by Akutagawa
‘Not for either of us, is it? I see, I see,’ Otsukotsu Sansaku, LLB, still flat on his backside, mumbled to himself as he watched her go.
General Kim
by Akutagawa Ryūnosuke
Their faces concealed by deep straw hats, two saffron-robed monks were walking down a country road one summer day in the village of Dong-u in the county of Ryonggang, in Korea’s South P’yŏng’an Province. The pair were no ordinary mendicants, however. Indeed, they were none other than Katō Kiyomasa, lord of Higo, and Konishi Yukinaga, lord of Settsu, two powerful Japanese generals, who had crossed the sea to assess military conditions in the neighbouring kingdom of Korea.
The two trod the paths among the green paddy fields, observing their surroundings. Suddenly they came upon the sleeping figure of what appeared to be a farm boy, his head pillowed on a round stone. Kiyomasa studied the youth from beneath the low-hanging brim of his hat.
‘I don’t like the looks of this young knave.’
Without another word, the Demon General kicked the stone away. Instead of falling to earth, however, the young boy’s head remained pillowed on the space the stone had occupied, its owner still sound asleep.
‘Now I know for certain this is no ordinary boy,’ Kiyomasa said. He grasped the hilt of the dagger hidden beneath his robe, thinking to nip this threat to his country in the bud. But Yukinaga, laughing derisively, held his hand in check.
‘What can this mere stripling do to us? It is wrong to take life for no purpose.’
The two monks continued on down the path among the rice paddies, but the tiger-whiskered Demon General continued to look back at the boy from time to time …
Thirty years later, the men who had been disguised as monks back then, Kiyomasa and Yukinaga, invaded the eight provinces of Korea with a gigantic army. The people of the eight provinces, their houses set afire by the warriors from Wa (the ‘Dwarf Kingdom’, as they called Japan), fled in all directions, parents losing children, wives snatched from husbands. Hanseong had already fallen. Pyongyang was no longer a royal city. King Seonjo had barely managed to flee across the border to Ŭiju and now was anxiously waiting for the Chinese Ming Empire to send him reinforcements. If the people had merely stood by and let the forces of Wa run roughshod over them, they would have witnessed their eight beautiful provinces being transformed into one vast stretch of scorched earth. Fortunately, however, Heaven had not yet abandoned Korea. Which is to say that it entrusted the task of saving the country to Kim Eung-seo – the boy who had demonstrated his miraculous power on that path among the green paddy fields so long ago.
Kim Eung-seo hastened to the Tonggun Pavilion in Ŭiju, where he was allowed into the presence of His Majesty, King Seonjo, whose worn royal countenance revealed his utter exhaustion.
‘Now that I am here,’ Kim Eung-seo said, ‘His Majesty may set his mind at ease.’
King Seonjo smiled sadly. ‘They say that the Wa are stronger than demons. Bring me the head of a Wa general if you can.’
One of those Wa generals, Konishi Yukinaga, kept his longtime favourite kisaeng, Kye Wol-Hyang, in Pyongyang’s Daedong Hall. None of the eight thousand other kisaeng was a match for her beauty. But just as she would never forget to put a jewelled pin in her hair each day, not one day passed in her service to the foreign general when Kye Wol-Hyang failed to grieve for her beloved country. Even when her eyes sparkled with laughter, a tinge of sadness showed beneath their long, dark lashes.
One winter night, Kye Wol-Hyang knelt by Yukinaga, pouring sake for him and his drinking companion, her pale, handsome elder brother. She kept pressing Yukinaga to drink, lavishing her charms on him with special warmth, for in the sake she had secreted a sleeping potion.
Once Yukinaga had drunk himself to sleep, Kye Wol-Hyang and her brother tiptoed out of the room. Yukinaga slept on in utter oblivion, his miraculous sword perched where he had left it on the rack outside the surrounding green-and-gold curtains. Nor was this entirely a matter of Yukinaga’s carelessness. The small curtained area was known as a ‘belled encampment’. If anyone were to attempt to enter the narrow enclosure, the surrounding bells would set up a noisy clanging that would rouse him. Yukinaga did not know, however, that Kye Wol-Hyang had stuffed the bells with cotton to keep them from ringing.
Kye Wol-Hyang and her brother came back into the room. Tonight she had concealed cooking ashes in the hem of her trailing embroidered robe. And her brother – no, this man with his sleeve pushed high up his bared arm was not in fact her brother but Kim Eung-seo, who, in pursuit of the king’s orders, carried a long-handled Chinese green-dragon sword. They crept ever closer to the curtained enclosure when suddenly Yukinaga’s wondrous sword leaped from its scabbard as if it had sprouted wings and flew straight at General Kim. Unperturbed, General Kim launched a gob of spit at the sword, which seemed to lose its magic powers when smeared by the saliva and crashed to the floor.
With a huge cry, General Kim swung his green-dragon sword and lopped off the head of the fearsome Wa general. Fangs slashing in rage, the head struggled to reattach itself to the body. When she witnessed this stupefying sight, Kye Wol-Hyang reached into her robe and threw handfuls of ash on the haemorrhaging neck stump. The head leaped up again and again, but was unable to settle on to the ash-smeared wound.
Yukinaga’s headless body, however, groped for its master’s sword on the floor, picked it up and hurled it at General Kim. Taken by surprise, General Kim lifted Kye Wol-Hyang under one arm and jumped up to a high roof beam, but as it sailed through the air, Yukinaga’s sword managed to slice off the vaulting General Kim’s little toe.
Dawn had still not broken as General Kim, bearing Kye Wol-Hyang on his back, was running across a deserted plain. At the distant edge of the plain, the last traces of the moon were sinking behind a dark hill. At that moment General Kim recalled that Kye Wol-Hyang was pregnant. The child of a Wa general was no different from a poisonous viper. If he did not kill it now, there was no telling what evil it could foment. General Kim reached the same conclusion that Kiyomasa had arrived at thirty years earlier: he would have to kill the child.
Heroes have always been monsters who crushed sentimentalism underfoot. Without a moment’s hesitation, General Kim killed Kye Wol-Hyang and ripped the child from her belly. In the fading moonlight the child was no more than a shapeless, gory lump, but it shuddered and raised a cry like that of a full-grown human being: ‘If only you had waited three months longer, I would have avenged my father’s death!’
As the voice reverberated across the dusky open field like the bellowing of a water buffalo, the last traces of the moon disappeared behind the hill.
Such is the story of the death of Konishi Yukinaga as it has been handed down in Korea. We know, of course, that Yukinaga did not lose his life in the Korean campaign. But Korea is not the only country to embellish its history. The history we Japanese teach our children – and our men, who are not much different from children – is full of such legends. When, for example, has a Japanese history textbook ever contained an account of a losing battle like this one from the Nihon shoki between the Chinese Tang and the Japanese Yamato?
The Tang general, leading 170 ships, made his camp at the Baekchon River. On the twenty-seventh day, the Yamato captain first arrived and fought with the Tang captain. Yamato could not win and retreated … On the twenty-eighth day, the generals of Yamato … leading the unorganized soldiers of Yamato’s middle army … advanced and attacked the Tang army at their fortified encampment. The Tang then came with ships on the left and right and surrounded them, and they fought. After a short time, the Yamato army had lost. Many went into the water and died. Their boats could also not be turned around.
To any nation’s people, their history is glorious. The legend of General Kim is by no means the only one worth a laugh.
MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR. · Letter from Birmingham Jail
ALLEN GINSBERG · Television Was a Baby Crawling Toward That Deathchamber
DAPHNE DU MA
URIER · The Breakthrough
DOROTHY PARKER · The Custard Heart
Three Japanese Short Stories
ANAÏS NIN · The Veiled Woman
GEORGE ORWELL · Notes on Nationalism
GERTRUDE STEIN · Food
STANISLAW LEM · The Three Electroknights
PATRICK KAVANAGH · The Great Hunger
DANILO KIŠ · The Legend of the Sleepers
RALPH ELLISON · The Black Ball
JEAN RHYS · Till September Petronella
FRANZ KAFKA · Investigations of a Dog
CLARICE LISPECTOR · Daydream and Drunkenness of a Young Lady
RYSZARD KAPUŚCIŃSKI · An Advertisement for Toothpaste
ALBERT CAMUS · Create Dangerously
JOHN STEINBECK · The Vigilante
FERNANDO PESSOA · I Have More Souls Than One
SHIRLEY JACKSON · The Missing Girl
Four Russian Short Stories
ITALO CALVINO · The Distance of the Moon
AUDRE LORDE · The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House
LEONORA CARRINGTON · The Skeleton’s Holiday
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS · The Finger
SAMUEL BECKETT · The End
KATHY ACKER · New York City in 1979
CHINUA ACHEBE · Africa’s Tarnished Name
SUSAN SONTAG · Notes on ‘Camp’
JOHN BERGER · The Red Tenda of Bologna
FRANÇOISE SAGAN · The Gigolo
CYPRIAN EKWENSI · Glittering City
JACK KEROUAC · Piers of the Homeless Night
HANS FALLADA · Why Do You Wear a Cheap Watch?
TRUMAN CAPOTE · The Duke in His Domain
SAUL BELLOW · Leaving the Yellow House
KATHERINE ANNE PORTER · The Cracked Looking-Glass
JAMES BALDWIN · Dark Days
GEORGES SIMENON · Letter to My Mother
WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS · Death the Barber
BETTY FRIEDAN · The Problem that Has No Name
FEDERICO GARCÍA LORCA · The Dialogue of Two Snails
YUKO TSUSHIMA · Of Dogs and Walls
JAVIER MARÍAS · Madame du Deffand and the Idiots
CARSON MCCULLERS · The Haunted Boy
JORGE LUIS BORGES · The Garden of Forking Paths
ANDY WARHOL · Fame
PRIMO LEVI · The Survivor
VLADIMIR NABOKOV · Lance
WENDELL BERRY · Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer
THE BEGINNING
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This selection first published 2018
Translation copyright © Jay Rubin, 2018
The moral rights of the authors and translator have been asserted
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ISBN: 978-0-241-33975-6