Rashoumon, by Ryuunosuke Akutagawa

∴ ∴ ∴ ∴ ∴

It happened that, as night fell upon a certain day, a servant was waiting beneath the Rashoumon for the rain to stop.

Beneath the broad expanse of the gate, there was only the one man. Well — a single cricket had settled upon a great round pillar from which the red lacquer peeled, here and there, in little patches. But, since the Rashoumon sits on Suzaku Avenue, you’d think there might have been someone other than this man waiting out the rain; some women’s veils or some soft crumpled hats perhaps, just two or three people at the very least standing beneath the gate. But no — there was no one but this man.

I’ll tell you that for two or three years in Kyoto, calamities like earthquakes and fires and whirlwinds and famine had occurred one right after the other — and so, appropriately, Kyoto’s resultant decline was no simple proceeding. According to the old chronicles, even effigies bearing the likeness of the Buddha (as well as the shrine paraphernalia) were smashed into kindling, still coated with red lacquer or gold and silver gilt, and sold along the roadside as firewood. This is what I meant by "no simple proceeding."

Since conditions in Kyoto had degenerated so precipitously, things like historical-landmark repair fell by the wayside; nobody cared about patching up the Rashoumon. And so, many opportunistic tenants had taken advantage of the gate’s deterioration. Foxes and badgers lived there. Thieves lived there. In the end, the Rashoumon even became a place to discard unclaimed corpses. And so, after sunset, the gate gave everyone a terrible feeling, and no one dared set foot in (or near) it.

Instead, crows gathered there, drawn from who-knows-where. In the daylight hours those crows, in countless numbers, drew circles high in the sky over the gate’s ornamental roof tiles, cawing and flapping about. And when the sky above the Rashoumon turned red at sunset, you could see them all scattered about in the air like sesame seeds. Of course, the crows came to the top of the gate to pick at the meat of the corpses; but on this day, perhaps because it had grown so late, there was not a single bird to be seen. Only, here and there upon the Rashoumon’s seven stone steps (which had begun to moulder and break apart, and through whose cracks long grasses grew), the crows’ white droppings were visible. The servant sat his rump, clad in a worn-out blue ao, down upon the last of these seven stone steps and, while staring vacantly at the rain, began to fuss at a large red pimple throbbing on his right cheek.

Well, I told you that the servant was "waiting for the rain to stop." And although it was certainly true that he was waiting for the rain to subside, it would probably be better to say, "the servant didn’t know what to do." He had no plans. Normally, of course, he would be expected to return home to his lord. But, the servant had been sent away from his lord’s household four or five days earlier. Before, I told you that the decline of Kyoto was no simple proceeding, and the dismissal of this particular servant, who had been employed by the same master for years, was nothing more than a minor consequence of that decline. So, rather than saying, "The servant was waiting for the rain to stop," it would perhaps be better to tell you that, "The servant, who was trapped by the rain and had no place to go, was at a loss." Furthermore, this Heian servant’s frame of mind was more than a little influenced by the weather. The rain had begun to fall just after the hour of the Monkey, and so far it had shown no signs of letting up. And so, for the time being, the servant was preoccupied by random thoughts of how he might manage to survive for another day — such a hopeless thing to have to do! — while upon Suzaku Avenue the noise of the falling rain descended all around him. He wasn’t really listening to it.

From miles away the rain had come to wrap up the Rashoumon, and the gate was confined by the sounds of its sighing. The evening darkness brought the sky low and lower; if someone had looked up just then at the Rashoumon’s roof where it stuck out diagonally into the air, the tips of the roof tiles might have looked as if they were holding up the heavy, gloomy clouds.

If the servant meant to see his way through this hopeless situation, he didn’t have the leisure to be selective in his choices. If he could not do what needed to be done, he would either starve to death beneath the roofed mud-wall of the Rashoumon, or starve to death at the side of the road. Either way, he would eventually be borne to the top of the gate and abandoned like a dog. If it just so happened that he did not choose death, though — the servant’s thoughts meandered down that path several times, and despite his best efforts he inevitably encountered the same conclusion: this "if it just so happened" business was still only hypothetical. Even though he wasn’t keen on choosing the style and method of his own imminent demise, the alternative meant that (to bring the line of reasoning to its natural conclusion) he would have to admit to himself that he had no choice other than to become a robber. But he found that, enthusiastic as he was to survive by any means, he couldn’t quite muster up the courage to endorse those thoughts with actions.

The servant sneezed, and then, wearily, he stood. The evening’s chill had made it so cold in Kyoto that night that he longed for a brazier. The gusting wind blew all around him without ceasing, and in the company of the evening darkness it occupied the great spaces between the gate’s pillars. Even the cricket on the vermillion-lacquered post had already abandoned him.

The servant ducked his head, pulled higher onto his shoulders the dark-blue ao (which he’d layered over a kazami the color of a yellow rose), and looked around him. He thought that perhaps he might spend the night here; if he could find a place near the Rashoumon to sleep, he would be free from the distress of the wind and the rain, and he would also be hidden from view. Luckily, just then the wide, vermillion-lacquered ladder which led up to the tower at the top of the gate caught his eye. If he climbed up that ladder, even if he did see another person, it would only be a corpse! To that end, the servant — making sure that the wooden-hilted sword hanging at his waist hadn’t slipped out of its scabbard — placed one warazouri-clad foot on the ladder’s bottom-most step.

A few moments passed as he climbed; the tower at the top of the Rashoumon emerged. Halfway up the broad ladder the man stopped, held his breath, scrunched up his body like a cat’s, and peeped overhead to see what lay waiting for him. For, from the tower above, firelight spilled faintly down upon him, illuminating that red, pus-filled pimple that nestled within the short whiskers on his cheek. The servant had clearly misjudged the situation, thinking that the only people who could be waiting in the tower above the Rashoumon were corpses. As far as that went, though, he thought he might venture a step or two up the ladder, and from that vantage-point see who it was that had lit the torch. It became immediately evident that someone had to be carrying the flame all around the tower; the light of the fire seemed to move about, here and there in the darkness. The murky yellow light shuddered, reflected upon the great spider-webs that hung from the ceiling, and the servant knew that no ordinary human being would ever come to the top of the Rashoumon on a rain-drenched night like this one just to light a torch.

The servant — lizard-like, on silent feet — made his way to the upper-most rung of the ladder with a great deal of effort, then crawled to the top of the tower. He made his body as flat as possible; he stuck out his head as far as it would go; fearfully, he tried to have a look at whatever lurked inside the tower.

In the narrow compass of torchlight the servant saw, just as the rumors had suggested, a number of abandoned corpses carelessly strewn about — but the circle of light was not as bright as he'd expected, and he could not be certain of their exact number. But, although he couldn’t see them very clearly, he realized that there were naked corpses mixed in together with the clothed ones, and that dead men had been jumbled together with dead women. It seemed impossible that the things lying on the floor like lumpen mud dolls — mouths gaping, hands stretching out, lying cluttered together in an untidy heap — had once been real, living people. And, because the parts of the corpses that were thrust upward into the air (like their shoulders and chests) were bathed in the indistinct firelight, the shadowed regions beneath seemed all the darker by comparison. The corpses, now quiet as deaf-mutes, had been silenced forever.

Without thinking, the servant immediately raised his hand to his nose, to cover the stench of the rotting bodies. But, in the next moment, he’d forgotten all about both the hand and the nose; so powerful was the emotion that rose up within him that he was robbed of the sense of smell.

For the first time, the servant saw that among the corpses squatted a living human being. It was a short, thin old woman, white-haired and monkey-faced, wearing clothes the color of cyprus bark. In her right hand she held a lit, pine-branch torch, and she peered closely at of one of the corpses, as if contemplating its face — and judging by the corpse’s long hair, it was probably the body of a woman.

For a moment, the servant (who was 60% frightened and 40% curious) was drawn completely out of himself, and failed even to remember to breathe. To borrow an expression from the old chroniclers, "he felt as if all the hair of his head and body were standing out on end." At that very moment, the old woman stuck the pine-branch torch into the floorboards and began, with both hands, to pluck the hair from the corpse at which she had been staring so raptly. She looked like a mother monkey picking nits off its monkey child — and for its part, the hair seemed to fly obediently into her hand of its own accord.

With every hair on the corpse’s head that dutifully allowed itself to be plucked without resistance, the fear vanished from the servant’s heart a little at a time. And at the same time that that happened, the servant found an intense hatred toward this old woman beginning to stir, a little at a time, within his breast. — Well, perhaps it is a bit misleading to say "toward the old woman." Rather, it was that the servant began to be repulsed by absolutely every element of wickedness in the world, and with each passing instant the feeling seemed to grow stronger. If someone had once again posed the question that he had contemplated so recently beneath the gate — whether to starve to death or to rob people for a living — I think that this man, with no trace of regret, in that particular moment would very likely have chosen to starve. It was in this ecstasy of loathing for the iniquity of mankind that the heart of the servant, like the pine-branch torch the old woman had shoved between the floorboards, burst energetically into flames.

The servant, of course, had no idea why the old woman was pulling out the corpse’s hair. Therefore, rationally speaking, he had no way to judge whether the act was good or evil. But, for the servant, in the tower at the top of the Rashoumon on this rain-drenched night, the removal of the corpse’s hair was nothing short of an unforgivable evil. (Of course, he had already forgotten that he had, not a few moments before, declared his intention to become a thief himself.)

And so, putting the force of both legs beneath him, the servant suddenly leapt up off the ladder. Placing his hand on the plain wooden hilt of his sword, with long strides he marched right up to the old woman. (It goes without saying that she was rather surprised.)

The old woman took one look at the servant and then, as though she had been shot out of a sling, she jumped straight past him.

"You! Where are you going?"

As the old woman tripped over corpses in her haste to escape, the servant cursed her and blocked the path to the ladder. Nevertheless, the old woman thrust him aside and did her best to get away. Once again, the servant shoved her back. For awhile, among the corpses, the two of them grappled in silent combat. But, I’m sure you knew the outcome of the fight from the very beginning. Finally, the servant grabbed the old woman’s arm — which was skin and bone, like a chicken’s foot — and wrestled her to the floor.

"What were you doing? Speak! If you don’t speak, it’s this for you!"

The servant pushed the old woman away and, without warning, tossed aside the scabbard and flashed the white steel of the sword right in front of her face. The old woman was utterly speechless. Her hands trembled, her shoulders heaved as she gasped for breath, and her eyes were so wide-open they seemed to bulge from their sockets — but, like a deaf-mute, she stubbornly remained silent. When the servant saw this, he became aware for the very first time that he held the old woman’s life in his hands. This awareness began to cool the fire of hatred that burned in his heart, until at last it was extinguished completely. What remained in the aftermath was simply that sense of tranquility and egotistical satisfaction that accompanies a particular job well-done, and nothing more. The servant, still looking down upon the old woman but finally softening his voice a bit, said:

"I’m not some sort of government official from the police commissioner’s office. I’m just a traveler who happened to pass by beneath this gate. So, I’m not going to do anything like tie you up with a rope and arrest you," he said. "Only, just now, up here in this tower — what was it you were doing? It would be very good if you would only tell me that."

Hearing that, the old woman opened her boggling eyes one degree wider and stared fixedly into the servant’s face. From beneath eyelids that had grown red as a carnivorous bird’s, she peered at him shrewdly. Her mouth, which had been so consumed by wrinkles that it almost seemed to merge with her nose, moved as if she were chewing. In her thin throat, her pointed Adam’s apple bobbed visibly. And then, issuing from that very throat, a panting voice like the caw of a crow fell upon the servant’s ears:

"I’m pulling this hair, you see — I’m pulling it, you see — I plan to make a wig."

The old woman’s mundane explanation defied the servant’s wild expectations, and he found himself disappointed. And so, as he began to feel disappointed, the hatred of a moment before — combined with cold contempt — began to reassert itself within his breast. Somehow, those feelings must have been transmitted to his counterpart, there in the tower. The old woman held up in one hand the long hair that she’d plucked from the corpse’s head, and began mumbling in a voice like the croak of a toad. She said something like this:

"It’s just as you say; something like plucking the hair off a corpse may be an evil thing to do. But, the kind of dead people you’ll find up here in the Rashoumon — they deserve no better. Now, this woman whose hair I was pulling — she used to cut and dry pieces of snake meat about 4 sun long, and she called them 'dried fish,' and she went to sell them at the barracks of the palace guard. Why, if she hadn’t gotten infected with the plague and died, she’d be out selling them now! And more than that, that 'dried fish' she sold was supposed to be delicious, and the palace guards were always buying it for meals. But, I never thought the things this woman did were evil. If she hadn’t done them, she would’ve starved to death; surely, you realize that she didn’t have any choice. By the same token, don’t think that this thing I do now is an act of evil! If I couldn’t bring myself to do this, I would starve, myself. You can be sure that I haven’t got a choice. So, this thing that I have no choice but to do — that woman would have condoned it, she probably would have even allowed me to do it if she knew."

What the old woman said was something like that, anyway.

As the servant listened coldly to this tale, he put the sword back in its scabbard and pushed the hilt down with his left hand. His right hand, of course, worried at that big, red, pus-filled pimple on his cheek. But, as he was listening, within the servant’s heart a certain kind of courage was beginning to be born. Before, beneath the Rashoumon, this man had lacked that very courage. Now, it moved him in exactly the opposite direction to the courage that he’d found in the moment he’d climbed up into the Rashoumon’s tower and grabbed the old woman. It wasn’t that he was no longer a coward who found himself unable to choose between starvation and robbery; it was that (and if he’d managed to properly articulate his feelings) he was in such an extremity of confused passion that even things like "dying of starvation" had suddenly been driven completely out of his head.

"Indeed, is that so?"

The servant said it with vicious sarcasm, as the old woman’s story was concluded. Advancing forward a single step, he suddenly withdrew his right hand from the pimple and grabbed the old woman’s collar. And then he bit out:

"Well then, I suppose you won’t mind if I should happen to tear off your clothes. Unless I, too, resort to this sort of thing, I will absolutely starve to death as well!"

And then the servant very quickly ripped off the old woman’s kimono. She tried to cling to his legs, but he kicked her down roughly onto the corpses. It was only five measured paces to the mouth of the ladder; the servant, carrying the newly-acquired, cypress bark-brown kimono under his arm, had climbed down the steep ladder and made off into the night in no time at all.

For a while, the old woman lay as one dead. But, after a time, she lifted her naked body from among the scattered corpses. With a sort of moan, the old woman — relying on the light of the still-burning flame — went crawling toward the mouth of the ladder, groaning all the way. She turned her white head upside down, and gazed intently beneath the gate. Outside there was only the night, deep and dark as a cave.

As for the servant's whereabouts? Nobody knows.

NOTES:

the hour of the Monkey = 3:00-5:00 PM
sun = an old-fashioned unit of length, about 3 centimeters long