Rashōmon and Seventeen Other Stories

by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa

  Just as he reached the point of utter exhaustion, he happened to read Raymond Radiguet’s dying words, “God’s soldiers are coming to get me,”33 and sensed once again the laughter of the gods. He tried to fight against his own superstitions and sentimentalism, but he was physically incapable of putting up any kind of struggle. The “demon of the fin de siècle” was preying on him without a doubt. He envied medieval men’s ability to find strength in God. But for him, believing in God—in God’s love—was an impossibility, though even Cocteau had done it!

  51. Defeat

  The hand with the pen began to tremble, and before long he was even drooling. The only time his head ever cleared was after a sleep induced by eight-tenths of a gram of Veronal, and even then it never lasted more than thirty minutes or an hour. He barely made it through each day in the gloom, leaning as it were upon a chipped and narrow sword.

  (June 1927: posthumous manuscript)

  SPINNING GEARS

  1. Raincoats

  I was on my way to Tokyo for the wedding reception of an acquaintance. Satchel in hand, I urged the taxi driver on toward a station on the Tō kaidō Line1 from my home in a coastal resort town. Thick pinewoods lined both sides of the road. We weren’t likely to make the Tokyo-bound train. The other passenger in the cab owned a barbershop. He was plump as a natsume2 and wore a short beard. Concerned about the time, I still managed to respond to his occasional remark.

  “Strange, the things that happen.I hear they’ve been seeing a ghost on Mr.X’s property—even in the daytime.”

  “Even in the daytime, eh?” My response was halfhearted.I stared across to where the western sun struck a pine-covered hill.

  “Not on good days, though. Mostly when it rains.”

  “Maybe the ghost comes to get wet.”

  “That’s funny… but I have heard it wears a raincoat.”

  Sounding its horn, the taxi pulled up beside the station.I took leave of the barber and went inside. The Tokyo train had in fact pulled out two or three minutes earlier. One person—a man in a raincoat—sat on the waiting-room bench, blankly staring outside.I recalled the ghost story I had just heard, but gave the thought only a contorted little smile.I decided to wait for the next train in the café across from the station.

  Actually, “café” was too grand a name for this place.I sat at a corner table and ordered a cup of cocoa. The table was covered in white oilcloth with a rough grid of narrow blue lines, but the slick coating was worn away in spots, revealing the dingy canvas beneath.I took a sip of the cocoa, which had a fishy, glue-like smell, and looked around the deserted room. On the grimy walls were slips of paper announcing the dishes available:Oyakodonburi,3 Pork Cutlet, Omelet with Local Eggs.

  These paper slips seemed so typical of the countryside near the Tō kaidō Line, where modern electric-powered locomotives pulled trains through fields of barley and cabbage.

  It was close to sunset by the time I boarded the next Tokyo train.I always rode second class, but this time I decided to go third class.

  The train was fairly crowded.I was surrounded by a group of elementary-school girls4 on their way back from a swim at Ō iso or some such place.I observed them as I lit a cigarette. They all seemed to be in a merry mood, and most of them jabbered on without a break.

  “Mr. Cameraman, what does ‘love scene’ mean? It’s English, isn’t it?”

  Sitting across from me, the “Mr. Cameraman” in question, who had apparently accompanied the school outing, did his best to avoid a straight answer, but a girl of fourteen or so kept plying him with questions. It suddenly occurred to me that her nasal whine might be due to an infection,5 and I couldn’t help smiling. Then the girl next to me, who must have been twelve or thirteen, went to sit on the lap of the young lady-teacher, hooking her arm around the woman’s neck and stroking her cheek. Between remarks to her friends, she would say things like, “You’re so pretty, teacher! You have such pretty eyes.”

  As a group they seemed to me more like women than schoolgirls—if you ignored the fact that some were unwrapping caramels or munching on unpeeled apples. But then the one I took to be the oldest girl must have stepped on someone’s foot as she passed my seat.“Oh, do forgive me!” she said. Oddly, her very maturity made her seem more like a schoolgirl than the rest.I couldn’t help sneering at myself, cigarette in my lips, for my own contradictory impression.

  Eventually the train, in which the lights had come on at some point, pulled into a suburban station.I stepped down to the cold, windy platform, crossed a footbridge, and waited for the connecting train. At that point I ran into T, who worked for a large company. While waiting, we talked about things such as the faltering economy. He, of course, knew a lot more about such matters than I did, but one of his powerful-looking fingers bore a turquoise ring that had nothing to do with hard economic times.

  “That’s quite a ring,” I said.

  “This? Oh, a friend of mine made me buy it from him when he went over to Harbin on business. He’s having a tough time, too. He can’t deal with the cooperatives6 anymore.”

  The train we boarded was, fortunately, not as crowded as the first one.T and I sat next to each other and kept on talking. He had just returned to Tokyo from an assignment in Paris this past spring, and so Paris tended to dominate our conversation. We talked about Mme. Caillaux’s shooting7 of the owner of Le Figaro, about crab cuisine, about an Imperial Prince who was traveling abroad…

  “France is having surprisingly little trouble with the economy. The French really hate to pay taxes, though, so their cabinets are always falling.”

  “But the franc’s gone through the floor.”

  “That’s if you believe what you read in the papers. Over there, the papers’ll tell you Japan has nothing but earthquakes and floods.”

  Just then, a man in a raincoat sat down across from us. This gave me an eerie feeling, and I wanted to tell T about the ghost story I had heard, but before I could do so, he tipped the handle of his cane to the left and, still facing forward, quietly said to me, “See that woman over there? The one with the gray woolen shawl.”

  “With the Western hairdo?”

  “Uh-huh, and the cloth bundle. She was in Karuizawa8 this summer. Always wearing chic Western clothing.”

  She certainly would have looked very shabby to anyone who saw her at the moment, however.I stole a few glances at her while talking with T. There was a hint of insanity between her brows. And protruding from her cloth bundle was a sea sponge with leopard-like spots.

  “I heard she was always dancing with some young American in Karuizawa. She’s one of those modern whatchamacallems.”9

  When I said goodbye to T, I realized that the man in the raincoat had disappeared at some point. Bag in hand, I walked from the station to a hotel. Tall buildings lined both sides of the street. As I walked along, I thought about this morning’s pinewoods.I also realized that something strange had entered my field of vision—a set of translucent spinning gears.I had had this experience several times before, and it was always the same: the number of gears would gradually increase until half my field of vision was blocked. This would last only a few moments, and then the gears would vanish, to be replaced by a headache. My eye doctor had often ordered me to cut down on smoking to rid myself of this optical illusion (if that’s what it was), but actually I had begun seeing the gears before I turned twenty, well before I started smoking.“Here it comes again,” I told myself, and covered my right eye to test the sight of the left one. The left eye was fine, but behind the lid of the right several gears were spinning.I hurried down the street as the buildings on the right side gradually disappeared.

  By the time I entered the hotel, the gears were gone, but the headache was still there. As I was checking my overcoat and hat at the desk, I decided to reserve a room; then I telephoned a magazine publisher to talk about money.

  The wedding banquet had apparently long since started.I found a seat at a far corner of the table and began moving my kni
fe and fork. There were more than fifty people seated at the U-shaped table, and all of them, from the bride and groom at the center on down, were naturally in high spirits.I, however, grew increasingly depressed beneath the bright lights. To escape this feeling, I tried chatting with my neighbor, an old gentleman with a white beard like a lion’s mane. He was actually a famous scholar of Chinese whose name I knew. Our conversation soon turned to the classics.

  “The kirin is, finally, a kind of unicorn,” I said.“And the hōō10 corresponds to the Western phoenix.”

  He seemed interested in my remarks, but the longer I sustained the mechanical process of making conversation, the more I began to feel a sick, destructive urge coming on.I declared that the legendary sage emperors Yao and Shun were “of course” fictional creations, and that the author of the Spring and Autumn Annals was actually a person of the much later Han period.11 At this, the China scholar made an open show of his displeasure. He turned away and, with a tiger-like growl, cut me off in mid-sentence.

  “If you start saying Yao and Shun never existed, you make a liar out of Confucius, and that sage would never tell a lie.”

  I shut up then, of course, and began to slice the meat on my plate.I noticed a tiny maggot silently squirming on the edge of the meat. The maggot called to mind the English word “Worm.” This was probably another word like “kirin” or “hōō” designating a legendary creature.12 I laid down my knife and fork and watched my champagne glass being filled.

  When, at last, the banquet ended, I walked down a deserted corridor to shut myself up in the room I had booked. The corridor struck me as more like that of a prison than a hotel, but fortunately my headache had subsided.

  They had brought my suitcase to the room, and my hat and coat as well. Hanging on the wall, the coat looked to me like my own standing figure.I hurriedly threw it into a corner wardrobe. Then I went to the mirror and stared at my reflection. My face in the mirror revealed the bones beneath the skin. Into the memory contained in this skull of mine leaped a vivid image of the maggot.

  I opened the door, stepped out, and wandered down the hall. In a corner where the corridor joined the lobby stood a tall lamp, its green shade brilliantly reflected against a glass door. The sight gave me a peaceful sensation.I sat in a nearby chair and mused on many things, but I was unable to remain seated there for as long as five minutes: there was another raincoat, this one dangling over the back of the sofa next to me where someone had tossed it.

  And this is supposed to be the coldest time of the year!

  Thinking this, I headed back down the hallway. At the bellboy station in a corner of the corridor, there was not a bellboy to be seen, though I could hear their voices. In response to some remark, one said in English, “All right.” All right? I struggled to grasp the meaning of the exchange.“All right”? “All right”? What could possibly be all right?

  My room, of course, was silent, but the thought of going through the door I found unsettling. After a moment’s hesitation, I steeled myself and went in.I sat at the desk, taking care not to look in the mirror. The seat was an armchair done in a green Moroccan leather like a lizard skin.I opened my bag, took out a sheaf of manuscript paper, and tried to work on a story I had been writing. But even after I had dipped it in ink, my pen would not move. And when at last it did, it just kept writing the same words over and over: “All right… All right…Allright, Sir… All right…”

  Suddenly the phone by the bed rang. Startled, I stood up and put the receiver to my ear.

  “Who is it?” I asked.

  “It’s me.Me…” It was my elder sister’s daughter.

  “What is it? Is something wrong?”

  “Yes, something terrible,” she said.“So I… It’s so terrible, I called your house, and Auntie told me to…”

  “Is it really so terrible?”

  “Yes, really—please come right away. Right away!”

  She cut the connection.I set the receiver down and pressed the button to summon a bellboy. My hand moved reflexively, but I was fully aware that it was trembling. No one came in response to the bell. More out of anguish than annoyance, I pressed the button again and again, understanding at last what Fate was trying to tell me with the words “All right.”

  That afternoon, in a nearby Tokyo suburb, my sister’s husband had been killed by a train. Despite the season, he had been wearing a raincoat.

  I am in that same hotel room now, writing the same story. No one goes down the hall in the middle of the night, but sometimes I hear the sound of wings outside my door. Perhaps someone is keeping birds nearby.

  2. Vengeance

  I woke in the hotel room at eight o’clock this morning but, strangely enough, when I tried to get out of bed I found only one slipper on the floor. This was a phenomenon that had been causing me both fear and anxiety over the past year or more—a phenomenon that reminded me, too, of the prince in the Greek myth who wore only one sandal.13 I rang for a bellboy and had him search for the other slipper. He explored the small room with a puzzled expression.

  “Here it is,” he said, “in the bathroom.”

  “How could it have gotten over there?”

  “I wonder.A rat, maybe?”

  When he left, I had a cup of coffee without milk and set about finishing my story. Framed in volcanic stone,14 the room’s square window looked out on a snowy garden. Whenever I set down my pen, I let my eyes wander over the snow. Spread out beneath a budding daphne, the snow was soiled by the smoky air of the city; the view pained my heart. Before I knew it, my pen had stopped moving, and I was puffing away on my cigarette and thinking about all kinds of things—my wife, my children, and especially my sister’s husband.

  Before he killed himself, my sister’s husband had been under suspicion of arson. And little wonder: he had insured his house for twice its worth before it burned down. He had also been serving a suspended sentence for perjury.15 What disturbed me even more than his suicide, however, was the fact that on my visits to Tokyo I would invariably see something burning. Once it was a farmer burning his hillside field that I saw from the train; another time it was the Tokiwabashi district fire that I saw from the taxi (I had my wife and the baby with me then). So I had a strong premonition of fire well before his house went up in flames.

  “Our house might burn down this year,” I said to my wife.

  “Oh, please, don’t say such things,” she protested.“It’s bad luck…. Still, if we ever did have a fire, it would be awful. We have so little insurance.”

  So far, my house had been spared, but… I forced myself to stop daydreaming and tried to get my pen moving again, but I couldn’t write so much as a line.I ended up leaving the desk and stretched out on the bed to read Tolstoy’s “Polikushka.” The protagonist of the story was a complicated jumble of vanity, pathology, and lust for fame.A few small revisions to the tragicomedy of his life, though, and you could end up with a caricature of my own life. Sensing the sneer of Fate in his particular tragicomedy gave me an increasingly weird feeling. Before an hour passed, I sprang from the bed and, with all my might, hurled the book into the curtained corner of the room.“Die, damn you!”16

  Instantly a large rat scurried from beneath the curtains, cutting diagonally across the floor to the bathroom.I bounded over to the bathroom door and flung it open to search for the rat, but there was no sign of it, even behind the white tub. Suddenly overcome by that eerie feeling, I hurriedly switched from slippers to shoes and walked down the deserted corridor.

  Again today, the corridor was as depressing as a prison. Hanging my head, I climbed and descended one stairway after another until I found myself in the hotel kitchen. The brightness of the place took me by surprise. Several of the rice cauldrons lining one wall had flames moving beneath them.I felt the mocking stares of the white-hatted chefs as I passed through the room, and I sensed the inferno that I had fallen into.I could not suppress the prayer that rose to my lips: “Oh, Lord, I beg thy punishment. Withhold thy wrath from
me, for I may soon perish.”17

  I left the hotel and hurried toward my sister’s house along streets reflecting blue sky in pools of snowmelt. All the branches and leaves of the park trees along the street had a blackish look, and each tree had a front and a back the way we human beings do. This, too, gave me a sensation closer to fear than annoyance.I recalled the souls in Dante’s Inferno who had been turned into trees, and I decided instead to walk on the other side, across the streetcar line, where only buildings edged the street.

  Even there, however, I could not manage to walk a full block without interference.

  “I know it’s very impolite of me to approach you on the street like this, but…” He was a young man in his early twenties wearing a uniform with gold buttons.I stared at him in silence and noticed a mole on the left side of his nose. He had removed his hat and he spoke nervously.

  “You are Mr.A, are you not?”

  “I am.”

  “I thought so.”

  “Is there something I can do for you?”

  “Oh, no, I just wanted to meet you, Sensei.I’m a devoted reader of your works, and…”

  I was already walking on before he could finish; I gave him a quick tip of my hat and left him behind.“Sensei,” “A-Sensei”: such titles of respect were the worst thing that anyone could use for me these days.I believed that I had committed every sin known to man, but they went on calling me “Sensei” whenever they had the chance, as if I were some sort of guru.I couldn’t help but feel in this the presence of something mocking me.“The presence of something”? But my materialism could only reject such mysticism. Just a few months earlier, I had written in a small coterie magazine: “I have no conscience at all—least of all an artistic conscience. All I have is nerves.”18