羅生門 English

It was an evening toward the close of one day.

A servant was waiting for the rain to let up beneath the Rashomon gate.

Beneath the broad gate, there was no one else but this man.

Only a single cricket clung to one of the large pillars, its red lacquer peeling here and there.

Since the Rashomon stood on Suzaku Avenue, one would expect to find two or three other figures sheltering from the rain — women in market hats, men in soft lacquered caps.

Yet there was no one but this man.

The reason was that Kyoto, over the past few years, had been struck by one calamity after another — earthquakes, whirlwinds, fires, famines.

The desolation of the city was beyond ordinary description.

According to old records, people smashed Buddhist statues and sacred implements and piled up the painted and gold-leafed timber by the roadside to sell as firewood.

With the city itself in such a state, no one gave a thought to repairing the Rashomon.

Taking advantage of the ruin, foxes and badgers made it their den.

Thieves took up residence there.

And in the end a custom arose of bringing the unclaimed dead to the gate and leaving them behind.

And so once the light of day was gone, everyone found the place eerie and would not venture near the gate.

In its place, crows had gathered in great numbers from somewhere.

During the day one could see any number of them wheeling and crying around the tall ridge ornaments of the roof.

And especially when the sky above the gate reddened with the evening glow, they were visible as clearly as scattered sesame seeds.

The crows came, of course, to peck at the flesh of the dead that lay atop the gate.

Today, however, perhaps because of the late hour, not a single crow was to be seen.

Only on the stone steps — crumbling here and there, with long grass sprouting from the cracks — crow droppings clung in white specks.

The servant sat on the topmost of the seven steps, the skirt of his faded indigo kimono tucked beneath him, absently watching the rain fall, one hand picking at a large festering pimple on his right cheek.

The author wrote just now that "the servant was waiting for the rain to let up"

— and so he had written.

But even if the rain did let up, the man had no particular idea what to do next.

Ordinarily, of course, he would have returned to his master's house.

But that master had dismissed him four or five days ago.

As noted above, Kyoto at that time was in a state of unusual decline.

The servant's dismissal from the master he had long served was nothing more than a small ripple from that larger decay.

So it would be more accurate to say not that "the servant was waiting for the rain to let up,"

but rather that he was "a servant caught in the rain with nowhere to go and no idea what to do"

— that phrasing would be more fitting.

Moreover, the weather that day had done no small amount to deepen the melancholy — the sentimentalisme — of this Heian-era servant.

The rain had begun around the Hour of the Monkey and showed no sign of stopping.

And so the servant, putting all else aside, was trying to think of what to do about tomorrow — trying, that is, to work out something that could not be worked out — turning over one idle thought after another while, without quite listening, he heard the sound of rain falling on Suzaku Avenue.

The rain enveloped the Rashomon, gathering the sound of a distant rush and drawing it near.

The evening dark gradually lowered the sky, and looking up, one could see the roof — its eaves jutting at an angle — propping up the heavy, dusky clouds.

To do something about what could not be done, one had no leisure to be choosy about means.

If he was choosy, he would simply starve to death in the ditch beneath some mud wall, or in the dirt of a roadside.

And then be hauled to this gate and dumped like a dog.

If he was not choosy — the servant's thoughts had circled the same road many times before arriving at this point.

But no matter how often he arrived there, this "if"

remained forever, in the end, an "if"

— just that.

Though the servant affirmed that he would not be particular about means, to resolve this "if"

he could not find the courage to affirm positively what naturally followed: that "there was nothing for it but to become a thief."

He lacked the courage to embrace that conclusion actively.

The servant gave a great sneeze, then rose heavily to his feet.

The evening chill of Kyoto had grown sharp enough to make one long for a charcoal brazier.

The wind swept without restraint through the pillars of the gate, bringing the dusk with it.

The cricket that had perched on the red-lacquered pillar was gone now.

The servant hunched his neck into his shoulders and, pulling high the collar of his indigo kimono worn over a yellow undergarment, glanced around the base of the gate.

He was looking for some place sheltered from wind and rain, out of sight of others, where he might pass the night in reasonable comfort.

As luck would have it, his eye fell on a wide, red-lacquered stairway leading up to the gatehouse above.

Anyone up there would surely be a corpse and no more.

Taking care that the sacred-handled sword at his hip did not slip from its scabbard, the servant lifted a foot in its straw sandal onto the lowest step.

Some minutes later.

On the middle of the wide stairway leading up to the gatehouse of the Rashomon, a man crouched like a cat, holding his breath, peering up at what lay above.

From the light of a fire burning in the upper room, a faint gleam touched the man's right cheek.

It was the cheek where, amid short stubble, a large pimple swollen red with pus had formed.

The servant had assumed from the start that only corpses were up there.

But climbing two or three steps, he could see that someone had lit a fire above and was moving it about.

He could tell immediately from the murky yellow light as it swayed and shimmered across the cobwebbed ceiling beams.

Whoever was up there lighting a fire on this rainy night, in this Rashomon, was surely no ordinary person.

The servant stole up the steep staircase without a sound, like a lizard, crawling almost to the very top.

Then, pressing his body as flat as he could and stretching his neck out as far as it would go, he peered fearfully into the gatehouse.

Inside the gatehouse, just as rumor had it, a number of corpses lay sprawled at random; but since the firelight reached less far than he had expected, he could not tell how many.

He could make out only dimly that among them were naked bodies and clothed bodies.

Of course, among them there were apparently both women and men.

And the corpses all lay tumbled across the floorboards — mouths open, arms flung out — like clay figures, so utterly still that one could almost doubt they had ever been living people.

And on the raised parts — shoulders, chests — the faint firelight settled, throwing the hollows into deeper shadow, while over it all lay a silence as absolute as that of the mute.

The servant could not help covering his nose at the stench of the rotting corpses.

But in the next moment his hand forgot to cover his nose.

A powerful emotion had seized away nearly all of his sense of smell.

It was then that the servant's eyes first found the human figure crouching among the corpses.

A short, lean, white-haired old woman in a bark-brown kimono, ape-like in her smallness.

She held a lit pine splinter in her right hand and was peering close at one of the corpses' faces.

From the length of the hair, the corpse was probably a woman.

Moved by six parts fear and four parts curiosity, the servant had forgotten even to breathe.

To borrow the words of an old chronicler, "the very hairs of his body were standing on end"

— that is how he felt.

Then the old woman wedged the pine splinter between the floorboards, and with both hands she grasped the neck of the corpse she had been staring at and began to pluck, one by one, the long hairs from its head — the way a mother ape picks lice from her young.

The hair seemed to come away easily with each pull.

With each hair that was plucked away, the servant's fear ebbed a little.

And at the same time, in its place, a fierce hatred for the old woman began to stir.

Or perhaps it would be more precise to say that what rose up was not hatred directed at the old woman specifically.

Rather, it was a revulsion toward all evil, growing stronger with every passing moment.

If someone had come to this servant now and put to him again the question he had been turning over beneath the gate — starve or steal — he would almost certainly have chosen starvation without a moment's hesitation.

His hatred of wickedness was blazing up that fiercely, like the pine splinter the old woman had stuck in the floor.

The servant had no idea, of course, why the old woman was pulling the hair from a dead person.

Rationally, he did not know how to judge it as good or evil.

But for him, on this rainy night, in this Rashomon, the act of pulling hair from a corpse was in itself an unpardonable evil.

Of course, the servant had long since forgotten that only moments before he himself had been contemplating a life of theft.

The servant put his strength into both legs and sprang up from the stairway in one motion.

And with his hand on the hilt of his sacred-handled sword, he strode in long strides toward the old woman.

It goes without saying that the old woman was startled.

The old woman took one look at the servant and leaped to her feet as though shot from a crossbow.

"Stop! Where do you think you're going?"

The servant cut off the old woman's path as she stumbled over corpses in her frantic attempt to flee, and shouted at her.

She still tried to shove him aside and push through.

He shoved her back.

For a moment the two of them grappled in silence among the corpses.

But the outcome was clear from the start.

The servant finally seized her by the arm and forced her down.

Her arm was nothing but skin and bone, like the leg of a chicken.

"What were you doing? Out with it. Out with it, or you'll get this."

The servant released the old woman, then in a single motion drew his sword and thrust the white blade before her eyes.

Still she was silent.

Hands trembling violently, chest heaving, eyes wrenched open so wide that the eyeballs seemed about to leave their sockets, she stared in a dumb, stubborn silence.

Seeing this, the servant became clearly aware for the first time that this old woman's life and death lay entirely in his own hands.

With that awareness, the fierce hatred that had been burning in him moments ago quietly cooled without his noticing.

What remained was only the calm satisfaction and ease that comes when one has set out to do a thing and brought it to smooth completion.

The servant looked down at the old woman and softened his voice a little.

"I'm not an officer of the Imperial Police. I'm just a traveler who happened to pass beneath this gate a little while ago. I have no intention of putting you in chains or anything like that. All I want is for you to tell me what you were doing up here just now."

The old woman opened her already wide eyes still further and fixed them on the servant's face.

Her eyes were sharp and reddish-rimmed like those of a bird of prey.

Then her lips — so creased by wrinkles that they nearly merged with her nose — began to move, as though chewing something.

Her thin throat moved, and the pointed lump of her Adam's apple was visible.

Then from that throat came a sound like the cawing of a crow, rasping and gasping, reaching the servant's ears.

"I was pulling out this hair, pulling out this hair, to make a wig out of it, you see."

The servant was disappointed to find the old woman's answer so unexpectedly ordinary.

With the disappointment came the return of that cold contempt alongside the hatred he had felt before.

This must have shown on his face, for the old woman sensed the change in his expression.

Still clutching in one hand the long hair she had plucked from the corpse's head, the old woman spoke in a low, toad-like mumble.

"Sure, pulling hair from the dead — you might well say that's a terrible thing to do. But the dead people here, every last one of them, is the kind of person who had it coming. Take the woman whose hair I just pulled — she used to chop snake into four-inch lengths, dry them, and sell them to the guards at their camps, telling them it was dried fish. If she hadn't gone and died of the plague, she'd probably be out selling it still. And thing is, the guards said her dried fish tasted fine, and they bought it regularly for their side dishes. I don't think what she did was wrong. If she didn't do it, she would have starved to death — she had no choice. So I don't think what I was doing is wrong either.

This too — if I didn't do it, I'd starve to death, so there's no other way.

So this woman, who knew full well what it is to have no choice, would most likely forgive me for what I'm doing."

The old woman said something to this effect.

The servant sheathed his sword, rested his left hand on the hilt, and listened to the old woman's words with cold detachment.

His right hand, meanwhile, was still picking idly at the large pimple on his cheek, red and swollen with pus.

But as he listened, a certain courage began to rise in his heart.

It was the very courage that had been lacking in him beneath the gate a short while before.

And it was a courage moving in exactly the opposite direction from the courage with which he had climbed up here and seized the old woman.

No longer did the servant waver between starving to death and becoming a thief.

In his state of mind at that moment, the thought of starving had been all but driven out of his awareness, beyond the reach of consciousness.

"Is that so? Is that really so?"

When the old woman finished speaking, the servant pressed her with a mocking tone.

Then he stepped one pace forward, suddenly pulled his right hand away from the pimple, seized the old woman by the scruff of her neck, and said in a voice like a snarl:

"Then don't go blaming me for robbing you. I'd do the same — starve otherwise, so there's no choice."

The servant swiftly stripped the old woman of her kimono.

Then when she clung to his legs, he kicked her roughly down onto the corpses.

The opening of the stairway was only five paces away.

The servant tucked the stripped bark-brown kimono under his arm and in an instant flew down the steep stairs into the darkness of the night below.

It was not long afterward that the old woman, who had lain crumpled among the corpses as though dead, raised her naked body from the heap.

Murmuring and moaning to herself, she crawled by the light of the still-burning fire to the opening of the stairway.

There, hanging her short white hair upside down, she peered down into the gate below.

Outside there was nothing — only the impenetrable dark of night.

No one knows where the servant went.