Rashōmon and Seventeen Other Stories

by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa

  Shortly afterward I bumped into a higher-school friend of mine, now a professor of applied chemistry. He was hugging a big briefcase and one eye was bloody-red.

  “What happened to you?”

  “This? Oh, it’s just pinkeye.”

  It suddenly occurred to me that this kind of pinkeye had been happening to me over the past fifteen years or so whenever I felt that attractive force, but I said nothing about it to him. He clapped me on the shoulder and started talking about our mutual friends. The conversation was still going when he led me into a café

  “It’s been years since I last saw you,” he said. “Must’ve been at the dedication ceremony for the Shu Shunsui stone.”30

  “You’re right, the Shu Shun…”

  I could not seem to pronounce the name “Shu Shunsui” properly. I found this disconcerting: it was Japanese, after all, not some foreign language. My friend, however, seemed unaware of my difficulty and went on talking—about the novelist K, about the bulldog he had bought, about the poison gas lewisite.

  “You haven’t been writing much lately, have you? I did read, ‘Death Register,’ though. Is it autobiographical?”

  “It is,” I said.

  “That was kind of a sick piece. Feeling better these days?”

  “Same as always, taking pills constantly.”

  “I’ve been having trouble sleeping lately myself.”

  “‘Myself’? Why ‘myself’?”

  “Well, you’re supposed to be the big insomniac, aren’t you? Better be careful: insomnia can be dangerous.”

  Something like a smile formed around his blood-gorged left eye. Before I could answer, I sensed that I would be unable to pronounce the word “insomnia.”31

  “Nothing new for the son of a madwoman,” I said instead.

  Before ten minutes had gone by, I was out walking down the street again. Now and then the paper scraps on the asphalt could almost be said to look like human faces. I saw a woman with bobbed hair coming in my direction. She looked beautiful at a distance, but close up I could see she had tiny wrinkles and an ugly face. In addition to which, she was obviously pregnant. I found myself averting my gaze and turning into a broad side street. After a few minutes of walking, I felt my hemorrhoids beginning to hurt. A sitz bath was the only way to remedy this kind of pain. Sitz baths: Beethoven himself used to take them…

  All at once the smell of the sulfur used in sitz baths assaulted my nose. There was, of course, no sulfur to be seen on the street. Recalling the paper rose petals again, I struggled to keep my gait steady.

  An hour later I was shut up in my room and seated at the desk, starting a new story. My pen sailed over the manuscript paper with a speed that I myself found amazing, but it came to a sudden stop after two or three hours as if pinned down by some invisible being. I gave up trying to write, left the desk and started wandering around the room. These were the times when my megalomania was at its most extreme. In my savage joy, I felt as if I had no parents, no wife, no children, just the life that flowed forth from my pen.

  Five minutes later, however, I had to take the phone. Despite my repeated attempts to answer, the phone conveyed nothing more to me than some kind of indistinct foreign word pronounced over and over. I seemed to be hearing “more” or “mole.” I finally abandoned the phone and walked around the room again, but the word stuck to me with a strange tenacity.

  “Mole…” I didn’t like the idea of the animal referred to by this English word, but a few seconds later I recast “mole” as the French word “la mort.” “Death”: with that came a new rush of anxiety. Death seemed to be bearing down on me just as it had borne down on my sister’s husband. And yet I sensed the presence of something comical within my own anxiety. Before I knew it, I was smiling. Where had this come from? Not even I knew the answer to that. I went to look in the mirror for the first time in quite a while, and stood face-to-face with my own reflection. It, too, was smiling, of course. As I stared at my image, I thought about my second self. Fortunately, I had never seen my second self—what the Germans call a Doppelgänger. The wife of my friend K, however, who had become an American film actor,32 had spotted my second self in the lobby of the Imperial Theatre. I recalled my confusion when she suddenly said to me, “Sorry I didn’t have a chance to speak with you the other night.” And then there was the time a certain one-legged translator, now dead, saw my second self in a Ginza tobacco shop. Maybe death was coming for my second self rather than for me. And even if it did come for me—

  I turned my back on the mirror and returned to the desk by the window.

  The square window, framed in volcanic stone, looked out on the withered lawn and a pond. Gazing at this garden scene, I thought about the notebooks and the unfinished play I had burned in that faraway pinewood.33 Then I took up my pen and returned to work on the new story.

  5. Red Lights

  Now the light of the sun became a source of agony for me. A mole indeed, I lowered the blinds and kept electric lights burning as I forged on with my story. Whenever the work tired me, I would open Taine’s History of English Literature and peruse the lives of the poets. Every one of them was unhappy. Even the giants of the Elizabethan age—Ben Jonson, the greatest scholar of his day, had succumbed to such a case of nervous exhaustion that he saw the armies of Rome and Carthage launching a battle on his big toe.34 I couldn’t suppress my wicked glee at their misfortune.

  One night when there was a strong east wind blowing (for me, a lucky sign), I cut through the basement and out to the street, in search of a certain old man.35 He lived alone in the attic of a Bible publishing house, where he worked as a handyman and devoted himself to prayers and reading. Beneath the crucifix on his wall we warmed our hands over his hibachi and talked of many things. Why had my mother gone mad? Why had my father’s business failed? And why had I been punished? Only he knew the answers to these mysteries, and with a strangely solemn smile he kept me company until all hours of the night. Sometimes, too, he would paint short verbal caricatures of human life. I had to respect this attic-dwelling hermit, but as we spoke I discovered that he, too, was moved by the force of attraction.

  “That gardener’s daughter I mentioned—she’s a pretty thing, and such a sweet girl! She’s awfully nice to me.”

  “How old is she?”

  “Just turned eighteen this year.”

  His feeling for the girl may have been fatherly love as far as he was concerned, but I couldn’t help noticing the passion in his eyes. And on the yellowing skin of the apple he offered me there appeared the figure of a unicorn. (I often found mythical animals in the grain of wood or the cracks of a coffee cup.) The unicorn was the same thing as the kirin, that was certain. I recalled the time a hostile critic called me “the kirin child of the 1910s”36 and felt that even this attic with its crucifix was no safe haven for me.

  “How have you been lately?” he asked.

  “Same as always, a bundle of nerves.”

  “Drugs are not going to help you, you know. Wouldn’t you like to become a believer?”

  “If only I could…”

  “It’s not hard. All you have to do is believe in God, believe in Christ as the son of God, and believe in the miracles that Christ performed.”

  “I can believe in the devil.”

  “Then why not God? If you believe in the shadow, you have to believe in the light as well, don’t you think?”

  “There’s such a thing as darkness without light, you know.”

  “Darkness without light?”

  I could only fall silent. Like me, he too was walking through darkness, but he believed that if there is darkness there must be light. His logic and mine differed on this one point alone. Yet surely for me it would always be an unbridgeable gulf.

  “But there must be light. Miracles prove it. Even now miracles occur every once in a while.”

  “Yes, the devil’s miracles perhaps…”

  “What is all this talk about the devil?”

&n
bsp; I felt tempted to tell him what I had experienced over the past year or so, but I was afraid it might go from him to my wife and children and I would end up like my mother in an insane asylum.

  “What have you got over there?” I asked.

  This sturdy old man turned to look at his aging bookcase with a playful Pan-like expression.

  “The complete works of Dostoevsky. Have you read Crime and Punishment ?”

  I had of course become familiar with four or five Dostoevsky novels some ten years earlier. But I found myself moved by the title Crime and Punishment which he had just happened (?) to mention, and so I asked him to lend it to me as I was leaving for my hotel. Again the electric-lit streets full of people were a burden to me, and I would have felt it especially unbearable had I chanced to meet any acquaintances. I slunk along like a thief, choosing only the darkest streets.

  Soon I began to notice that I had a pain in my stomach. I knew the only thing to stop it was a glass of whiskey. I found a bar and started in through the door until I saw what a cramped, smoke-filled place it was. A small crowd of young men—probably artists—stood there drinking. They were gathered around a woman, her hair arranged in coils over her ears,37 who was playing passionately on the mandolin. This was too much for me, and I backed out. It was then that I noticed my shadow rocking from side to side, and I realized that the light shining on me was a sickening red. I came to a halt on the street, but my shadow continued its side-to-side movement. With apprehension, I turned to discover at last the colored glass lantern hanging from the eaves of the bar, swaying slowly in powerful gusts of wind.

  The next place I tried was a basement restaurant. I walked up to the bar and ordered a glass of whiskey.

  “Whiskey? All we have is Black and White, Sir.”

  I poured my whiskey into soda water and began sipping it in silence. Next to me were two men in their late twenties or early thirties, newspaper reporters, it seemed. They were conversing in low voices—in French. I kept my back toward them but could feel them looking me over from head to toe. I actually felt their gazes on my flesh, like electrical impulses. They knew my name, that was clear, and they seemed to be talking about me.

  “Bien…. très mauvais…. pourquoi?”

  “Pourquoi?…. le diable est mort!”

  “Oui, oui…. d’enfer38….”

  I threw a silver coin on the bar (my last one) and fled from this underground chamber. Swept by the night wind, the street helped steady my nerves now that my stomachache had subsided somewhat. Thinking of Raskolnikov, I felt the desire to confess everything I had done, but that would give rise to a tragedy for others besides me—besides even my immediate family. And it was far from certain whether the desire itself was even genuine. If only my nerves could be as steady as those of ordinary people! But for that to happen I would have to go somewhere—to Madrid, to Rio, to Samarkand…

  Soon I was disturbed by a small white signboard hanging from the eaves of a shop. It was emblazoned with a trade mark: an automobile tire with wings. This made me think of an ancient Greek who relied on man-made wings. He flew high into the sky until his wings were burned by the sun,39 and he plunged into the ocean and drowned. To Madrid, to Rio, to Samarkand: I had to scoff at my own reverie. But neither could I help thinking of Orestes pursued by the Furies.

  I walked down a dark street along a canal. Soon I was reminded of my adoptive parents’ home in the suburbs. The two of them were surely waiting there each day for my return. My children probably were, too. But I dreaded the power that would naturally bind me if I went home to them. Upon the choppy waters of the canal a barge was moored at the embankment, a dim glow seeping from within. Even in a place like this, no doubt, families were living, men and women hating each other in order to love each other…. But, calling forth my own combative spirit once again, and feeling the whiskey, I went back to my hotel room.

  I sat at the desk again, reading more Mérimée letters, and again I found them giving me the strength to go on living. When I learned, however, that the author had become a Protestant40 at the end of his life, I felt as if I were seeing the face behind the mask for the first time. He, too, was one of us: those who walk through the darkness. Through the darkness? Now A Dark Night’s Passing began to frighten me. To forget my melancholy, I started to read Conversations with Anatole France, but this modern Pan, too, was another man who bore a cross…

  An hour had gone by when a bellboy poked his head in to deliver a packet of letters. One was from a Leipzig publisher asking me to write an essay on the theme of “The Modern Japanese Woman.” Why me of all people on a subject like that? The letter, in English, carried a handwritten P.S.: “We would be most pleased if your portrait of the Japanese woman were done like a Japanese ink painting, entirely in black and white.” This reminded me of the Black and White whiskey I had drunk earlier, and I ripped the letter to shreds. I opened another envelope at random and ran my eyes over the yellow letter paper that emerged from it. This one was from a young man I had never met. The words “your story, ‘Hell Screen’” could hardly fail to disturb me. The third letter I opened was from my nephew. At last I could turn to family matters with a momentary sense of relief. But even this letter delivered a blow at the end:

  “I will be sending you a second-edition copy of Red Lights.”41

  Red lights! I fled from the room, convinced that I was being mocked. The corridor was empty. Leaning one hand against the wall, I made my way to the lobby. There I took a seat and decided that I would at least give myself the pleasure of a smoke. The cigarette pack for some inexplicable reason carried the brand name “Airship.” (I had been smoking nothing but “Star” since settling into this hotel.) Once again man-made wings presented themselves to my eyes. I called over a bellboy and ordered two packs of Star. If what he said was true, Star was the one brand they had sold out of.

  “We do have Airship, though, Sir.”

  I shook my head and surveyed the broad lobby. Across from me four or five foreigners were chatting around a table. One of them—a woman in a red dress—seemed to be glancing at me from time to time while speaking to her companions in low tones.

  “Mrs. Townshead….” Some invisible something whispered to me. I had of course never heard of anyone named “Mrs. Townshead.” Even supposing it was the name of the woman over there—

  I stood up and, fearing I might suddenly go mad, decided to return to my room.

  Once there, I considered telephoning a mental hospital, but I knew that, for me, to enter such a place would be tantamount to dying. After much indecision, I started reading Crime and Punishment to dispel my fear. The page to which I opened by chance, however, turned out to be from The Brothers Karamazov. Had I picked up the wrong book? I looked at the cover. Crime and Punishment—the book was Crime and Punishment, that was certain. The bindery had accidentally included pages from the wrong book. That I had, in turn, accidentally opened the book to those misbound pages: I sensed the agency of the finger of destiny and felt compelled to read that passage. Before I had read a single page, however, my entire body began to tremble. It was the scene in which the devil torments Ivan. Ivan, and Strindberg, and Maupassant—and, here in this room: me…

  Sleep was the only thing that could save me. But all my narcotics were gone. I could hardly stand the thought of being kept awake in torment, but I generated enough desperate courage to have coffee brought to the room and started writing with frantic intensity. Two pages, five pages, seven pages, ten pages: the manuscript went on growing before my eyes. I was filling the world of this story with supernatural beasts, one of which was becoming my own self-portrait.42 Fatigue, however, began to cloud my brain. I finally left the desk and lay down on the bed. I slept for what must have been forty or fifty minutes. But when I became aware of someone whispering these words in my ear, I came suddenly awake and stood up:

  “Le diable est mort.”

  Beyond the window and its volcanic stone frame, the night was beginning to give way to
a chilly-looking morning. I stood against the door and surveyed the empty room. Clouded in patches by the outside air, the glass of the window on the other side of the room seemed to display a tiny landscape: a yellow-tinged pinewood, and beyond it, the sea. I approached the window with some trepidation, only to discover that the elements that made up the landscape were simply the garden’s withered grass and pond. The illusion had had its effect on me, though, for it called forth an emotion close to homesickness.

  Stuffing my books and the manuscript into the bag on the desk, I made a decision: as soon as it turned nine o’clock, I would call a certain magazine publisher and, one way or another, arrange for some money. Then I would go home.

  6. Airplane

  I urged the taxi on from a station on the Tō kaidō Line to my home in a coastal resort town. In spite of the cold, for some reason, the driver had nothing but an old raincoat thrown over his shoulders. I found the coincidence unsettling and tried not to look at him, keeping my eyes trained instead out the window. I saw a funeral procession passing beyond some low pines—probably on the old highway. It seemed to include none of the usual white paper lanterns or dragon lamps, but artificial lotuses of gold and silver waved gently before and after the pole-borne coffin…

  Home at last, I spent the next three days in relative peace, thanks to my wife and child and to the power of narcotics. My second-floor study gave me a glimpse of the sea beyond the pinewoods. I spent only the mornings at my desk, listening to pigeons as I wrote. Aside from the pigeons and crows, we also had sparrows landing now and then on the veranda. This was another source of pleasure for me. Pen in hand, I would think of the phrase from the Chinese classics whenever I heard the birds: “The Sparrow of Joy43 enters the hall.”

  One cloudy warmish afternoon I went to a variety store to buy some ink. The only kind on the shelf was sepia, the one color I have always been uncomfortable with. I gave up and left the store for a solitary stroll down the nearly empty street. A foreigner came swaggering in my direction, a man around forty who appeared to be near-sighted. This was the neighborhood Swede who suffered from persecution delusion and whose name was actually Strindberg. I had a physical reaction to him as he passed by.