Rashōmon
One day twilight, a servant was waiting for the rain to stop under Rashōmon.
There was no one else under the wide gate except this man.
There was just a katydid on a large pillar which was painted red but peeling off in some places.
Rashōmon was located on Suzaku Avenue.
So there must be two or three other people there, including women and men who weared their hats, to wait for the rain to stop.
But besides this man, there was no one else.
Because for the past two or three years, Kyoto had had a succession of disasters, such as earthquakes, gusts, fires and famines.
Therefore, the destruction of the city was not the same as in the past.
According to the old documents, Buddha statues and Buddhist instruments were smashed and the wood with vermilion or gold and silver leaf was piled up on the streets and sold as firewood.
Because the things were like this inside the city, there was no one to repair Rashōmon and no one to look after it.
Then, making good use of the desolation, foxes and raccoon dogs inhabited it.
Thieves inhabited it.
At last, it became customary for people to bring the dead, who had no one to take care of them, to the gate and leave them there.
So, when the sun disappears from the sky, everyone got so scared that they don't come to the neighborhood of this gate.
Instead, the ravens came from somewhere, in large numbers.
In the daytime, the ravens flitted about in a circle, chirping, around the ridge-end tile which was like a tail.
When the sky above the gate was red with the setting sun, it looked like sesame seeds sprinkled.
The ravens, of course, came to peck at the flesh of the dead in the gate.
――Today, perhaps because of the late hour, not a single one could be seen.
But there were the ravens' white droppings in places on the crumbling stone steps, where the long grass were.
The servant put the butt of his faded clothes on the top step of the seven stone steps and watched the rain fall in a daze, minding a large pimple on his right cheek.
I wrote earlier, "a servant was waiting for the rain to stop."
However, the servant had no particular plan to do something even if the rain stopped.
Normally, the servant would be able to return to his master's house.
However, the master laid off him four or five days ago.
As I have written before, the city of Kyoto was in decline at that time.
The fact that the servant was laid off by his master who had employed him for many years, was actually a small aftermath of this decline.
Therefore, it would be more appropriate to say "a servant was stuck in the rain and had nowhere to go and was at a loss" rather than "a servant was waiting for the rain to stop."
In addition, the weather conditions today also affected the Sentimentalisme of the servant in Heian period.
The rain that began to fall in the late afternoon was not likely to stop.
So, the servant was absentmindedly listening to the sound of the rain that had been falling on Suzaku Avenue for some time now, thinking about how to deal with his life for the next day at any cost――how to do the impossible.
The rain was wrapping at Rashōmon and gathering a distant rumbling sound.
Darkness gradually lowered the sky, and the edge of the roof of the gate, protruding diagonally, supported the heavy dark clouds.
You can't help but choose the means to do something about the inevitable.
If you choose, you will die under the fence or on the ground by the side of the road.
And it will be brought to the top of this gate, and be abandoned like a dog.
If I don't choose,――
The idea of the servant was that after wandering along the same path many times, he finally arrived at this place.
But this "if I do," however long it took, was still "if I do."
While affirming the fact that the servant should not choose any means, he didn't have the courage to affirm that there is no alternative but to become a thief.
The servant gave a big yawn and then stood up exhaustedly.
It was so cold in the evening chill in Kyoto that he wanted a wooden brazier already.
The wind with the evening darkness blew unreservedly between the pillars of the gate.
The katydid, which had been perched on the red-painted pillar, had already disappeared.
The servant shrugged his neck making the shoulders of his dark blue clothe covering his yellow underwear higher, and looked around the gate.
He thought that he would sleep for the night if he could find a place where he could get away from the wind and rain and not be seen.
Fortunately, he saw a wide ladder, also painted red, leading to the up floor of the gate.
Up there, if there were people, they would be dead anyway.
The servant put his foot with straw sandal onto the bottom rung of the ladder, taking care not to let his sword with hijiri-hilt come out, which he carried around his waist.
A few minutes later, on the middle rung of a wide ladder leading to the up floor of Rashōmon, a man was cowering like a cat, holding for breath, peering up floor.
The firelight from the up of the gate faintly wiped the man's right cheek.
It was a cheek with redly purulent pimple in a short beard.
The servant, from the beginning, had thought that the only people up here were the dead.
But when he climbed up a couple of rungs, he found that there was someone with a fire up there and was moving here and there.
It was easy to recognize because of the murky, yellowish light reflected on the ceiling full of spider webs.
They were not a ordinary person, lighting a fire on this rainy night at Rashōmon.
Squeezing the footsteps like a gecko, the servant finally crawled up the steep ladder to the top step.
Then, flattening his body as much as possible, he put his head forward as far as possible and looked into the up floor.
Inside the gate, as he had heard rumors about, there were a number of corpses discarded in a haphazard manner, but he couldn't tell how many there were because the range of the firelight was smaller than he had expected.
The only thing that can be known was that there were naked corpses and kimono-clad corpses among them, though it was vague.
Of course, there were both women and men in them.
They were lying on the floor with their mouths open and hands outstretched, like dolls made of clay, so that the fact that they had once been living people was in doubt.
They were forever dumb and silent, their shoulders and chests catching the vague light of the fire, darkening the shadows of the lower parts.
The servant involuntarily covered his nose at the rotten smell of those corpses.
However, in the next moment, his hand had already forgotten to cover his nose.
This was because certain strong emotions had robbed this man of his sense of smell at all.
The servant's eyes then saw for the first time a human being crouched in the floor abandoned the corpses.
It was a short, skinny, white-haired, ape-like old woman in a cypress-bark-colored kimono.
The old woman held a piece of lit pine wood in her right hand and looked into the face of one of the corpses.
Judging by the long hair, it was probably the corpse of a woman.
The servant was so moved by 60% of fear and 40% of curiosity that he forgot to breathe for a while.
He felt, in the words of the author of the old documents, as if "the hair on his head was growing fat."
Then the old woman inserted a piece of pine in between the floorboards, put her hands on the neck of the corpse she had been looking at, and began to pull out its long hair, one by one, just as a monkey's parent took a lice of their child.
Apparently the hair fell out according to the hand.
As the hairs fell out one by one, the servant's fear gradually disappeared from his mind.
And at the same time, the hatred for the old woman began to increase little by little.
――it may be misnomer to say "the hatred for the old woman."
The antipathy to all kinds of evil was growing stronger by a minute.
If someone had brought up to the servant the question of starving to death or becoming a thief, which the man had been pondering under the gate, the servant would have chosen to starve to death without a second thought.
So much so that this man's hatred of evil was burning up as vigorously as a piece of lit pine wood inserted in between the floorboards.
The servant, of course, didn't know why the old woman would pull out the corpse's hair.
Therefore, he didn't know, rationally, whether good or evil.
But to the servant, pulling out the hair of a corpse on this rainy night at Rashōmon was already an unforgivable evil in and of itself.
Of course, the servant had forgotten that he had intended to become a thief until a moment ago.
So the servant put all his strength into his legs and jumped up the ladder.
Then he walked in front of the old woman with his hand on the hilt of his sword.
Needless to say, the old woman was astonished.
When the old woman took one look at the servant, she jumped up and down as if she had been hit by a crossbow.
"You bastard! Where are you going?"
The servant said, blocking her way, as the old woman, stumbling over the corpse, tried to flee in a panic.
The old woman still tried to run away pushing away the servant.
The servant also tried to push her to prevent her from going away.
The two grabbed each other in silence for a while amidst the corpses.
But the winner was known from the beginning.
The servant finally grabbed the old woman's arm and forced her down.
The old woman's arm was just like a chicken's leg, just bone and skin.
"What were you doing? Say. You don't say? Look this!"
The servant let go of the old woman and suddenly pulled out his sword and thrust the white steel color of the blade in front of her eyes.
But the old woman was silent.
Her hands trembling, breathing on her shoulders, her eyes open as if her eyeballs are about to go out of her eyelids, and she is insistently silent as if she couldn't speak.
The servant was clearly aware for the first time that the old woman's life and death were totally under the control of his own will.
And this awareness cooled the hatred that had been burning fiercely in his heart.
All that was left was the peaceful satisfaction of being good at a task.
So the servant, looking down on the old woman, softened his voice a little and said,
"I'm not an police.
I'm a traveler who has just passed under this gate.
So it's not a matter of arresting you.
You just need to tell me what you were doing above the gate at the moment."
Then the old woman's eyes widened and she looked intently at the servant's face.
She looked at him with reddened eyelids and the piercing eyes of a carnivorous bird.
Then she moved her lips almost united with her nose by the wrinkle, as if she were chewing on something.
He could see her adam's apple moving on her narrow throat.
Then from that throat came a raven's chirping voice, panting and panting, to the servant's ears.
"I was thinking of taking this hair out, this hair out, and making it into a wig."
The servant was disappointed by the old woman's answer, which was surprisingly ordinary.
And at the same time as he was disappointed, the previous hatred came into his mind again, with a cold contempt.
Then his feeling must have been communicated to the other side.
The old woman, still holding in one hand a long shedding hair that she had taken from the head of the corpse, said in a mumbling voice like a toad,
"You are right. Pulling out the hair of a corpse is a bad thing.
But all the dead people here deserve to have their hair pulled out.
This woman whose hair I plucked off, cut a snake into 4 inch pieces and dried them, and claiming they were dried fish, went to sell them to the office of Imperial Guard police.
If she hadn't caught the plague and died, she would have gone to sell them even now.
They bought saying, 'The fish her selling tastes good.'
I don't think she did anything wrong.
If she didn't do it, she would have starved to death.
That was unavoidable.
So I don't feel bad about what I was doing now.
If I don't do it, I will die of starvation, I have no choice.
She could know very well that I had no choice.
I'm sure she would tolerate what I have to do."
The old woman said something along these lines.
The servant, with his sword in its scabbard, holding the hilt with his left hand, listened to the story coldly.
With his right hand, of course, he was minding a big pimple with pus on his cheek.
As he listened to this, the servant's heart was filled with courage.
It was the courage that he had lacked earlier under the gate.
And it was the courage to move in the opposite direction from the courage he had shown when he climbed up the gate to capture the old woman.
The servant not only didn't hesitate whether to starve to death or become a thief.
In the mind of this man at that time, the thought of starving to death had been driven out of his consciousness to the point where he could hardly even think about it.
"You're sure of it?"
The servant confirmed it in a mocking voice when the old woman had finished.
Then he stepped forward, abruptly removed his right hand from the pimple, grabbed the old woman by the collar, and said aggressively,
"Well, then, don't hate me if I try to take away your clothes.
If I don't, I'm going to die of starvation."
The servant quickly stripped the old woman of her kimono.
Then he kicked the old woman down on the corpse as she tried to hold on to his leg.
It was only five steps to the mouth of the ladder.
The servant, clutching his stripped cypress-bark-colored kimono by his side, quickly climbed down the steep ladder into the depths of night.
It was not long before the old woman, who had been lying like a corpse for some time, pulled her bare body up from the corpses.
The old woman made a mumbling, groaning noise and crawled to the mouth of the ladder, following the light of the still-burning fire.
And from there, with her short white hair upside down, she peered under the gate.
Outside, there was nothing but black and hollow night.
No one knows where the servant has gone.
(I translated Rashōmon (羅生門) by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa.)
- To return to Japanese short stories translated into English
There was no one else under the wide gate except this man.
There was just a katydid on a large pillar which was painted red but peeling off in some places.
Rashōmon was located on Suzaku Avenue.
So there must be two or three other people there, including women and men who weared their hats, to wait for the rain to stop.
But besides this man, there was no one else.
Because for the past two or three years, Kyoto had had a succession of disasters, such as earthquakes, gusts, fires and famines.
Therefore, the destruction of the city was not the same as in the past.
According to the old documents, Buddha statues and Buddhist instruments were smashed and the wood with vermilion or gold and silver leaf was piled up on the streets and sold as firewood.
Because the things were like this inside the city, there was no one to repair Rashōmon and no one to look after it.
Then, making good use of the desolation, foxes and raccoon dogs inhabited it.
Thieves inhabited it.
At last, it became customary for people to bring the dead, who had no one to take care of them, to the gate and leave them there.
So, when the sun disappears from the sky, everyone got so scared that they don't come to the neighborhood of this gate.
Instead, the ravens came from somewhere, in large numbers.
In the daytime, the ravens flitted about in a circle, chirping, around the ridge-end tile which was like a tail.
When the sky above the gate was red with the setting sun, it looked like sesame seeds sprinkled.
The ravens, of course, came to peck at the flesh of the dead in the gate.
――Today, perhaps because of the late hour, not a single one could be seen.
But there were the ravens' white droppings in places on the crumbling stone steps, where the long grass were.
The servant put the butt of his faded clothes on the top step of the seven stone steps and watched the rain fall in a daze, minding a large pimple on his right cheek.
I wrote earlier, "a servant was waiting for the rain to stop."
However, the servant had no particular plan to do something even if the rain stopped.
Normally, the servant would be able to return to his master's house.
However, the master laid off him four or five days ago.
As I have written before, the city of Kyoto was in decline at that time.
The fact that the servant was laid off by his master who had employed him for many years, was actually a small aftermath of this decline.
Therefore, it would be more appropriate to say "a servant was stuck in the rain and had nowhere to go and was at a loss" rather than "a servant was waiting for the rain to stop."
In addition, the weather conditions today also affected the Sentimentalisme of the servant in Heian period.
The rain that began to fall in the late afternoon was not likely to stop.
So, the servant was absentmindedly listening to the sound of the rain that had been falling on Suzaku Avenue for some time now, thinking about how to deal with his life for the next day at any cost――how to do the impossible.
The rain was wrapping at Rashōmon and gathering a distant rumbling sound.
Darkness gradually lowered the sky, and the edge of the roof of the gate, protruding diagonally, supported the heavy dark clouds.
You can't help but choose the means to do something about the inevitable.
If you choose, you will die under the fence or on the ground by the side of the road.
And it will be brought to the top of this gate, and be abandoned like a dog.
If I don't choose,――
The idea of the servant was that after wandering along the same path many times, he finally arrived at this place.
But this "if I do," however long it took, was still "if I do."
While affirming the fact that the servant should not choose any means, he didn't have the courage to affirm that there is no alternative but to become a thief.
The servant gave a big yawn and then stood up exhaustedly.
It was so cold in the evening chill in Kyoto that he wanted a wooden brazier already.
The wind with the evening darkness blew unreservedly between the pillars of the gate.
The katydid, which had been perched on the red-painted pillar, had already disappeared.
The servant shrugged his neck making the shoulders of his dark blue clothe covering his yellow underwear higher, and looked around the gate.
He thought that he would sleep for the night if he could find a place where he could get away from the wind and rain and not be seen.
Fortunately, he saw a wide ladder, also painted red, leading to the up floor of the gate.
Up there, if there were people, they would be dead anyway.
The servant put his foot with straw sandal onto the bottom rung of the ladder, taking care not to let his sword with hijiri-hilt come out, which he carried around his waist.
A few minutes later, on the middle rung of a wide ladder leading to the up floor of Rashōmon, a man was cowering like a cat, holding for breath, peering up floor.
The firelight from the up of the gate faintly wiped the man's right cheek.
It was a cheek with redly purulent pimple in a short beard.
The servant, from the beginning, had thought that the only people up here were the dead.
But when he climbed up a couple of rungs, he found that there was someone with a fire up there and was moving here and there.
It was easy to recognize because of the murky, yellowish light reflected on the ceiling full of spider webs.
They were not a ordinary person, lighting a fire on this rainy night at Rashōmon.
Squeezing the footsteps like a gecko, the servant finally crawled up the steep ladder to the top step.
Then, flattening his body as much as possible, he put his head forward as far as possible and looked into the up floor.
Inside the gate, as he had heard rumors about, there were a number of corpses discarded in a haphazard manner, but he couldn't tell how many there were because the range of the firelight was smaller than he had expected.
The only thing that can be known was that there were naked corpses and kimono-clad corpses among them, though it was vague.
Of course, there were both women and men in them.
They were lying on the floor with their mouths open and hands outstretched, like dolls made of clay, so that the fact that they had once been living people was in doubt.
They were forever dumb and silent, their shoulders and chests catching the vague light of the fire, darkening the shadows of the lower parts.
The servant involuntarily covered his nose at the rotten smell of those corpses.
However, in the next moment, his hand had already forgotten to cover his nose.
This was because certain strong emotions had robbed this man of his sense of smell at all.
The servant's eyes then saw for the first time a human being crouched in the floor abandoned the corpses.
It was a short, skinny, white-haired, ape-like old woman in a cypress-bark-colored kimono.
The old woman held a piece of lit pine wood in her right hand and looked into the face of one of the corpses.
Judging by the long hair, it was probably the corpse of a woman.
The servant was so moved by 60% of fear and 40% of curiosity that he forgot to breathe for a while.
He felt, in the words of the author of the old documents, as if "the hair on his head was growing fat."
Then the old woman inserted a piece of pine in between the floorboards, put her hands on the neck of the corpse she had been looking at, and began to pull out its long hair, one by one, just as a monkey's parent took a lice of their child.
Apparently the hair fell out according to the hand.
As the hairs fell out one by one, the servant's fear gradually disappeared from his mind.
And at the same time, the hatred for the old woman began to increase little by little.
――it may be misnomer to say "the hatred for the old woman."
The antipathy to all kinds of evil was growing stronger by a minute.
If someone had brought up to the servant the question of starving to death or becoming a thief, which the man had been pondering under the gate, the servant would have chosen to starve to death without a second thought.
So much so that this man's hatred of evil was burning up as vigorously as a piece of lit pine wood inserted in between the floorboards.
The servant, of course, didn't know why the old woman would pull out the corpse's hair.
Therefore, he didn't know, rationally, whether good or evil.
But to the servant, pulling out the hair of a corpse on this rainy night at Rashōmon was already an unforgivable evil in and of itself.
Of course, the servant had forgotten that he had intended to become a thief until a moment ago.
So the servant put all his strength into his legs and jumped up the ladder.
Then he walked in front of the old woman with his hand on the hilt of his sword.
Needless to say, the old woman was astonished.
When the old woman took one look at the servant, she jumped up and down as if she had been hit by a crossbow.
"You bastard! Where are you going?"
The servant said, blocking her way, as the old woman, stumbling over the corpse, tried to flee in a panic.
The old woman still tried to run away pushing away the servant.
The servant also tried to push her to prevent her from going away.
The two grabbed each other in silence for a while amidst the corpses.
But the winner was known from the beginning.
The servant finally grabbed the old woman's arm and forced her down.
The old woman's arm was just like a chicken's leg, just bone and skin.
"What were you doing? Say. You don't say? Look this!"
The servant let go of the old woman and suddenly pulled out his sword and thrust the white steel color of the blade in front of her eyes.
But the old woman was silent.
Her hands trembling, breathing on her shoulders, her eyes open as if her eyeballs are about to go out of her eyelids, and she is insistently silent as if she couldn't speak.
The servant was clearly aware for the first time that the old woman's life and death were totally under the control of his own will.
And this awareness cooled the hatred that had been burning fiercely in his heart.
All that was left was the peaceful satisfaction of being good at a task.
So the servant, looking down on the old woman, softened his voice a little and said,
"I'm not an police.
I'm a traveler who has just passed under this gate.
So it's not a matter of arresting you.
You just need to tell me what you were doing above the gate at the moment."
Then the old woman's eyes widened and she looked intently at the servant's face.
She looked at him with reddened eyelids and the piercing eyes of a carnivorous bird.
Then she moved her lips almost united with her nose by the wrinkle, as if she were chewing on something.
He could see her adam's apple moving on her narrow throat.
Then from that throat came a raven's chirping voice, panting and panting, to the servant's ears.
"I was thinking of taking this hair out, this hair out, and making it into a wig."
The servant was disappointed by the old woman's answer, which was surprisingly ordinary.
And at the same time as he was disappointed, the previous hatred came into his mind again, with a cold contempt.
Then his feeling must have been communicated to the other side.
The old woman, still holding in one hand a long shedding hair that she had taken from the head of the corpse, said in a mumbling voice like a toad,
"You are right. Pulling out the hair of a corpse is a bad thing.
But all the dead people here deserve to have their hair pulled out.
This woman whose hair I plucked off, cut a snake into 4 inch pieces and dried them, and claiming they were dried fish, went to sell them to the office of Imperial Guard police.
If she hadn't caught the plague and died, she would have gone to sell them even now.
They bought saying, 'The fish her selling tastes good.'
I don't think she did anything wrong.
If she didn't do it, she would have starved to death.
That was unavoidable.
So I don't feel bad about what I was doing now.
If I don't do it, I will die of starvation, I have no choice.
She could know very well that I had no choice.
I'm sure she would tolerate what I have to do."
The old woman said something along these lines.
The servant, with his sword in its scabbard, holding the hilt with his left hand, listened to the story coldly.
With his right hand, of course, he was minding a big pimple with pus on his cheek.
As he listened to this, the servant's heart was filled with courage.
It was the courage that he had lacked earlier under the gate.
And it was the courage to move in the opposite direction from the courage he had shown when he climbed up the gate to capture the old woman.
The servant not only didn't hesitate whether to starve to death or become a thief.
In the mind of this man at that time, the thought of starving to death had been driven out of his consciousness to the point where he could hardly even think about it.
"You're sure of it?"
The servant confirmed it in a mocking voice when the old woman had finished.
Then he stepped forward, abruptly removed his right hand from the pimple, grabbed the old woman by the collar, and said aggressively,
"Well, then, don't hate me if I try to take away your clothes.
If I don't, I'm going to die of starvation."
The servant quickly stripped the old woman of her kimono.
Then he kicked the old woman down on the corpse as she tried to hold on to his leg.
It was only five steps to the mouth of the ladder.
The servant, clutching his stripped cypress-bark-colored kimono by his side, quickly climbed down the steep ladder into the depths of night.
It was not long before the old woman, who had been lying like a corpse for some time, pulled her bare body up from the corpses.
The old woman made a mumbling, groaning noise and crawled to the mouth of the ladder, following the light of the still-burning fire.
And from there, with her short white hair upside down, she peered under the gate.
Outside, there was nothing but black and hollow night.
No one knows where the servant has gone.
(I translated Rashōmon (羅生門) by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa.)
- To return to Japanese short stories translated into English