Japanese Tales

by Royall Tyler

  How bitterly he now regretted having left his first wife! He promised himself that he would go directly to her when he reached the city. The way seemed unbearably long. On arrival he rushed to her house, found the gate open, and went in.

  Everything had changed. The house seemed uninhabited and was falling to ruin. A wave of anguish swept over him as he gazed at the desolation, lit up as it was by an autumn moon just five days off the full. The night was chilly, too. He felt very sad.

  In the house he found his wife lying all alone, just where she had lain in the old days. She showed no sign of anger when he came in, greeting him instead with joy. “How did you get here?” she asked. “When did you get back?”

  He told her how he had longed for her and promised that from now on they would live together again. “I’ll get all the things I’ve brought with me delivered here tomorrow,” he said, “and I’ll get my men moved here too. I just wanted to let you know right away, tonight.” She looked very happy. After talking till late about the past, they finally lay down in each other’s arms. “Have you no servant at all?” he asked. She explained that she had been too poor to keep one. He knew that her plight was his fault, and pity for her mingled in his thoughts with disgust at what he had done. It was nearly dawn when they fell asleep, with the shutters still open.

  Sunlight streaming full into the room woke the man up. The woman in his arms was dried skin over dead bones. In horror he leaped to his feet, desperately hoping it was a hallucination. But no: what had once been a woman was now a long-dead corpse.

  He dressed in frantic haste and burst into the neighbor’s little house. “Where’s the woman who used to live next door?” he shouted. “There’s no one there!”

  “She? Oh, her husband left her and went off to some province, and she was so hurt she got sick,” the neighbor replied. “She had no one to take care of her and this past summer she died. Of course, there was no one to dispose of the body either, so she’s still there. People are afraid to go near the place. That’s why it’s empty and going to ruin.”

  Terrified though he was, there was nothing further he could say or do, and he went his way.

  134.

  I SAW IT IN A DREAM

  Magari no Tsunekata lived in Owari province with his wife and was very comfortably off. After many years of marriage he fell in love with another woman. His wife made quite a fuss about this, as a woman might be expected to do, but he could not give his mistress up. He tried all sorts of dodges to keep seeing her in secret, but his wife had spies out after him, and any report that he was with his mistress would literally give her fits.

  Once Tsunekata had business in the Capital and spent some time preparing for his trip. The day before he was due to leave he was overcome by the desire to see his mistress. Since his wife’s fierce jealousy made it impossible for him to go openly, he announced instead that he was wanted by the provincial administration.

  At his mistress’s house, he and his mistress talked awhile in bed. When they eventually fell asleep, he dreamed that his wife burst in on them. “Ah, there you are with that woman again!” she screamed. “That’s all you ever do nowadays, lie around with her! You with your innocent face and your smooth lies!” She went on like that for a while, then fell on him and thrust herself violently between him and his mistress. At this Tsunekata woke up.

  Frightened and confused, he started home as soon as he could, and by daybreak was back with his wife. “It’s really too bad!” he complained. “Here I’m about to leave, and they had to call me in for a meeting! I couldn’t get away and so I had no sleep at all. What a thing to do to me!”

  “Eat your breakfast,” rasped his wife. Her hair was bristling straight up, then lying flat, then bristling skyward again.

  “That’s sort of scary,” he remarked.

  “You’re disgusting!” his wife retorted. “You were over at her place last night, loving her up. It’s written all over your face.”

  “Who told you that?”

  “I saw it clear as a bell, you pig. I saw it in a dream.”

  “You did? You saw what?”

  “Oh, I knew when you left yesterday evening that that was where you were headed. During the night I dreamed I went to her house. There you were snuggled up with her, chatting away. I listened. ‘So you’ve given her up, have you?’ I thought. ‘Well then, what are you doing in bed with her?’ Bah! I dove in between you and both of you jumped up in a panic.”

  Tsunekata was dumbfounded. “Well, what did I say?” he asked.

  His wife repeated every word he had said. Tsunekata himself had dreamed the whole thing, very precisely. He was terrified. He kept his own dream to himself, however, and only revealed the whole awful incident later on, to a friend.

  Just think what kind of spiritual state the wife must have been in! Jealousy is a very grave sin. Some suppose she must have ended up turning into a snake.

  135.

  THE SNAKE CHARMER

  The musician Sukemitsu was imprisoned for neglect of duty in a storehouse belonging to the Minister of the Left. The assortment of creatures and creepy-crawlies that inhabited the place frightened Sukemitsu quite enough already, but then in the middle of the night (this was exactly what he had been most afraid of) a huge snake appeared. Its head was like a lion’s, its eyes were like bronze bowls, and its tongue, three feet long, flickered menacingly. Already the snake’s vast jaws were yawning wide to swallow him when, half dead with fear, he managed to pull out his flute and play a passage from the dance Genjōraku.

  The snake stopped, lifted its head high in the air, and listened awhile. Then it slithered away.

  136.

  THE TUG-OF-WAR

  The wrestler Ama no Tsuneyo lived in Tango province. In the summer he liked to stroll by the river that ran near his house, and was doing so one day, with a small boy beside him, when he paused under a tree by a deep pool.

  The pool was blue-green and frightening because you could not see the bottom. Tsuneyo was gazing at the rushes around it when he noticed a large ripple dart from the opposite bank straight toward him. What could it possibly be? When the ripple reached his side, a snake lifted its head from the water. It was a very big one indeed, judging from the size of the head, and it stared at Tsuneyo so hard that he nervously stepped back a little. Then it vanished again into the pool.

  The ripple darted off to the far side and a swell of water came rolling back. The snake’s tail rose from the pool and thrashed its way toward Tsuneyo, who waited, calmly now, to see what it would do. When the tail had wrapped itself twice around his legs, the snake began to pull. It wanted to drag him into the pool! Tsuneyo planted his feet more firmly, but the snake was so strong that the teeth of his high clogs broke and he felt sure he would be dragged down. Once more he dug in his feet, but the snake tugged so hard that they simply plowed through the earth, leaving a furrow several inches deep. Tsuneyo was just putting up a last, desperate effort, when the snake snapped in two and blood stained the surface of the pool. He pulled up the tail half, unwound it, and washed his legs in the pool. The attack had left indelible marks.

  By this time Tsuneyo’s servants had rushed up, and he had them wash the wounds with wine. Then they inspected the snake’s tail half. Huge was the only word for the creature. The body was a good foot thick where it had broken. It turned out that the snake had wrapped its head end, on the opposite bank, around a thick tree-root to give itself a better hold. Even so Tsuneyo had proved the stronger, and the snake had snapped instead. The head end, still clinging as tightly as ever to the root, seemed not to have realized what had happened. Imagine how it must have been feeling!

  But how strong had the snake really been? Tsuneyo’s men tied a rope round their master’s legs and ten of them pulled on it. Tsuneyo said the snake had tugged harder than that. Three men were added, then five, but they still were not enough. Finally sixty men took the rope, and Tsuneyo decided that yes, that was how the snake had pulled. In other words (considering
that Tsuneyo had not been dragged down by the snake) Tsuneyo had the strength of about a hundred men.

  That was the kind of wrestler we used to have in the old days.

  137.

  AS DEEP AS THE SEA

  A professional keeper of hawks once followed an escaped bird deep into the mountains till he spied a hawk’s nest in a tall tree. This was a welcome find. He marked the place, went home again, and returned at the right time to get the young hawks.

  It was a wild and desolate spot, and the tree leaned over a bottomless ravine. The nest of young hawks was high in its branches, and the parents were circling round it. What specimens the parents were! No doubt the young would be just as impressive. Bent on catching them, the man hardly even knew he was climbing the tree.

  Just short of the nest, a branch broke under him and he plummeted into another tree growing straight out of the cliff below. He hung on there, more dead than alive, between a yawning chasm and a sheer wall of rock.

  Though his servants assumed he had fallen into the ravine and been killed, they thought they had better make sure. Clinging precariously to the edge of the cliff, they peered over into the depths. All the leaves in the way hid their master from them, and they got nothing for their trouble but a spell of dizziness. They could only go home and inform their master’s wife and children, who wept at the news. The family wanted at least to see for themselves where the body lay, but the servants cried, “No, no, we can’t even remember the way, and besides, it’s no use your going! Goodness knows how deep that ravine is! We did our best to find him down there, but we couldn’t see anything at all!” So no one even went back to look.

  The man sat on a tiny ledge about the size of a dinner tray, clinging to the tree and keeping very still. The slightest movement, and he would be dashed to pieces on the rocks below. There was nothing he could do. But although his business was raising hawks, he had chanted the Kannon Sutra ever since his childhood and he trusted in Kannon’s mercy. Now he called on Kannon to save him and began to chant.

  When he got to the passage, “His vow to save suffering beings is as deep as the sea,” he thought he heard something rustling up from the bottom of the ravine. What could it be? With infinite caution he peered down and saw an enormous snake at least twenty feet long slithering straight up toward him. It was going to eat him, or at least that was the only explanation that made sense. Now he was really frightened, and begged Kannon from the bottom of his heart to save him from this awful danger.

  The snake made no attempt to swallow him when it reached his seat. On the contrary, it just kept going. Its only thought seemed to be to climb up and out of the ravine. Perhaps he could hang on to it somehow and go up with it! He drew the dagger from his belt, plunged it into the snake to make a handhold, and let himself be drawn up and over the edge of the cliff. As he slid off he tried to take out the dagger, but it was too firmly planted. The snake pulled away from him and slithered off toward the next ravine with the dagger still stuck in its back.

  Delirious with relief, the man tried to run home, but sitting motionless for several days, without food or water, had made him so weak that in fact he could only barely drag himself back to his house. The household was in the middle of a memorial rite for him when he staggered in, causing momentary pandemonium. He wept as he told them his extraordinary experience. Then he ate and slept soundly.

  The next morning he got up early, washed his hands, and opened the text of the Kannon Sutra he always read. His dagger, the one he had plunged into the back of the snake, was planted in the text at the words “His vow to save suffering beings is as deep as the sea.”

  138.

  WHAT THE SNAKE HAD IN MIND

  A woman on her way up to hear the monthly preaching at Urin’in, a temple in northern Kyoto, had come to a stone bridge — just a small slab over a tiny brook — when another, younger woman walking along the brook stepped on the slab as she crossed and overturned it. Where it had been the first woman was surprised to see, all coiled up, a little spotted snake.

  The snake slowly unwound itself and set off after the young woman who had overturned its stone. This was intriguing. Perhaps the snake was angry at having been disturbed and wanted to get even. The older woman was curious enough to set out after it.

  The young woman the snake was following did look round sometimes, but seemed to suspect nothing. No one passing by did either. Apparently only the older woman could see the snake.

  In time they reached Urin’in. The young woman climbed the steps and sat down on the wooden floor while the snake too got up the steps and wriggled to her side. Still no one saw it or raised the alarm.

  When the preaching was over the young woman left, and the snake with her. The older woman stayed behind them on the way back. In the southern district of the city the woman entered a house that seemed to be hers, and the snake followed.

  The snake was unlikely to do anything during the day, but the older woman was determined to be on hand for whatever might happen that night. She went up to the house, explained that she had just arrived from the country and had nowhere to stay, and begged for a night’s lodging. She had assumed all along that the young woman was the owner, but in fact it was an old lady who invited her in. She found the young woman sitting on the raised floor with the snake coiled at the foot of a pillar, gazing at her. The young woman was talking about “the mansion,” and it seemed clear that she was in service somewhere.

  When the sun set and darkness fell, the visitor could no longer see the snake, so she proposed spinning hemp in exchange for the old lady’s hospitality. For this she would need light. The old lady gladly accepted her offer and lit a lamp. As the visitor spun, she looked around her. The young woman seemed to have lain down to sleep. No doubt the snake would go to her now — but it did not. The visitor felt she ought to mention the snake, but decided she would only make trouble for herself if she did and so kept silent. The evening wore on till at last the lamp went out. There was nothing to do but go to bed.

  Next morning the visitor woke up with a start, anxious to know what might have happened during the night. After getting up quite normally, the young woman told the old lady she had had an odd dream, and the old lady insisted on hearing it.

  “Last night,” said the young woman, “I dreamed somebody stood by my pillow. She was human from the waist up, but from the waist down she was a snake. She was beautiful, though, and this is what she said to me. ‘Once I hated someone so much that I turned into a snake and spent many long and lonely years under the stone slab of a bridge. Yesterday you overturned the stone and saved me. I felt so gloriously free that I wanted to thank you properly. That’s why I followed you to the temple and heard the Buddha’s most rare and wonderful Teaching. That in turn canceled my sins, and now I’ll soon be reborn in human form. You’ve made me so happy! In return I’ll make sure that your life goes well and you find a good husband.’ And that was the end of my dream.”

  Both listeners were astonished, and the visitor confessed who she really was and why she was there. She and the young woman became fast friends and saw each other often.

  The young woman did do well, too, because she married a very wealthy man, a junior steward in a great household. Everything went for her exactly as she wished.

  139.

  RED PLUM BLOSSOMS

  In the west of the Capital lived a man of some rank in the world. His only daughter, a sweet and lovely girl, wrote a beautiful hand by the time she reached her teens, and her skill at poetry was peerless. Not only that, she was also an expert musician and played the koto particularly well.

  The family’s large mansion included several bark-thatched pavilions, curiously and handsomely made. Pretty streams ran through a garden which was always beautiful, if not with spring flowers then with the leaves of fall. And while the girl’s parents thought only of her, the girl herself was lost in delight over the flowers and leaves.

  The garden had places where cherry blossoms opened in the mi
sts of spring, and where the weeping willow fronds’ new green swayed deliciously in the breeze; while elsewhere the colored autumn leaves hovered in layers of brocade, and chrysanthemums of many hues leaned under their burden of dew beneath the tall hagi plants’ feathery curves. Yet the girl loved above all the red-flowering plum.

  She planted a red plum tree near her room, and when it bloomed she opened her shutters to gaze on it rapturously, all alone. The fragrance intoxicated her so much that she stayed there all day. She let nothing else grow near her plum and would not have birds nesting in its branches. When the flowers fell, she gathered the fallen petals in a lacquered bowl to enjoy their scent awhile longer; and on windy days she even spread mats to collect them as they fluttered down, so as to make sure they were not blown away and lost. When the petals were withered at last, she mixed them into her incense to save the very last of their sweet smell.

  In time she fell ill and grew rapidly worse, despite her parents’ lamentations. Before long she was gone. Her mother and father had to bid her farewell forever, and could never look at the plum tree after that without a pang of sorrow.

  One day a little snake appeared under the tree. Though it seemed ordinary enough, it came again the next spring and stayed wrapped around the tree. When the petals began to fall, it picked them up one by one in its mouth and heaped them together. Realizing that it could only be their daughter herself, the parents grieved afresh. All they could do was to call in two holy monks and have them expound the Lotus Sutra under the tree, one chapter a day in the time-honored fashion, for the good of their daughter’s soul.