The Project Gutenberg eBook of Rashomon

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Title: Rashomon

Author: Ryūnosuke Akutagawa

Release date: November 1, 1999 [eBook #1982]
Most recently updated: April 15, 2013

Language: Japanese

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1982

Credits: Produced by Rick Davis

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 羅生門 ***

Produced by Rick Davis

RASHOMON

By AKUTAGAWA Ryunosuke

A note from the digitizer

This file is encoded in Japanese. Your computer must be Japanese-capable to read it.

The text was taken from a 1917 edition which is naturally written in the traditional orthography with prewar kanji forms. I have taken the liberty of using postwar orthography and kanji forms, and have also added readings in parentheses where I considered them necessary.

Rashomon

Ryūnosuke Akutagawa

　It was a late afternoon in a certain year. A lone servant was waiting for the rain to let up beneath the Rashomon gate. In the wide space under the gate, there was no one else besides this man. Only a single cricket perched on one of the large round pillars, its vermilion paint flaking in places. Since the Rashomon stood on Suzaku Avenue, one would expect that besides this man, there might be two or three others—women in market-woman's hats or men in soft black headgear—also waiting out the rain. Yet there was no one but this man. Why? Because for the past two or three years, Kyoto had been struck by a succession of calamities—earthquakes, whirlwinds, fires, and famines. The desolation of the capital was beyond measure. According to old records, people smashed Buddhist statues and altar fittings, piling up the wood—still bearing traces of vermilion or gold and silver leaf—by the roadside to sell as firewood. If the capital itself was in such a state, it was no wonder that no one ever gave a thought to repairing the Rashomon. Taking advantage of its ruin, foxes made their dens there, and thieves made their lairs. In the end, a custom even arose of bringing unclaimed corpses to this gate and abandoning them there. Thus, when darkness fell, everyone felt uneasy and avoided setting foot anywhere near the gate. Instead, crows gathered in great numbers from somewhere. By day, one could see them tracing countless circles, cawing as they wheeled about the high ornamental ridge-end tiles. Especially when the sky above the gate reddened with the evening glow, they stood out clearly like scattered sesame seeds. The crows, of course, came to peck at the flesh of the dead lying atop the gate—though today, perhaps because it was late, not a single one was visible. Only here and there, on the crumbling stone steps whose cracks were overgrown with long grass, could one see the crows' droppings, stuck in white patches. The servant sat down on the topmost of the seven stone steps, settling his washed-out dark blue jacket beneath him, and, fretting over the large pimple that had come up on his right cheek, stared vacantly at the falling rain. The author wrote earlier that "the servant was waiting for the rain to let up." But even if the rain stopped, the servant had no particular plan for what to do. Ordinarily, of course, he ought to have returned to his master's house. Yet his master had dismissed him four or five days earlier. As I mentioned before, the city of Kyoto was in a state of decline beyond measure at that time. That this servant had been dismissed by the master who had employed him for many years was nothing more than a small ripple of that decline. Thus, rather than saying "the servant was waiting for the rain to let up," it would be more apt to say "a servant, trapped by the rain, with nowhere to go, was at his wit's end." Moreover, the look of the sky that day had not a little influence on this Heian-period servant's Sentimentalisme. The rain, which had begun to fall in the late afternoon, showed no sign of letting up. And so the servant, trying somehow to manage the next day's livelihood before anything else—trying, so to speak, to manage what could not be managed—traced a chain of disjointed thoughts, listening without really listening to the sound of the rain falling on Suzaku Avenue. The rain wrapped around the Rashomon, gathering from afar the sound of a great rushing roar. The dusk lowered the sky gradually, and looking up, one could see the gate's roof supporting heavy, dim clouds on the tips of its projecting eaves. To manage what could not be managed, there was no leisure to choose one's means. If one chose, one would only starve to death beneath an earthen wall or on the dirt by the roadside, and then be brought to this gate and discarded like a dog. If one did not choose—the servant's thoughts, after wandering again and again along the same path, finally arrived at this conclusion. Yet this "if" was, no matter how many times he turned it over, in the end still an "if." Even as he affirmed the idea of not choosing his means, he could not summon the courage to actively affirm what must necessarily follow: that there was no choice but to become a thief. The servant let out a great sneeze, then rose wearily to his feet. The evening chill of Kyoto was already cold enough to make one long for a brazier. The wind blew mercilessly through the gaps between the gate's pillars, together with the deepening dusk. The cricket that had been perched on the vermilion pillar had already gone off somewhere. The servant, hunching his neck, raised the shoulders of his dark blue jacket, worn over a yellow unlined robe, and looked around the gate. He was thinking that if there were some place sheltered from wind and rain, and free from the fear of being seen, where he could sleep comfortably through the night, he would spend it there somehow. Then his eye fell on a wide ladder, also painted vermilion, that led up to the gate's upper floor. Up there, even if there were people, they would surely be nothing but corpses. The servant, careful that the long sword with the priestly hilt at his waist should not slip from its sheath, set his straw-sandaled foot on the lowest rung of the ladder. Some minutes later. Halfway up the wide ladder leading to the upper floor of the Rashomon, a man, crouching like a cat, held his breath and peered at what was above. The faint light of a fire from the upper floor moistened the man's right cheek. It was a cheek with a red, pus-filled pimple among its short stubble. From the start, the servant had assumed that whoever was up there would be nothing but corpses. But when he had climbed two or three rungs, he saw that someone above had lit a fire and seemed to be moving it about here and there. The murky yellow light, flickering, was reflected in the cobwebbed corners of the ceiling, and he knew it at once. On this rainy night, atop this Rashomon, whoever was lighting a fire was surely no ordinary person. The servant, stealing his footsteps like a shrine keeper, finally climbed the steep ladder to the topmost rung, crawling as if on all fours. Then, flattening his body as much as he could and thrusting his neck forward as far as possible, he timidly peered into the upper chamber. What he saw was that, as rumor had it, several corpses lay carelessly discarded inside, but the range of the firelight was narrower than he had expected, so he could not tell how many there were. All he could vaguely discern was that among them were naked corpses and corpses in clothing. Of course, men and women seemed to be mixed among them. And all these corpses, so much so that one might doubt they had ever been living human beings, lay tumbled about the floor like clay dolls, mouths agape, arms outstretched. Moreover, the raised parts—shoulders and chests—caught the dim firelight, casting the hollows into deeper shadow, and they were silent forever, as if mute. The servant, involuntarily, covered his nose against the stench of the rotting corpses. But the next moment, his hand had already forgotten to cover his nose. For a powerful emotion had almost entirely robbed the man of his sense of smell. It was then that the servant's eyes, for the first time, saw a human figure crouching among the corpses. It was a short, thin, white-haired old woman, dressed in a cypress-bark-colored robe, looking like a monkey. In her right hand she held a burning pine torch, and she was gazing as if peering into the face of one of the corpses. Judging by the length of its hair, it was probably the corpse of a woman. The servant, moved by six parts fear and four parts curiosity, forgot even to breathe for a while. To borrow the words of the old chronicler, he felt as if "the hairs of his head and body were standing on end." Then the old woman, thrusting the pine torch between the floorboards, took the head of the corpse she had been gazing at in both hands and began to pull out its long hair, one strand at a time, just as a mother monkey picks lice from her child. The hair seemed to come out easily with her hands. As each strand of hair was pulled out, the fear in the servant's heart gradually faded. And at the same time, a fierce hatred for the old woman gradually stirred within him. No—perhaps it would be misleading to say hatred for this old woman. Rather, it was a revulsion against all evil, growing stronger with each passing minute. At this moment, if someone had brought up again the question the man had been pondering beneath the gate—whether to starve to death or become a thief—the servant would likely have chosen starvation without a moment's hesitation. So fiercely was the man's hatred of evil blazing up, like the pine torch the old woman had thrust into the floor. The servant, of course, did not understand why the old woman was pulling the dead woman's hair. Accordingly, he could not rationally decide whether it was good or evil. But for the servant, the very act of pulling a dead person's hair on this rainy night, atop this Rashomon, was already in itself an unforgivable evil. Of course, the servant had long since forgotten that until a moment ago he himself had been thinking of becoming a thief. And so the servant, putting strength into both legs, leapt up from the ladder onto the floor, and, hand on the hilt of his long sword, strode up to the old woman in great steps. Needless to say, the old woman was startled. The moment she saw the servant, she sprang up as if shot from a crossbow. "You—where do you think you're going?" The servant, blocking the path of the old woman as she stumbled over the corpses and tried frantically to flee, shouted this abuse at her. Even so, the old woman tried to shove past him. The servant, in turn, pushed her back, refusing to let her pass. The two grappled in silence for a while among the corpses. But the outcome was clear from the start. The servant finally seized the old woman's arm and forced her down to the floor. It was an arm of nothing but bone and skin, like a chicken's leg. "What were you doing? Come on, what were you doing? Speak. If you don't, this is what you'll get!" The servant, releasing the old woman, suddenly drew his sword from its sheath and thrust the white gleam of the steel before her eyes. But the old woman remained silent. Her hands trembling, her breath coming in gasps from her shoulders, her eyes so wide that the eyeballs seemed about to pop from their lids, she remained stubbornly mute, like a deaf-mute. Seeing this, the servant for the first time became clearly conscious that the old woman's life or death was entirely in his hands. And this consciousness, before he knew it, cooled the hatred that had been burning so fiercely until now. What remained was only the calm pride and satisfaction of one who has accomplished a task and brought it to a successful end. And so the servant, looking down at the old woman, softened his voice a little and said: "I'm not an officer of the police commissioner's office. I'm a traveler who just happened to pass beneath this gate. So I have no intention of binding you or doing anything to you. I only want you to tell me what you were doing up here on this gate at this hour." At this, the old woman widened her already wide-open eyes even further and stared fixedly at the servant's face. She looked at him with sharp, bloodshot eyes, like a bird of prey. Then, moving her lips—which, wrinkled, had almost merged with her nose—as if chewing on something, she spoke. Through her thin throat, one could see her sharp Adam's apple moving. And then, from that throat, a voice like a crow's caw came, gasping, to the servant's ears. "I was pulling this hair—this woman's hair—to make a wig." The servant was disappointed that the old woman's answer was so unexpectedly commonplace. And at the same time as his disappointment, the former hatred came back into his heart, together with a cold contempt. Perhaps his expression conveyed this to the other. The old woman, still holding in one hand the long strands of hair she had plucked from the corpse's head, spoke haltingly in a voice like a toad's croak, saying something like this: "Indeed, pulling the hair of the dead may be a bad thing. But these dead—most of them—are people who deserve to have such things done to them. Take this woman whose hair I've just pulled: she used to cut up snake meat into four-inch pieces, dry them, and sell them as dried fish at the Tachibana camp. If she hadn't died of plague, she might still be selling them now. And the soldiers, saying her dried fish tasted good, bought them without fail as a side dish. I don't think what this woman did was wrong. She did it because she had to, or she would have starved to death. So I don't think what I'm doing now is wrong either. I'm doing it because I have to, or I would starve to death. And I'm sure this woman, who knew well what it means to have no choice, would forgive what I do." —The old woman said roughly this. The servant sheathed his sword and, pressing its hilt with his left hand, listened to her story coldly. Of course, with his right hand, he was fretting over the large red, pus-filled pimple on his cheek as he listened. But as he listened, a certain courage was born in the servant's heart. It was the courage that had been lacking in this man a while ago beneath the gate. And it was, moreover, a courage that moved in a direction entirely opposite to the courage he had felt when he climbed to the top of this gate and seized the old woman. The servant did not merely cease to hesitate between starving to death and becoming a thief. Judging from the man's state of mind at that moment, the very thought of starving to death had been driven almost entirely out of his consciousness, beyond even the possibility of consideration. "Is that so?" When the old woman finished speaking, the servant pressed her with a mocking voice. Then, stepping forward, he suddenly took his right hand away from his pimple, seized the old woman by the collar of her robe, and said: "Then you won't resent me if I rob you. I too must do this, or I will starve to death." The servant swiftly stripped the old woman of her robe. Then, kicking her down roughly onto the corpses as she tried to cling to his legs, he counted only five steps to the top of the ladder. Clutching the stripped cypress-bark-colored robe under his arm, he sped down the steep ladder into the depths of the night in an instant. It was shortly after that the old woman, who had lain as if dead for a while, raised her naked body from among the corpses. Groaning and muttering, she crawled to the top of the ladder, guided by the light of the still-burning fire. And from there, tilting her short white hair downward, she peered beneath the gate. Outside, there was only the pitch darkness of the night. The servant had already hurried off into the city of Kyoto, braving the rain, to commit robbery.

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