Rashōmon and Seventeen Other Stories

by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa

  This street was no more than three blocks long, but in the time it took me to cover that distance, the same dog passed by me four separate times.44 Half its face was black. As I turned into a side street I recalled the Black and White whiskey, and it occurred to me that “Strindberg” had just been wearing a black and white necktie. I could not believe this had been a coincidence, and if it was not a coincidence—

  I came to a momentary stop on the street, feeling as if my mind were still walking on alone. Next to the road, behind a wire fence, lay a glass bowl that someone had tossed away. It had a slight rainbow-like shimmer, and around its bottom was embossed a design that seemed to be of wings. Just then several sparrows flew down toward it from the branches of a pine tree. No sooner had they reached the bowl than they soared again upward as if making their escape together…

  I went to the house of my wife’s family and sat in a cane chair on the veranda by the garden. In a wire mesh enclosure in a corner of the garden, several white leghorns were quietly moving around. At my feet lay a black dog. Even as I struggled to solve unanswerable riddles, I went on chatting calmly (outwardly, at least) with my wife’s mother and younger brother.

  “Quiet here, isn’t it?”

  “Certainly quieter than Tokyo!”

  “You mean, disturbing things happen even in a place like this?”

  “We are in the real world here, after all.”

  My mother-in-law said this with a smile, but she was right: even this place of refuge from the heat was part of the real world. I knew all too well what sins and tragedies had occurred here in the space of one short year. The doctor bent on murdering his patients by slow poisoning, the old woman who set fire to the home of her adopted son and his wife, the lawyer who tried to snatch his younger sister’s assets: for me, seeing the homes of such people was always like seeing hell in human life itself.

  “You have a crazy person living in the neighborhood, don’t you?”

  “Oh, you mean little H? He’s not crazy. He just turned out to be an idiot,” she said.

  “I’m sure he’s got ‘schizophrenia.’ The sight of him always gives me an eerie feeling. The other day—I don’t know—I saw him bowing to the Horsehead Kannon.”45

  “Gives you an eerie feeling? Come on, you’ve got to be tougher than that.”

  “He’s tougher than I am,” my wife’s younger brother46 interjected in his usually hesitant manner, sitting up in his futon in the room opened to the veranda. He wore several days’ growth of beard.

  “Even tough guys have tender spots,” I said.

  “Oh dear, that’s too bad,” my mother-in-law said. I had to smile at this, which brought a smile from my brother-in-law as well. He gazed off at the pinewoods far beyond the fence and spoke in dreamy tones. (Still recovering from an illness, this young man often looked to me like pure spirit free of flesh.)

  To me he said, “You can be strangely detached from all things human one minute and the next thing I know you have these incredibly intense human desires, and…”

  “Well sure, I can be good and the next thing you know I’m bad.”

  “No, it’s not so much good and bad as that you’ve got these opposites in you that are…”

  “You mean, like a grownup with a child inside?”

  “No, not that, either. I don’t know, I can’t put it very well, but…. maybe it’s like the two poles of electricity. Sort of like having the two opposites in one.”

  What startled us both at this point was the violent roar of an airplane. I looked up to see a plane all but touching the pine trees above us as it soared upward. It was an unusual model, its single set of wings painted yellow. The chickens and the family dog, also startled by the sound, scattered in all directions. The dog howled as it crawled under the veranda with its tail between its legs.

  “That plane might crash,” I said.

  “No, it’ll be fine. By the way, have you ever heard of airplane disease?”

  Instead of speaking, I answered with a shake of my head as I lit a cigarette.

  “I’ve heard that people who fly airplanes are always breathing the air up high, so after a while they can’t stand breathing the air down here…”

  After leaving my mother-in-law’s house, I walked through the utterly still pinewoods, feeling ever more depressed. Why had that airplane flown directly over me instead of someone else? Why did the hotel have only Airship cigarettes? Struggling with painful questions like these, I chose a deserted road to walk down.

  Beyond the low sand dunes, the sea was a cloudy stretch of gray. A swing set without swings jutted upward on a dune. It looked like a gallows to me. There were even a few crows perched on the topmost pole. They all looked at me but gave no sign of flying off. Far from it: the middle crow lifted its big beak heavenward and cawed exactly four times.

  Following a sandy bank with withered grass, I turned down a path where there were many summer homes. Among more tall pines on the right side there should have been the white presence of a two-story wood-frame Western-style house. (A good friend of mine liked to call it “The House Where Springtime Lives.”) Instead there was only a bathtub perched on a concrete slab. Fire, I thought at once, and I tried not to look as I walked by. Just then I saw a man on a bicycle coming straight at me. He wore a dark brown cap, and he was hunched over the handlebars, his eyes fixed strangely straight ahead. For a moment I thought I recognized the face of my sister’s dead husband, and I turned into a side path before he could reach me. But in the very center of this new path lay the rotting corpse of a mole, belly upward.

  Something was out to get me. The thought increased my anxiety with every step I took. Then, one at a time, translucent gears began to block my field of vision. Afraid that my final moments were nearing, I yet managed to walk on with head erect. The number of gears increased, and they began to spin ever faster. At the same time the interwoven branches of the pines on the right began to look as if I were seeing them through finely cut glass. I felt my heartbeat rising and kept trying to make myself stand still at the side of the road, but someone seemed to be pushing me from behind: stopping was out of the question…

  Thirty minutes later I was on my back on the floor in my upstairs room, eyes shut tight, struggling with the pain of a violent headache. Behind my closed eyelids I began to see a single wing with silver feathers overlapping like fish scales. The image was projected on my retinas with perfect clarity. I opened my eyes, and shut them again once I had confirmed that no such image existed on the ceiling. Again the silver wing shone in the darkness. I remembered that the radiator cap of the taxi I had just taken had had wings on it.

  Just then someone clattered up the stairs and clattered right down again. When I realized the “someone” was my wife, the shock of it roused me from the floor and I immediately went down and stuck my head into the gloomy family room at the bottom of the stairs. My wife had flung herself face down on the matted floor, trying to catch her breath, shoulders heaving.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing, I’m fine,” she said. With a great effort she raised her face from the mat and forced herself to smile as she went on to explain, “It wasn’t any one thing. I just had this feeling that you were going to die, Papa, and—”

  This was the most terrifying experience of my life.

  —I don’t have the strength to keep writing this. To go on living with this feeling is painful beyond description. Isn’t there someone kind enough to strangle me in my sleep?

  (1927: Posthumous manuscript)

  Notes

  ARSJ Sekiguchi Yasuyoshi, Akutagawa Ryūnosuke to sono jidai (Tokyo: Chikuma shobō, 1999)

  CARZ Yoshida Seiichi et al. (eds.), Akutagawa Ryū nosuke zenshū, 8 vols. (Tokyo: Chikuma shobō, 1964–5)

  IARZ Kōno Toshirō et al. (eds.), Akutagawa Ryū nosuke zenshū, 24 vols. (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1995–8)

  NKBT Yoshida Seiichi et al. (eds.), Akutagawa Ryū nosuke shū, in Nihon kindai bungaku taikei, 60vols. (Toky
o: Kadokawa shoten, 1968–74), vol. 38(1970)

  RASHŌMON (Rashōmon)

  “Mon” means “gate.” The Rashōmon (originally, Rajōmon: outer castle gate) was the great southern main entrance to Kyoto during the golden age of the imperial court, the Heian Period. Massive pillars supported a cavernous chamber topped by a sloping tile roof, with stone steps leading into and out of its towering archway. In its heyday, all its wooden surfaces wore a coat of vermilion lacquer. The broad Suzaku Avenue running north from the Rashōmon led straight to the gate of the Imperial Palace, where lived the tiny, aesthetically refined fraction of the populace depicted in the country’s greatest literary monument, Murasaki Shikibu’s The Tale of Genji.

  Based on a twelfth-century tale, Akutagawa’s retold story is set at the decaying end of the era, when power had largely shifted from the courtiers to the warlords who would dominate the coming centuries, and much of the city—and the gate itself—lay in ruins. Despite its title, Kurosawa Akira’s celebrated film, Rashōmon (1950), owes little to this tale—perhaps the scruffy servant, whose cynical view of human nature the film ultimately rejects, and the setting beneath the gate where Kurosawa’s characters wait out the rain and tell the famous story reflecting multiple angles on truth (see “In a Bamboo Grove”).

  1. To borrow a phrase from a writer of old: Akutagawa’s narrator uses an expression found in the twelfth-century Konjaku monogatari (Tales of Times Now Past) for the sensation of the hair standing on end. For an English translation, see Translator’s Note, note 2.

  IN A BAMBOO GROVE (Yabu no naka)

  Kurosawa’s Rashōmon is based primarily on this story, set in the late Heian Period. Akutagawa’s “Rashōmon” contributed little more to the film than the frame (see that story’s headnote). While this story is based on a twelfth-century tale (for an English translation, see Translator’s Note, note 2), the place names are real, and most relate to the steep hills that line the ancient capital Kyoto’s eastern flank. Yamashina, now an eastern ward of the city, was a village lying just beyond the hills. Situated in the foothills on the city side, Toribe Temple was connected with a burial ground toward the south. Lying just to the north in those foothills, Kiyomizu Temple is still a major site of popular worship. Awataguchi was a familiar northeasterly point of entry from the hills. Wakasa Province would have been several days’ journey on foot to the northeast of Kyoto. The “Magistrate” (Kebiishi, literally “Examiner of Misdeeds,” also translated “Police Commissioner”) to whom the characters speak was a Kyoto city official who exercised both police and judicial authority. In the original tale, the highwayman has no name; Akutagawa seems to have borrowed “Tajō maru” from another story about a “famous bandit” in the same collection.

  1. the first watch: 8: 00p.m.

  2. Binzuru: The Japanese version of the Sanskrit name Pindolabharadvaja, who was one of the Buddha’s more important disciples and a focus of popular worship.

  3. bodhisattva of a woman: In Mahayana Buddhism, an enlightened being who compassionately defers entry into Nirvana in order to help others attain enlightenment. By extension, a perfectly beautiful woman.

  4. burial mound: Prehistoric Japanese aristocrats were often buried in mounded graves containing jewels, weapons, and other valuables.

  5. Kanzeon: Also known as Kannon. See also “The Nose,” note 1.

  THE NOSE (Hana)

  “Naigu,” an honorary title for a priest privileged to perform rites within the Imperial Palace, is pronounced “nigh-goo.” While his name, Zenchi, derives from an abstract Zen Buddhist concept of enlightenment, he is a practitioner of a simpler, more widely practiced kind of Buddhism, in which the believer is transported to a more concretely-conceived western paradise, or Pure Land, after death. His fictional temple is located in Ike-no-o, a village now part of the city of Uji, south of Kyoto.

  1. Kannon Sutra: Actually a chapter of the Lotus Sutra (Myōhō renge-kyō; Sanskrit: Saddharma Pundarika Sutra; English: Sutra on the Lotus of the Wonderful Law or Scripture of the Lotus Blossom of the Fine Dharma ), which is the premier scripture of Japanese Mahayana Buddhism. Chapter 25 details the miraculous power of the bodhisattva of compassion, Kannon (Sanskrit: Avalokitesvara), to respond to all cries for help from the world’s faithful. Akutagawa’s choice of scriptures in this story is not entirely consistent with any one Buddhist sect.

  2. Mokuren… Shu Han emperor: Mokuren and Sharihotsu: two of Shakyamuni Buddha’s sixteen disciples; Sanskrit: Maudgalyayana and Sariputra. Ryū ju and Memyō: Sanskrit: Nagarjuna and Asvaghosa. Liu Bei (162–223) was the first emperor of the Shu Han dynasty (221–64) in southwestern China.

  3. Fugen: Sanskrit: Samantabhadra. Often depicted riding a white elephant to the Buddha’s right, Fugen symbolizes, among other things, the Buddha’s concentration of mind. The trunk of the elephant might also have attracted the Naigu’s attention.

  DRAGON: THE OLD POTTER’S TALE (Ryū)

  Borrowed from China, the dragon, often deified, is one of the oldest East Asian symbols of awesome power and good fortune. Akutagawa’s given name, Ryū nosuke, or “dragon-son,” was meant to confer on him some of the imaginary creature’s auspicious nature. While this story is based on a fictional thirteenth-century tale (for an English translation, see Translator’s Note, note 3), it is set in the very real city of Nara, which was Japan’s capital from 710to 784and is still a major religious center for both Buddhism and Shintō, Japan’s indigenous, nature-loving faith. Sarusawa Pond is a good-sized pond (some 340meters in circumference) situated just across the road from the Great South Gate of the massive Kō fukuji Temple, where the priestly protagonist E’in lives. (The Kasuga Shrine, one of the most important Shintō establishments, is a short walk to the east.) The name E’in is a two-syllable word: “e” as in “yes” followed smoothly (without a glottal stop) by “een” as in “seen.” The name of E’in’s “brother monk,” Emon, has the same short “e” followed by “mon.” According to the lunar calendar in use in pre-modern times, the third day of the third month could occur anywhere from the end of March to late April. The “distant” places mentioned in the text would all have been within a fifty-mile radius, the aunt’s village of Sakurai about twenty miles.

  1. Amida: Adherents of Pure Land Buddhism repeatedly call upon the name of Amida (Sanskrit: Amitabha), the Buddha of Infinite Light, in hopes of being reborn in his paradise.

  2. great annual Kyoto processions…. out of season: As the imperial capital at the time, and having broad avenues, Kyoto had far grander seasonal processions than Nara. The Hollyhock Festival (Aoi Matsuri) was (and is) one of the grandest of all, occurring in the fourth lunar month (now 15 May) with elaborately decorated oxcarts and viewing stands and hundreds of participants marching between the imperial palace and two major Shintō shrines to pray for good crops and relief from storms.

  THE SPIDER THREAD (Kumo no ito)

  1. Lord Buddha Shakyamuni: The Japanese often refer to the so-called “historical Buddha,” Siddhartha Gautama (c. 563–c. 483 BC) by his designation as “Sage of the Shakya Clan” (‘‘Shakyamuni”). The image here of “Lord Shakyamuni” (Japanese, “Shaka-sama”) as a supernatural being in Paradise derives from the elaborate Buddhist canon that took shape after his death. For sources of this story, see Translator’s Note. See also note 2 to “O-Gin.”

  2. the River of Three Crossings and the Mountain of Needles… peep-box: “Topographical” features of the Japanese Buddhist Hell. The Stygian river, crossed by the soul on the seventh day after death, had routes of graduated difficulty depending on the individual’s accumulated sinfulness. The peep-box (nozokimegane or nozoki-karakuri) enabled the paying customer to view a series of still pictures (often including images of heaven and hell) through openings in the side of a box. The devices had their heyday in the late eighteenth century. See Timon Screech, The Lens within the Heart: The Western Scientific Gaze and Popular Imagery in Later Edo Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2002).

  HELL SCREEN (Jig
okuhen)

  “Yoshihide” has four evenly-stressed syllables, pronounced: Yo-shee-hee-deh. “Monkeyhide” also has four syllables. For the source of this tale (and an English translation), see Translator’s Note (and note 5).

  1. China’s First Emperor… Sui emperor Yang: China’s self-proclaimed “First Emperor” (259–210 BC; reigned 247–210). His construction of the Great Wall, which began c. 228 BCand was completed a few years after his death, cost the lives of many of his subjects. Yang, the second and last emperor of the Sui Dynasty (569–618; reigned 604–618), was another ruler whose ambitious public works cost many lives and much treasure.

  2. Nijō-Ōmiya in the Capital: Several eleventh-or twelfth-century stories marked this intersection outside the southeastern corner of the Imperial Palace grounds as a place where one might encounter a procession of goblins. See, for example, Helen Craig McCullough, Ō kagami: The Great Mirror (Princeton University Press, 1980), p. 136.

  3. the minister had recreated… spirit vanish: For the translation of a Nō play on the legend of Minamoto no Tōru (822–895), his lavish garden, and his ghost, see Kenneth Yasuda, Masterworks of the Nō Theatre (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), pp. 460–84.

  4. human sacrifice… apillar: This echoes an ancient legend which also inspired a fifteenth-century Nō play, Nagara, in which the spirit of the sacrificial victim returns to seek vengeance for his unjust death.

  5. Kawanari or Kanaoka: Both artists, Kose no Kanaoka (fl. c. 895) and Kudara no Kawanari (782–853) were noted for the uncanny realism of their works, none of which survives. A horse that Kanaoka painted on the Imperial Palace wall was said to escape at night and tear up nearby fields. See Yoshiko K. Dykstra, The Konjaku Tales, 3 vols. (Osaka: Intercultural Research Institute, Kansai Gaidai University, 1998–2003), 2:282–4, for a story about Kawanari.