To be sure, theirs was not the poverty of the lower classes who lived boxed together in the long, partitioned tenement houses. Rather, it was the poverty of the lower middle class, who must continually agonize over keeping up appearances. His father, a retired official, had to support a household of five, including the maid, on an annual pension of ¥ 5007 plus a little interest from money in the bank. This meant endless scrimping and saving. They lived in a house that had five rooms (including the entryway), a small garden, and a rather impressive gate. They rarely made new kimono for anyone, however, and in the evening his father had to make do with a low-grade saké they could never serve to guests. His mother kept her patched obi hidden beneath a short jacket. And Shinsuke—Shinsuke still remembers the stink of varnish from the used desk they bought him. Actually, with its green baize surface and shiny silver-colored drawer pulls, the desk had a nice, neat look to it at first glance, but the cloth was worn thin, and the drawers never opened smoothly. This piece of furniture was not so much a desk as a symbol of the entire household, a symbol of the constant struggle to keep up appearances.

  Shinsuke hated this poverty. Indeed, the unquenchable hatred he felt then continues to reverberate deep in his heart even now. He could never buy books. He could never go to summer school. He could never wear a new overcoat. His friends got all those things. He envied them—sometimes to the point of jealousy. But he would never admit to himself that he harbored such envy and jealousy because he was contemptuous of their abilities. His contempt, however, did nothing to change his hatred for his own family’s poverty. He hated their old tatami mats, their dim oil lamps, their paper-covered sliding doors with peeling pictures of ivy—everything that made their house so shabby. Still worse, merely because of this shabbiness, he hated the very parents who gave him birth. He especially hated his father, who was bald and shorter than Shinsuke himself. His father would often attend school-sponsor meetings,8 and Shinsuke felt shame at the sight of this father of his there in his friends’ presence. At the same time, he was ashamed of his despicable nature for being ashamed of his own flesh-and-blood. He kept a “Diary without Self-Deceit” in imitation of the writer Kunikida Doppo;9 on its lined pages he recorded passages like this:

  I am unable to love my father and mother. No, this is not true. I do love them, but I am unable to love their outward appearance. A gentleman should be ashamed to judge people by their appearance. How much more so should he be ashamed to find fault with that of his own parents. Still, I am unable to love the outward appearance of my father and mother….

  What he hated even more than the shabbiness, though, was the petty deceits to which the poverty gave rise. His mother once gave some relatives a piece of sponge cake packed in a box from the elegant Fūgetsu bakery. The cake itself, however, she had actually bought at the local confectioner’s. And his father—how earnestly had his father taught him “Hard work, frugality, and martial prowess” as the central tenets of the Way of the Warrior.10 According to his father, buying a Chinese character dictionary in addition to the old classic references was enough to make one guilty of “luxurious over-indulgence in high culture”! When it came to deceit, though, Shinsuke was not much better than his parents. He supplemented his fifty-sen-per-month allowance any way he could in order to buy the books and magazines he hungered for above all things. He used every possible excuse to steal his parents’ money—by “losing” change on the way home from an errand, by saying that he had to buy a notebook or to pay dues to the students’ association. When these failed to bring in enough, he would try charming his parents out of his next month’s allowance, or cozying up to his old mother, who was particularly lenient with him. He disliked his own lies as much as his parents’, but still he continued to lie—boldly and cunningly. He did this primarily out of need, but also for the pathological pleasure it gave him—something like the pleasure of killing a god. In this one point he came close to being a juvenile delinquent. The last page of his “Diary without Self-Deceit” contained these few lines:

  Doppo said he was in love with love. I am trying to hate hatred. I am trying to hate my hatred for poverty, for falsehood, for everything.

  These were Shinsuke’s innermost feelings. He had indeed come to hate his own hatred for poverty. The double ring of hatred continued to pain this young man not yet twenty years old. Not that happiness was entirely lacking. He always made the third or fourth highest grade in examinations. And a beautiful young boy in one of the lower grades, all unbidden, expressed love for him. But for Shinsuke these were chance rays of sunlight shining through an overcast sky. Hatred oppressed him more than any other emotion, and before he knew it this hatred had left permanent scars on his heart. Even after he escaped from poverty, he could not stop hating it. And at the same time, he could not stop hating extravagance just as much. This hatred for extravagance was a brand burned into the skin by lower-middle-class poverty—and perhaps by that alone. To this day, Shinsuke feels this hatred inside himself, this petty-bourgeois moralistic fear of having to struggle against poverty.

  The autumn he graduated from the university, Shinsuke visited the home of a friend still attending the Faculty of Law. They sat conversing on the tatami floor of the friend’s good-sized room, the paper doors and walls of which were showing their age. From behind his friend, an old man of perhaps sixty poked his head in. Intuitively, Shinsuke sensed in the old man’s alcoholic face a retired official.

  “My father.” The friend introduced the old man to him with this simple phrase.

  Shinsuke offered a proper formal greeting, which the old man almost arrogantly ignored. Before he left the room, however, he told Shinsuke, “Make yourself comfortable. We have chairs out there…” Now Shinsuke noticed the two armchairs set on the darkened wood of the glassed-in corridor that ran past the room—long-legged chairs with fading red seat cushions from a half-century earlier. In these two pieces of furniture, Shinsuke sensed the entire lower middle class. He sensed, too, that his friend was just as ashamed of his father as Shinsuke was of his own. This is yet another minor incident that remains in Shinsuke’s memory with painful clarity. Ideas might well come to cast new and varied shadows on his mind in the future, but he was, first and foremost, the son of a retired official, bred not of
lower-class poverty but of lower-middle-class poverty and its need to trade in falsehood.

  4. School

  School, too, left Shinsuke with nothing but gloomy memories. Aside from two or three university lectures he attended without taking notes, none of the classes in any of his schools interested him in the least. Moving from one school to the next, how-ever—from middle school to higher school,11 from higher school to university—was the only thing that could save him from a life of poverty. Shinsuke did not realize this while he was still in middle school, of course—at least, not clearly. But from the time he graduated from middle school, the threat of poverty began to weigh on his heart like an overcast sky. In higher school and university, he thought frequently about quitting, but the threat of poverty would always put a quick stop to such plans by showing him the gloomy future he would face. He hated school, of course. He especially hated middle school with all its restrictions. How cruel the gatekeeper’s bugle sounded to him! How melancholy was the color of the thick poplars on the school grounds! There Shinsuke studied only useless minutiae—the dates of Western history, chemical equations for which they did no experiments, the populations of the cities of Europe and America. With a little effort, this could be relatively painless work, but he could not forget the fact that it was all useless minutiae. In The House of the Dead, Dostoevsky says that a prisoner forced to do such useless work as pouring water from bucket number 1 into bucket number 2and back again would eventually commit suicide.12 In the rat-gray school-house, amid the rustling of the tall poplars, Shinsuke felt the mental anguish that such a prisoner would experience. But there was more.