Traditional Japanese Literature

by Haruo Shirane

  One demon who appeared to be the leader sat at the head, and in two rows on his right and left were countless other demons, every single one of them indescribably horrible to look at. They were offering each other wine and enjoying themselves just like ordinary people. The wine jar went round many times, and the chief demon seemed particularly drunk. A young demon at the end of a row got up and walked slowly out in front of the chief, holding up a tray and evidently chattering away in a low voice—though what it all was that he was saying, the old man could not make out. The chief demon looked just like any ordinary person as he sat with a cup in his left hand and his face wreathed in smiles. The young demon performed a dance and sat down, then, beginning from the ends of the rows, the other demons danced in turn, some of them well, some badly. Watching in amazement, the old man heard the chief say, “Tonight’s entertainment has been even better than usual. But what I should like to see is some dance that’s really special.” At these words—perhaps some spirit took possession of him, or some god or Buddha put the thought into his mind—the old man suddenly felt an urge to rush out and do a dance. At first he thought better of it, but then the rhythm that the demons were chanting sounded so attractive that he said to himself, “I don’t care what happens, I’ll rush out and dance. If I die, I die.” And with his hat down over his nose and his woodchopper’s axe stuck in his belt, he left his hollow tree and danced out in front of the chief. The demons leapt to their feet with loud shouts of surprise. The old man danced with all his might, jumping in the air and bending low, twisting this way and that, and marking the time with loud yells, until he had danced right round the clearing. The chief and the whole company of demons watched in delighted astonishment.

  “We’ve been having these parties for many years now,” the chief said, “but we’ve never had anything like this before. Old man, from now on you must always attend our parties.” “You don’t need to tell me, sir,” replied the old man, “I shall be there. This time I was unprepared and forgot the last steps. But if it pleases you so much, sir, I’ll do it again in less of a hurry.” “Well said,” declared the chief. “You must come again, without fail.” “The old man may promise this now,” said a demon three places away from the chief, “but I am afraid he may not come. Shouldn’t we get some pledge from him?” “Yes, we certainly should,” the chief agreed, and they all began to discuss what they should take. “What about taking the wen off his face?” said the chief. “A wen is a lucky thing, so I doubt if he’d want to lose that.” At this, the old man begged, “Take an eye or my nose, but please allow me to keep this wen, sir. It would be very hard on me to be robbed for no reason at all of something I’ve had for so many years.” “If he’s that unwilling to part with it, take it from him,” said the chief, whereupon a demon went up to the old man and with a “Here goes!” twisted the wen and pulled. The old man felt no pain at all. “Now then, see to it that you attend our next party,” he was told. By this time it was nearly dawn, and as the cocks were crowing, the demons went away. When he felt his face, the old man could find no trace of the wen he had had for so long. It had disappeared completely, as if it had been just wiped away. All thought of going to cut wood went out of his mind, and he returned to his home. When his aged wife questioned him about what had happened, he told her the story of the demons. “Who would have thought such a thing possible?” she exclaimed.

  Now the old man who lived next door to them had a large wen on his left cheek, and when he found that his neighbor no longer had one, he asked him how he had got rid of it. “Where did you find a doctor to take it away? I wish you would tell me, then I could have mine taken away too.” “It wasn’t taken away by a doctor,” replied the old man, and he explained what had happened and how the demons had removed it. “I’ll get rid of mine in the same way,” said the other, and he persuaded his neighbor to tell him all the details of what had happened.

  The second old man, following his instructions, got into the hollow tree and waited; then, just as he had been told, the demons appeared and sat round in a circle, enjoying themselves drinking. “Where is he? Is the old man here?” called the chief, and the second old man tottered out, trembling with fright. “Here he is,” shouted the demons, and the chief ordered him to be quick and dance. Compared with the first old man’s dance, this was a very poor and clumsy effort, and the chief demon said, “This time his dance was bad, very bad indeed. Give him back that wen we took from him as a pledge.” A demon came out from the end of a row and shouting, “The chief’s giving you back the wen we took as a pledge,” threw the wen at the old man’s other cheek, so that he now had one on each side of his face.

  Never be envious of others, they say.

  About the Priest with the Long Nose (2:7)

  Once there lived at Ikenoo111 a court priest named Zenchin.112 He was a very saintly man, being thoroughly versed in the esoteric teachings of Buddhism and having practiced its rites for many years, and thus he was in great demand to say all manner of prayers. As a result he was very prosperous, and there was never a sign of dilapidation in the temple buildings or in the priests’ living quarters. The offerings to the Buddha and the votive lamp were never neglected. The periodic banquets to the priests and the temple sermons—all were held regularly. And so the priests’ quarters in the temple were always fully occupied. Never a day passed without the bath being heated and a noisy crowd of priests bathing. In the neighborhood, too, a number of small houses were built and a flourishing village grew up.

  Now Zenchin had a long nose, five or six inches long, in fact, so that it seemed to hang down beyond his chin. It was purply-red in color, swollen and pimply like the peel of an orange. It itched terribly, and he used to boil water in a kettle and put his nose into it, protecting his face from the fire by means of a tray in which he had cut a hole just large enough to allow the nose to pass through. He would give it a good boiling, and when he took it out it was a deep purple hue. Then he would lie down on his side, and putting something underneath the nose, he would get someone to tread on it, whereupon something like smoke oozed out from the hole in each of the pimples. As the treading grew heavier, white maggots emerged from each of the holes and were pulled out with a pair of hair-tweezers—a white maggot about half an inch long from each hole. You could even see the open holes they had come from. Then the nose was put back into the same water and boiled up again, which made it shrink until it was the size of an ordinary person’s nose. But within two or three days it would swell up again to its former size.

  This same process went on over and over again, so that there were a great many days when it was swollen. At mealtimes, therefore, Zenchin would get one of his acolytes to sit opposite him and hold a strip of wood about a foot long and an inch wide under his nose to keep it up, staying like that until the meal was over. When Zenchin got anyone else to hold his nose up, they were not gentle in the way they did it and he got so annoyed that he lost his appetite. Accordingly this one priest was given the job of holding his nose up at every meal. One day, however, he was feeling unwell, and when Zenchin sat down to his breakfast gruel there was no one to support his nose. While he was wondering what to do, a lad who was one of his servants volunteered to hold the nose up for him. “I’m sure I shall do just as well as that priest,” he said. He was overheard by one of the acolytes, who reported his offer to Zenchin, and the boy, a good-looking lad in his middle teens, was summoned to come and sit in front of his master, where he took up the nose-supporter and, holding himself very formally and correctly, kept the nose at just the right height, not too high and not too low, so that Zenchin could drink his gruel. As he drank, Zenchin remarked how skillful the lad was, even better than the priest. But just then the boy turned aside to sneeze, and as he sneezed, his hand shook, the stick supporting the nose wobbled, and the nose slipped off and fell plop into the gruel, which splashed up all over their faces. Zenchin was furious, and as he wiped his head and face with paper, he ordered the boy out, bellowing, “You confou
nded idiot! A stupid lout, that’s what you are. Just you go and hold up some bigwig’s nose, instead of mine, then I’ll bet you wouldn’t do this. You stupid great fool! Get out, get out!” “Certainly, I’ll go and hold his nose up,” called the lad, as a parting shot, “—if there is anybody else with a nose like yours. You don’t know what you’re talking about, sir.” The acolytes all went where they could not be seen and had a good laugh.

  How Yoshihide, a Painter of Buddhist Pictures, Took Pleasure in Seeing His House on Fire (3:6)

  Again, long ago there was a painter of Buddhist pictures named Yoshihide. His neighbor’s house caught fire, and when the flames threatened to engulf Yoshihide’s house too, he saved himself by running out into the street. Inside the house he had some pictures of Buddhist divinities that he had been commissioned to paint. Also inside were his wife and children, all caught there without even having time to dress. But Yoshihide did not give them a thought, he simply stood on the other side of the street congratulating himself on his own escape. As he watched, he could see that the fire now had a grip on his own house, and he continued to watch from the other side of the street until the house was a mass of billowing smoke and flame. Several people came up to him to express their sympathy at this awful disaster, but he was completely unperturbed, and when asked why, all he did was to go on standing there on the other side of the street watching his house burn, nodding his head and every now and then breaking into a laugh. “What a stroke of luck!” he said. “This is something I’ve never been able to paint properly for all these years.” The people who had come to express their condolences asked him how he could just stand there like that. “What a shocking way to behave! Has some demon got into you?” they asked. Yoshihide, however, only stood laughing scornfully, and replied, “Of course not. For years now I’ve not been able to paint a good halo of fire in my pictures of the god Fudō.113 Now that I’ve seen this, I’ve learned what a fire really looks like. That’s a real stroke of luck. If you want to make a living at this branch of art, you can have any number of houses you like—provided you’re good at painting Buddhas and gods. It’s only because you have no talent for art that you set such store by material things.”

  It was perhaps from this time on that he began to paint pictures of his “Curling Fudō,” which even nowadays people praise so highly.

  How a Sparrow Repaid Its Debt of Gratitude (3:16)

  Long ago, one fine day in spring, a woman of about sixty was sitting cleansing herself of lice when she saw a boy pick up a stone and throw it at one of the sparrows that were hopping around in the garden. The stone broke the bird’s leg, and as it floundered about, wildly flapping its wings, a crow came swooping down on it. “Oh, the poor thing,” cried the woman, “the crow will get it,” and snatching it up, she revived it with her breath and gave it something to eat. At night, she placed it for safety in a little bucket. Next morning, when she gave it some rice and also a medicinal powder made from ground copper, her children and grandchildren ridiculed her. “Just look,” they jeered, “Granny’s taken to keeping sparrows in her old age.”

  For several months she tended it, till in time it was hopping about again, and though it was only a sparrow, it was deeply grateful to her for nursing it back to health. Whenever she left the house on the slightest errand, the woman would ask someone to look after the sparrow and feed it. The family ridiculed her and wanted to know whatever she was keeping a sparrow for, but she would reply, “Never you mind! I just feel sorry for it.” She kept it till it could fly again, then, confident that there was no longer any risk of its being caught by a crow, she went outside and held it up on her hand to see if it would fly away. Off it went with a flap of its wings. Everyone laughed at the woman because she missed her sparrow so much. “For so long now I’ve been used to shutting it up at night and feeding it in the morning,” she said, “and oh dear, now it’s flown away! I wonder if it will ever come back.”

  About three weeks later, she suddenly heard a sparrow chirruping away near her house, and wondering if all this chirruping meant that her sparrow had come back, she went out to see, and found that it had. “Well I never!” she exclaimed. “What a wonderful thing for it to remember me and come back!” The sparrow took one look at the woman’s face, then it seemed to drop some tiny object out of its mouth and flew away. “Whatever can it be, this thing the sparrow has dropped?” she exclaimed, and going up to it, she found it was a single calabash-seed. “It must have had some reason for bringing this,” she said, and she picked it up and kept it. Her children laughed at her and said, “There’s a fine thing to do, getting something from a sparrow and treating it as if you’d got a fortune!” “All the same,” she told them, “I’m going to plant it and see what happens,” which she did. When autumn came, the seed had produced an enormous crop of calabashes, much larger and more plentiful than usual. Delighted, the woman gave some to her neighbors, and however many she picked, the supply was inexhaustible. The children who had laughed at her were now eating the fruit from morning to night, while everyone in the village received a share. In the end, the woman picked out seven or eight especially big ones to make into gourds, and hung them up in the house.

  After several months, she inspected them and found that they were ready. As she took them down to cut openings in them, she thought they seemed rather heavy, which was mysterious. But when she cut one open, she found it full to the brim. Wondering whatever could be inside it, she began emptying it out—and found it full of white rice! In utter amazement, she poured all the rice into a large vessel, only to discover that the gourd immediately refilled itself. “Obviously some miracle has taken place—it must be the sparrow’s doing,” she exclaimed, bewildered but very happy. She put that gourd away out of sight before she examined the rest of them, but they all proved to be crammed full of rice, just like the first one. Whenever she took rice from the gourds, there was always far more than she could possibly use, so that she became extremely rich. The people in the neighboring villages were astonished to see how prosperous she had become, and were filled with envy at her incredible good fortune.

  Now the children of the woman who lived next door said to their mother, “You and that woman next door are the same sort of people, but just look where she’s got to! Why haven’t you ever managed to do any good for us?” Their criticism stung the woman into going to see her neighbor. “Well, well, however did you manage this business?” she asked. “I’ve heard some talk about it being something to do with a sparrow, but I’m not really sure, so would you tell how it all came about, please?” “Well, it all began when a sparrow dropped a calabash-seed and I planted it,” said the other woman, rather vaguely. But when her neighbor pressed her to explain the whole story in detail, she felt she ought not to be petty and keep it to herself, so she explained how there had been a sparrow with a broken leg that she had nursed back to health, and how it must have been so grateful that it had brought her a calabash-seed, which she had planted; and that was how she had come to be wealthy. “Will you give me one of the seeds?” she was asked, but this she refused to do. “I’ll give you some of the rice that was in the gourds,” she said, “but I can’t give you a seed. I can’t possibly let those go.” The neighbor now began to keep a sharp lookout in case she too might find a sparrow with a broken leg to tend. But there were no such sparrows to be found. Every morning as she looked out, there would be sparrows hopping around pecking at any grains of rice that happened to be lying about outside the back door—and one day she picked up some stones and threw them in the hope of hitting one. Since she had several throws and there was such a flock of birds, she naturally managed to hit one, and as it lay on the ground, unable to fly away, she went up to it in great excitement and hit it again, to make sure that its leg was broken. Then she picked it up and took it indoors, where she fed it and treated it with medicine. “Why, if a single sparrow brought my neighbor all that wealth,” she thought to herself, “I should be much richer still if I had several of
them. I should get a lot more credit from my children than she did from hers.” So she scattered some rice in the doorway and sat watching, then when a group of sparrows gathered to peck at it, she threw several stones at them, injuring three. “That will do,” she thought, and putting the three sparrows with broken legs into a bucket, she fed them a medicinal powder made from ground copper. Some months later, feeling very pleased with herself now that they had all recovered, she took them outdoors and they all flew away. In her own estimation she had acted with great kindness. But the sparrows bitterly resented having had their legs broken and being kept in captivity for months.

  Ten days went by, and to the woman’s great joy the sparrows returned. As she was staring at them to see if they had anything in their mouths, they each dropped a calabash-seed and flew off. “It’s worked,” she thought exultantly, and picking up the seeds, she planted them in three places. In no time, much faster than ordinary ones, they had grown into huge plants, though none of them had borne much fruit—not more than seven or eight calabashes. She beamed with pleasure as she looked at them. “You complained that I had never managed to do any good for you,” she said to her children, “but now I’ll do better than that woman next door,” and the family very much hoped that she would. Since there were only a few calabashes, she did not eat any herself or let anyone else eat any, in the hope of getting more rice from them. Her children grumbled, “The woman next door ate some of hers and gave some to her neighbors. And we’ve got three seeds, which is more than she had, so there ought to be something for ourselves and the neighbors to eat.” Feeling that perhaps they were right, the woman gave some away to the neighbors, while she cooked a number of the fruit for herself and her family to eat. The calabashes tasted terribly bitter, however; they were just like the kihada fruit that people use as a medicine, and made everyone feel quite nauseated. Every single person who had eaten any, including the woman herself and her children, was sick. The neighbors were furious and came round in a very ugly mood, demanding to know what it was she had given them. “It’s shocking,” they said. “Even people who only got a whiff of the things felt as if they were on their last legs with sickness and nausea.” The woman and her children, meanwhile, were sprawled out half-unconscious and vomiting all over the place, so that there was little point in the neighbors’ complaining, and they went away. In two or three days, everyone had recovered, and the woman came to the conclusion that the peculiar things which had happened must have been the outcome of being overhasty and eating the calabashes which should have given rice. She therefore hung the rest of the fruit up to store. After some months, when she felt they would be ready, she went into the storeroom armed with buckets to hold the rice. Her toothless mouth grinning from ear to ear with happiness, she held the buckets up to the gourds and went to pour out the contents of the fruit—but what emerged was a stream of things like horseflies, bees, centipedes, lizards, and snakes, which attacked and stung her, not only on her face but all over her body. Yet she felt no pain, and thought that it was rice pouring over her, for she shouted, “Wait a moment, my sparrows. Let me get it a little at a time.” Out of the seven or eight gourds came a vast horde of venomous creatures which stung the children and their mother—the latter so badly that she died. The sparrows had resented having their legs broken and had persuaded swarms of insects and reptiles to enter the gourds; whereas the sparrow next door had been grateful because when it had broken its leg it had been saved from a crow and nursed back to health.