Rashōmon and Seventeen Other Stories

by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa

  22. A Painter

  It was just a magazine illustration, but the ink drawing of a rooster showed a remarkable individuality. He asked a friend to tell him about the painter.18

  A week later, the painter himself came to pay him a visit. This was one of the most remarkable events in his entire life. He discovered in this painter a poetry of which no one else was aware. In addition, he discovered in himself a soul of which he himself had been unaware.

  One chilly autumn evening, he was reminded of the painter by a stalk of corn: the way it stood there armed in its rough coat of leaves, exposing its delicate roots atop the mounded earth like so many nerves, it was also a portrait of his own most vulnerable self. The discovery only served to increase his melancholy.

  It’s too late now. But when the time comes…

  23. The Woman

  From where he stood, the plaza was beginning to darken. He walked into the open space feeling slightly feverish. The electric lights in the windows of several large office buildings flashed against the clear, faintly silvery sky.

  He halted at the curb and decided to wait for the woman there. Five minutes later she came walking toward him looking somewhat haggard. “I’m exhausted,” she said with a smile when she caught sight of him. They walked through the fading light of the plaza side-by-side. This was their first time together. He felt ready to abandon anything and everything to be with her.

  In the automobile she stared at him and asked, “You’re not going to regret this?”

  “Not at all,” he answered with conviction.

  She pressed her hand on his and said, “I know I won’t have any regrets.”

  Again, as she said this, her face seemed to be bathed in moonlight.

  24. The Birth

  He stood by the sliding screen, looking down at the midwife in her white surgical gown washing the baby. Whenever soap got in its eyes, the baby would wrinkle up its sad little face and let out a loud wail. It looked like a baby rat, and its odor stirred him to these irrepressible thoughts—

  Why did this one have to be born—to come into the world like all the others, this world so full of suffering? Why did this one have to bear the destiny of having a father like me?

  This was the first son his wife bore him.

  25. Strindberg

  He stood in the doorway, watching some grimy Chinese men playing Mahjongg in the moonlight where figs bloomed. Back in his room, he started reading The Confessions of a Fool beneath a squat lamp. He had barely read two pages when he caught himself with a sour smile. So—the lies that Strindberg wrote to his lover, the Countess, were hardly different from his own.

  26. Antiquity

  He was nearly overwhelmed by peeling Buddhas, heavenly beings, horses and lotus blossoms. Looking up at them, he forgot everything—even his good fortune at having escaped the clutches of the crazy girl.

  27. Spartan Discipline

  He was walking down a back street with a friend when a hooded rickshaw came charging in their direction. He was surprised to recognize the passenger as the woman he had been with the night before. Her face seemed to be bathed in moonglow even now, in the daylight. With his friend present, they could not exchange even ordinary greetings.

  “Pretty woman,” his friend said.

  Eyes on the spring hills at the end of the street, he answered without the slightest hesitation:

  “Yes, very.”

  28. Murder

  The country road stank of cow manure in the sun. Mopping his sweat, he struggled up the steep hill. The ripened wheat on either side of the road gave off a pleasant scent.

  “Kill him, kill him…”

  Before he knew it, he was muttering this aloud to himself over and over. Kill whom? It was obvious to him. He recalled the cringing fellow with close-cropped hair.

  Just then, the domed roof of a Catholic church appeared beyond the yellow wheat.

  29. Form

  It was a cast-iron saké bottle. With its finely incised lines, it had managed at some point to teach him the beauty of “form.”

  30. Rain

  In the big bed he talked with her about many things. Beyond the bedroom window it was raining. The blossoms of the crinum tree had begun to rot in the rain, It seemed. Her face, as always, looked as if it were in moonlight, yet talking with her was not entirely free of boredom. He lay on his stomach, had himself a quiet smoke, and realized he had now been with her for seven years.

  Do I still love this woman? he asked himself. He was in the habit of observing himself so closely that the answer came as a surprise to him: I do.

  31. The Great Earthquake19

  The odor was something close to overripe apricots. Catching a hint of it as he walked through the charred ruins, he found himself thinking such thoughts as these: The smell of corpses rotting in the sun is not as bad as I would have expected. When he stood before a pond where bodies were piled upon bodies, however, he discovered that the old Chinese expression, “burning the nose,” was no mere sensory exaggeration of grief and horror. What especially moved him was the corpse of a child of twelve or thirteen. He felt something like envy as he looked at it, recalling such expressions as “Those whom the gods love die young.”20 Both his sister and his half-brother had lost their houses to fire. His sister’s husband, though, was on a suspended sentence for perjury.21

  Too bad we didn’t all die.

  Standing in the charred ruins, he could hardly keep from feeling this way.

  32. Fight

  He had a quarrel with his half-brother that ended in a physical brawl. True, he was a constant source of pressure for this younger brother, who in turn cost him a good deal of freedom. Relatives were always telling the young man, “be like your brother,” but for him, this was like being bound hand and foot. Locked in each other’s grip, they fell near the edge of the veranda. He still remembers the one crape myrtle bush in the garden by the veranda—its load of brilliant red blossoms beneath a sky about to drop its rainy burden.

  33. Hero

  From the window of Voltaire’s house, he found himself looking up toward a high mountain. There was nothing to be seen on the glacier-topped mountain, not even a vulture. There was, however, a short Russian man22 doggedly climbing the trail.

  After night fell, beneath the bright lamp in Voltaire’s house, he wrote this didactic poem (still picturing that Russian man climbing the mountain).

  You who more than anyone obeyed the Ten Commandments

  Are you who more than anyone broke the Ten Commandments.

  You who more than anyone loved the masses

  Are you who more than anyone despised the masses.

  You who more than anyone burned with ideals

  Are you who more than anyone knew reality.

  You are what our Eastern world has bred—

  An electric locomotive that smells of flowering grasses.

  34. Color

  At thirty he found himself loving a piece of vacant land. It contained only some moss and scattered bits of brick and tile. To his eyes, however, it was exactly like a Cezanne landscape.

  He suddenly recalled his passions of seven or eight years earlier. And when he did so, he realized that seven or eight years earlier he had known nothing about color.

  35. Comic Puppet

  He wanted to live life so intensely that he could die at any moment without regrets. But still, out of deference to his adoptive parents and his aunt, he kept himself in check. This created both light and dark sides to his life. Seeing a comic puppet in a Western tailor’s shop made him wonder how close he himself was to such a figure. His self beyond consciousness, however—his “second self”—had long since put such feelings into a story.23

  36. Tedium

  He was walking through a field of plume grass with a university student. “You fellows still have a strong will to live, I suppose?”

  “Yes, of course, but you, too…”

  “Not any more,” he said. He was telling the truth. At some point
he had lost interest in life. “I do have the will to create, though.”

  “But surely the will to create is a form of the will to live…?”

  To this he did not reply. Above the field’s red plumes rose the sharp outline of an active volcano. He viewed the peak with something close to envy, though he had no idea why this was so….

  37. “Woman of Hokuriku”24

  He met a woman he could grapple with intellectually. He barely extricated himself from the crisis by writing a number of lyric poems, some under the title “Woman of Hokuriku.” These conveyed a sense of heartbreak as when one knocks away a brilliant coating of snow frozen onto a tree trunk.

  Hat of sedge dancing in the wind:

  How could it fail to drop into the road?

  What need I fear for my name?

  For your name alone do I fear.

  38. Punishment25

  They were on the balcony of a hotel surrounded by trees in bud. He was drawing pictures to amuse a little boy—the only son of the crazy girl, with whom he had broken off relations seven years earlier.

  The crazy girl lit a cigarette and watched them play. With an oppressive feeling, he went on drawing trains and airplanes. Fortunately, the boy was not his, but it still pained him greatly when the child called him “uncle.”

  After the boy wandered off, the crazy girl, still smoking her cigarette, said suggestively:

  “Don’t you think he looks like you?”

  “Not at all. Besides—”

  “But you do know about ‘prenatal influence,’ I’m sure.”

  He looked away from her in silence, but in his heart he wanted to strangle her.

  39. Mirrors

  He was in the corner of a café, chatting with a friend. The friend was eating a baked apple and talking about the recent cold weather when he himself began to sense a certain contradiction in the conversation.

  “Hey, wait a minute—you’re still a bachelor, right?”

  “Not exactly: I’m getting married next month.”

  That silenced him. The mirrors set in the café walls reflected him in endless numbers. Coldly. Menacingly.

  40. Dialogue

  Why do you attack the present social system?

  Because I see the evils that capitalism has engendered.

  Evils? I thought you recognized no difference between good and evil. How do you make a living, then?

  He engaged thus in dialogue with an angel—an angel in an impeccable top hat.

  41. Illness

  He suffered an onslaught of insomnia. His physical strength began to fade as well. The doctors gave him various diagnoses—gastric hyperacidity, gastric atony, dry pleurisy, neurasthenia, chronic conjunctivitis, brain fatigue…

  But he knew well enough what was wrong with him: he was ashamed of himself and afraid of them—afraid of the society he so despised.

  One afternoon when snow clouds hung over the city, he was in the corner of a café, smoking a cigar and listening to music from the gramophone on the other side of the room. He found the music permeating his emotions in a strange new way. When it ended, he walked over to the gramophone to read the label on the record.

  “Magic Flute—Mozart.”

  All at once it became clear to him: Mozart too had broken the Ten Commandments and suffered. Probably not the way he had, but…

  He bowed his head and returned to his table in silence.

  42. The Laughter of the Gods

  At thirty-five, he was walking through a pinewood with the spring sun beating down on it. He was recalling, too, the words he had written a few years earlier: “It is unfortunate for the gods that, unlike us, they cannot commit suicide.”

  43. Night

  Night closed in again. The rough sea sent up spray in the fading light. Beneath these skies, he married his wife anew. This brought them joy, but there was suffering as well. With them, their three sons watched the lightning over the open sea. His wife, holding one of the boys in her arms, seemed to be fighting back tears.

  “See the boat over there?” he asked her.

  “Yes…”

  “That boat with the mast cracked in two…”

  44. Death

  Taking advantage of his sleeping alone, he tried to hang himself with a sash tied over the window lattice. When he slipped his head into the sash, however, he suddenly became afraid of death. Not that he feared the suffering he would have to experience at the moment of dying. He decided to try it again, using his pocket watch to see how long it would take. This time, everything began to cloud over after a short interval of pain. He was sure that once he got past that, he would enter death. Checking the hands of his watch, he discovered that the pain lasted one minute and twenty-some seconds. It was pitch dark outside the lattices, but the wild clucking of chickens echoed in the darkness.

  45. Divan26

  Divan was giving him new inner power. This was an “Oriental Goethe” he had not known before. He saw the author standing with quiet confidence on the Other Shore, far beyond good and evil, and he felt an envy close to despair. In his eyes, the poet Goethe was even greater than the poet Christ. For in the heart of the poet Goethe, there bloomed not only the roses of the Acropolis and Golgotha but the rose of Arabia as well. If only he had the least ability to follow in this poet’s footsteps!

  Once he had finished reading Divan and recovered somewhat from its terrifying emotional impact, he could only despise himself for having been born such a eunuch in life!

  46. Lies

  He felt the suicide of his sister’s husband as a terrible blow. Now he was responsible for his sister’s family as well. To him at least, his future looked as gloomy as the end of the day. He felt something like a sneer for his own spiritual bankruptcy (he was aware of all of his faults and weak points, every single one of them), but he went on reading one book after another. Even Rousseau’s Confessions, though, was full of the most heroic lies. And when it came to Tō son’s New Life,27 he felt he had never met such a cunning hypocrite as that novel’s protagonist. The one who truly moved him, though, was François Villon. He found in that poet’s many works the “beautiful male.”

  Sometimes in his dreams the image would come to him of Villon waiting to be hanged. Like Villon, he had several times nearly fallen to the ultimate depths of life, but neither his situation nor his physical energy would permit him to keep this up. He grew gradually weaker, like the tree Swift saw28 so long ago, withering from the top down.

  47. Playing with Fire

  She had a radiant face, like the morning sun on a thin sheet of ice. He was fond of her,29 but he did not love her, nor had he ever laid a finger on her.

  “I’ve heard you want to die,” she said.

  “Yes—or rather, it’s not so much that I want to die as that I’m tired of living.”

  This dialogue led to a vow to die together.

  “It would be a Platonic suicide, I suppose,” she said.

  “A Platonic double suicide.”

  He was amazed at his own sangfroid.

  48. Death

  He did not die with her, but he took a certain satisfaction in his never having touched her. She often spoke with him as though their dialogue had never happened. She did once give him a bottle of cyanide with the remark, “As long as we have this, it will give us both strength.”

  And it did indeed give him strength. Sitting in a rattan chair, observing the new growth of a shii tree,30 he often thought of the peace that death would give him.

  49. Stuffed Swan

  With the last of his strength, he tried to write his autobiography, but it did not come together as easily as he had hoped. This was because of his remaining pride and skepticism, and a calculation of what was in his own best interest. He couldn’t help despising these qualities in himself; but neither could he help feeling that “Everyone is the same under the skin.” He tended to think that Goethe’s title “Poetry and Truth”31 could serve for anyone’s autobiography, but he knew that not everyone is moved
by literature. His own works were unlikely to appeal to people who were not like him and had not lived a life like his—this was another feeling that worked upon him. And so he decided to write his own brief “Poetry and Truth.”

  Once he had finished writing “The Life of a Stupid Man,” he happened to see a stuffed swan in a secondhand shop. It stood with its head held high, but its wings were yellowed and moth-eaten. As he thought about his life, he felt both tears and mockery welling up inside him. All that lay before him was madness or suicide. He walked down the darkening street alone, determined now to wait for the destiny that would come to annihilate him.

  50. Captive

  One of his friends went mad.32 He had always felt close to this man because he understood far more deeply than anyone else the loneliness that lurked beneath his jaunty mask. He visited him a few times after the madness struck.

  “You and I are both possessed by a demon,” the friend whispered, “the demon of the fin de siècle.”

  Two or three days later, he heard, the man ate roses on the way to a hot-spring resort. When the friend was hospitalized, he recalled once sending him a terra cotta piece. It was a bust of the author of The Inspector General, one of the friend’s favorite writers. Thinking how Gogol, too, had gone mad, he could not help feeling that there was a force governing all of them.