Japanese Tales

by Royall Tyler

  The snake, which never left the spot, heard all the preaching. On the fifth day the monks spoke on the chapter in which the Serpent Princess offers the Buddha a priceless pearl and passes straight into Nirvana. Under the plum tree, the little snake died. Those who saw its passing wept.

  Later the father dreamed about his daughter. At first she was dressed in torn and filthy clothes and looked very downcast. But a holy man came to her and had her take off her rags. Her skin underneath was golden and glowing, like the skin of a buddha, and the holy man dressed her in rich robes and a priestly stole. Finally he raised her up and they floated away together on a purple cloud.

  That was the end of the dream. The girl’s salvation was the Sutra’s gift.

  140.

  THE ENIGMA

  Once a thief got into a shop in the Western Market and the Imperial Police surrounded the place, intent on capturing him. Their commander rode among them fully armed, in formal headdress and pale grey cloak.

  When a freed convict bearing a spear was posted to stand at the door of the shop, the thief signaled to him through a crack that he should come closer. “Go tell your commander to get off his horse and come here,” the thief said. “I have something to tell him in private.”

  The freed convict reported this message, and the commander moved to obey, over his men’s strenuous objections. “No, I’d better look into this,” was all he would say as he dismounted and started for the door.

  The thief opened it and invited the commander in, closing and bolting it again when he was inside. The men were furious. “Here we’ve got him surrounded!” they sputtered. “We can’t possibly miss him! And now His Lordship has to walk right in and get himself shut up for a nice little chat. This is insane!”

  Shortly the door opened again. The commander emerged, got back on his horse, and rode up to his men. “There’s more to this business than meets the eye,” he announced. “We’ll have to hold off till I give a report to His Majesty.” He headed straight for the palace, leaving his men to stand guard.

  “That’s right,” he said when he returned, “we can’t arrest him. Go back to headquarters. Those are His Majesty’s orders.”

  The men obeyed. Their commander stayed on alone until finally, after dark, he went to the door and announced the emperor’s decision. The thief burst into loud and unrestrained sobbing.

  After the commander was gone, the thief stole out and disappeared into the night. No one ever found out who he was or why he had been pardoned.

  141.

  WASPS

  A quicksilver dealer in Kyoto had gotten rich from his business. He traveled regularly back and forth to Ise province with a train of a hundred horses or more, all loaded with silk and cotton cloth, thread, rice, and other such goods, and he never took with him more than a few boys to drive the animals. As old age approached, he had never suffered a single loss from fire or flood and, still more remarkably, had never lost a single sheet of paper to thieves.

  This was extraordinary because the people of Ise are perfectly capable of robbing their own parents. Friend and foe, rich and poor spend their time scheming to bilk each other, and they do not hesitate to plunder the weak to add to their own fortune. For some reason the quicksilver merchant was about the only victim they had not yet despoiled.

  Now, there was a robber band one hundred strong which lurked in the Suzuka Mountains on the western border of the province and year after year preyed on all who passed that way. They would seize everything of value (private or imperial property, it made no difference), then kill the unhappy travelers. Even the government in Kyoto had been unable to suppress them.

  During the height of their depredations the quicksilver merchant came that way again, traveling out of Ise toward the Capital with his usual train of a hundred well-laden horses and protected only by his youthful drivers. He even had women with him, and all the food, etc., that they required.

  The robbers spotted the caravan with glee. Its leader was obviously soft in the head, and they intended to appropriate the riches he was so innocently parading before them. In the depths of the mountains they ambushed him from front and rear. The terrified drivers fled. After rounding up the pack horses, the robbers stripped the women of all their clothes and shooed them off into the wilds. As for the merchant, who was riding a mare, he barely managed to get away and scramble up a high hill. The robbers watched him go but decided he was a hopeless case anyway and not worth chasing. Instead, they headed down into the valley to divide the booty. Everyone was well pleased and felt he had come easily enough by his share.

  Meanwhile the merchant on his hill was staring aloft and bellowing, “Where are you? Where are you? Hurry!” In an hour or so a huge, murderous wasp three inches long came droning down from the sky into a tall tree nearby. The merchant redoubled his exhortations to haste. Then a long, thick, reddish cloud appeared in the sky.

  The robbers were just putting away their spoils. The cloud descended into their valley and the wasp in the tree followed. The cloud was wasps. Hundreds of wasps overwhelmed each robber and stung him to death. Then the cloud gathered once more, rose, and vanished into the distance.

  The quicksilver merchant went down into the valley in his turn and found there the whole hoard of booty the robbers had stored up over the years: a huge number of bows, quivers, horses, saddles, articles of clothing, and many other things. He returned with it all to Kyoto, even richer than before.

  His secret was that he brewed wine at home and fed it all to his wasps, which in many other ways too he treated with the greatest consideration. Most robbers knew this and left his property alone. These marauders had been done in by their own ignorance.

  142.

  WITHOUT EVEN A FIGHT

  Sakanoue no Haruzumi, a veteran warrior, lived in the province of Kii. Having business in the Capital he set off, but not without being fully armed and accompanied by equally well-armed retainers, for he feared an attack by a particular enemy of his.

  Late that night he was passing through the southern district of the Capital when he met a party of court nobles on horseback. Servants were going ostentatiously before them to clear the way. There was no doubt about what had to be done. Haruzumi dismounted. “Lay down your bows!” he orderd his men, who promptly obeyed. Then they all waited with their foreheads pressed to the earth.

  Haruzumi was just thinking the lords must have gone by when he, like every one of his men, felt a heavy hand on his neck. He twisted his head round in surprise. The riders he had taken for nobles were instead half a dozen armed and armored men with arrows ready to the string. “Move and you’re dead!” one barked.

  They were bandits, and Haruzumi had fallen straight into their trap. He was furious with himself, and miserable too, but under threat of instant death he could only do as the bandits ordered. They stripped him and his men of every garment they had on, of their bows and quivers, of their horses and saddles, of their swords and daggers, and even of their shoes.

  Haruzumi knew that if he had been on guard against them they would have had to kill him to get away with this, and he felt sure he would have put up a good enough fight to capture the bandits somehow himself. But they had tricked him with their charade into laying down his own arms and waiting politely, with bowed head, to be robbed. It was too much. His fighting career was cursed. Haruzumi gave up the profession of arms.

  143.

  THE TEMPLE BELL

  One day an ancient monk turned up at Koyadera in Settsu province and explained to the abbot that he was on his way up from the western provinces toward the Capital. “But I’m so old that I’m all worn out,” he continued. “I just can’t go on! Perhaps you won’t mind if I rest at your temple for a while. Do you suppose there’s anywhere I could stay?”

  “I can’t think of a place offhand,” the abbot replied. “If you stay in the gallery around the main hall, you’ll be exposed to the weather and you’ll get sick.”

  “Well, how about the bell tower? It’s
completely enclosed, after all.”

  “Fine, that’s a good idea,” said the abbot. “It’s all yours. And it would be nice if you’d ring the bell, too.”

  The old monk looked pleased, and the abbot led him straight to the bell tower. “Here’s the bell ringer’s mat,” he said. “Make yourself at home.”

  When the abbot ran into the regular bell ringer, he told him about the old monk who had come wandering in and described how he had installed the fellow under the bell. “He says he’ll take care of ringing it,” the abbot went on, “so you can take it easy while he’s here.” The bell ringer did not complain.

  For two days the ancient traveler rang the bell. On the morning of the third day the bell ringer thought he would just go and see how the fellow was doing. “Hello!” he called at the base of the tower. “Are you there?” And he squeezed inside.

  The old monk, amazingly tall, lay sprawled out full length, wrapped in a miserable garment. He was dead. The bell ringer beat a fast retreat and went to find the abbot.

  “The old boy’s dead,” he stammered. “What are we going to do?”

  The abbot went straight to check this awful news. It was true. The monk was dead. He closed the door to the bell tower and warned the rest of the temple’s monks.

  “Congratulations!” they growled back at him. “It was so thoughtful of you to let him stay! Now you’ve got the whole temple polluted!” But it was too late now to be angry. They saw they would have to get some villagers to come and take the body away.

  Unfortunately, the village’s shrine festival was near, as the villagers quickly pointed out. “We just can’t go and get ourselves polluted now,” they said. No one would touch the corpse, and noon came while the monks went on fretting about what in the world to do.

  Out of nowhere, two men appeared, about thirty years old and dressed in light grey cloaks that darkened toward the bottom, with broad, conical hats hanging round their necks against their backs. Their skirts were tucked up for easier movement, and they had swords stuck in their belts. Certainly they were humble men, but they seemed alert and pleasant. They went straight to the monks’ dormitory and asked whether by any chance an old monk was stopping nearby.

  The monks told them a tall old monk had spent the last couple of days in the base of the bell tower, but said they gathered that this morning he had just been found dead. The two men burst into tears of shock and grief. They explained that the old monk had been their father. “He’d gotten stubborn in his old age,” they said, “and we had a little quarrel. It was nothing, really, but he stormed off and disappeared. We’re from Akashi county in Harima. After he’d gone we split up to find him, and we’ve been looking for him ever since. We’re not penniless, you know. We own a good deal of rice land and you can find retainers of ours even in the neighboring county. We’ll have a look for ourselves, and if he’s really dead we’ll bury him this evening.”

  The abbot took them to the bell tower and waited outside while they went in. “Oh father, here you are!” they cried when they saw the old monk’s face. Then they rolled on the ground and wept aloud. The sight was too much for the abbot, who was soon weeping too. “Our quarrel was nothing,” they mourned, “but you were an old man and just wouldn’t give in! Off you went to hide from us and ended up here, in the middle of nowhere. And we weren’t even with you when you died!” This thought brought on a fresh paroxysm of tears. Finally they said they would go to prepare for the funeral and closed the door of the bell tower behind them. When the abbot described the scene to his colleagues, they wept too.

  Well along in the evening some forty or fifty people arrived, with much noise and commotion, and brought out the old monk’s body. Quite a few were armed. The monks kept well away from the bell tower. Far from going to watch the proceedings, they were all so afraid that they shut themselves up in their rooms. As a result, they only heard the mourners carry the body to a pine wood several hundred yards off, up against the hillside behind the temple. The mourners spent the night beating gongs and chanting the Buddha’s Name, dispersing only at dawn.

  For the thirty days the pollution lasted not even the bell ringer rang the bell, and no other monk went near the bell tower either. At last, when it was finally safe to do so, the bell ringers returned to the tower to clean up. The great bell was gone.

  The bell ringer ran to spread this latest outrage to the rest of the temple, and the monks trooped out to see for themselves. It was a fact: the bell had been stolen. Why, those people must have planned the whole funeral just so they could steal the bell! The monks thought they had better check the funeral site.

  Off they all went, with some people from the village, to the pine wood. The thieves had chopped up a big pine tree to make a fire around the bell and melt it down, and there were bits of bronze all over the place. They had brought off quite an operation! Unfortunately, there was no way to find out who they had been. The monks could only resign themselves to their loss.

  Ever since, Koyadera has been without a bell.

  144.

  THE DEAD MAN WAKES

  Being a professional, the robber Hakamadare naturally ended up in jail. He was released under a general amnesty. Having nowhere to go then, and nothing else to turn his hand to, he went up to Osaka Pass and played dead, stark naked, beside the trail. The passing travelers clustered round and, noticing that he was not wounded, chattered to each other about how he might have died.

  Along from Kyoto came an armed warrior on a good horse, followed by a troupe of servants and retainers. The warrior saw the crowd, stopped, and sent one of his men to find out what they were gawking at. The man reported that they were puzzling over a dead man without a wound on him. The warrior ordered his followers back into proper formation and rode on. He stared at the corpse as he passed.

  The crowd clapped their hands and laughed. “A fine warrior you are,” they taunted him, “with all that train of yours, to be squeamish about a body!” The warrior ignored them.

  In time the crowed dispersed. There was no one left around Hakamadare when another warrior came along. He had no train of servants and retainers, but he was well armed. He went right up to the body. “Poor man!” he said. “I wonder what you died of. I don’t see any wound.” He poked at the corpse here and there with the tip of his bow. Suddenly the dead man seized the bow, leaped up, pulled the warrior down from his horse, drew the man’s own dagger, and killed him.

  “Better be more careful next time!” said Hakamadare.

  In no time Hakamadare had the slain man’s clothes off and was wearing them himself. Next he seized the warrior’s weapons, jumped on his horse, and galloped away toward the east. He had already arranged a rendezvous with a dozen or two of the convicts who had been released with him, and he took any latecomer on as a servant. The band swept along, robbing everyone they met of clothing, mounts, and weapons. These were distributed among the naked bandits until it was twenty or thirty well-armed desperados who rode eastward along the road, and no one they encountered could stand against them.

  That’s what a man like that will do if you give him half a chance. Just get close enough for him to touch you, and watch out! The first warrior, the one who rode resolutely by, turned out to have been a fellow named Taira no Sadamichi. Everyone who heard the story nodded approval of his action. It had been wise of him to pass on, despite his large train. And what a fool he had been, the one who, without a single follower by him, had gone right up to the body!

  145.

  COWED

  Late one fall Hakamadare, the notorious bandit chieftain, felt he needed some new clothes and decided to go looking for them. It was the middle of the night and the town was quiet. You could barely see the moon. Along came a man wearing a complete, first-class outfit. He was sauntering down the path playing the flute.

  “That’s the one!” thought the bandit. “He’s come to give me his clothes!”

  Hakamadare was about to jump his victim when he suddenly felt afraid, and followe
d the man instead. The man gave no sign of knowing anyone was behind him. He just strolled along playing his flute. To test him, Hakamadare started running with heavy steps.

  The man turned around but did not stop playing. Hakamadare retreated, unable to bring himself to attack. He tried the same thing over and over, but the man never got flustered. “This is an odd one!” thought Hakamadare.

  Half a mile or so further on, Hakamadare decided he had to act. He drew his sword and charged. The man stopped playing, stood still, and turned to face him. “Who are you?” he asked. Hakamadare was cowed. In spite of himself he plopped down on the ground.

  “Who are you?” the man repeated. Hakamadare could tell it was useless to run.

  “I’m a bandit,” he answered.

  “What’s your name?

  “Hakamadare.”

  “Oh yes,” said the man, “I’ve heard of you. You’re tough. Come with me.” He went on again, playing his flute. Hakamadare followed like a demon caught by some god.

  They came to the man’s house. He turned out to be the famous warrior Yasumasa, the former governor of Settsu province. Yasumasa invited Hakamadare in and gave him a thickly padded coat. “When you need clothes,” he said, “just come to me. Don’t go attacking people you know nothing about. You could make a big mistake.”

  The awestruck Hakamadare told this story the next time he was arrested.

  146.

  THE BLOODY SWORD

  A mountain temple in Tajima province was over a century old. No one went near it because it was haunted by demons, but one day a pair of monks, one old and one young, happened by just after sundown, and since they did not know the place they decided to stay there.