3 Strange Tales
Copyright One Peace Books, Inc.
ISBN 13: 978-1-935548-12-6
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First published paperback edition by One Peace Books, Inc. in 2012
Author Ryunosuke Akutagawa Translated by Glenn Anderson Edited by Marie Iida
Cover Design Shimpachi Inoue
One Peace Books
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Printed in USA
Rashomon
A Christian Death
Agni
In a Grove
Preface
The Japanese Modern Classics series, of which this book is the second in the series, was meant not for the Japanese literary scholar, but for the casual reader, the paperback reader, the graphic novel fan.
With this readership in mind, we chose three tales for this collection: Rashomon, A Christian Death, and Agni. Nice and succinct. Three crypt-keeper-like tales of horror and oddity that fit nicely together. Hence the title, 3 Strange Tales.
While the collection could just stop there, in the fashion and spirit of this collection we have added a bonus story. Yes, a bonus story. Akutagawa’s In a Groove, is Pulp Fiction before there was Pulp Fiction, and it is just as powerful as anything written today. The particularly observant reader may note that In a Grove served as the plot for Akira Kurosawa’s film named, Rashomon. It’s fluid take on point of view and narration continues to exert a powerful influence on writing today, as in the previously mentioned Tarantino film, Pulp Fiction. In truth, the story was just to good to leave out, and so we present it to you, our readers, as a bonus.
All of these tales were written in early twentieth century Japan, a world very different than ours today. And yet, the casual reader can enjoy them for their fun and inventive story telling techniques even now.
Rashomon
It was evening. A lowly servant sat under Rashomon waiting for a break in the rain.
He was alone under the looming gate. Being on the main street, Suzako Oji, one would expect to catch glimpses of straw hats or nobleman’s headgears atop the heads of stragglers waiting out the rain. But he was alone—save for a single grasshopper which clung to the chipped red laquer of a large, round column.
He was alone because in the past few years Kyoto had been visited by every conceivable disaster from earthquakes and typhoons to fires and famines. The capital was in rapid decline. According to old records, Buddhist images and altars were smashed in the streets, and even the most valuable fragments, coated with lacquer and gold leafing, were stacked by the road and sold as firewood. With civilization on the edge of collapse, who could have been bothered to see to the maintenance of the gate? And so badgers and foxes came to live there. Thieves lived there. Eventually, it became customary to dispose of unclaimed corpses there, a practice that filled the area with a sense of dread so palpable that no one dared to approach it after sunset.
In their place came the crows. During the day they gathered in huge flocks and traced out wide circles over the roof. At sunset, when the sky turned red, it looked like someone had scattered seeds across the sky. They came to pick the flesh from the corpses at the top of the gate. On that day, perhaps because it was so late, there were none in sight. But they had left their mark: bright splotches of their waste splattered the decaying stone steps where weeds crept from cracks in the rocks. The servant had settled into the seat of his worn blue kimono at the top of the steps. He fiddled with an enormous pimple that had recently appeared on his right cheek while he gazed absent-mindedly at the falling rain.
I have just said that he was waiting for a break in the rain. But even if the rain were to end, there was nothing for him to do. Under normal circumstances he would have returned to the home of his master, but he had been given leave of the house four or five days ago. As I’ve just noted, Kyoto was in decay, and the dismissal of the servant by the master whom he had served for years was no doubt a small repercussion of this decay. So rather than saying he was waiting for a break in the rain, allow me to rephrase: the servant was trapped by the rain, but had nowhere else to go. Something about the look of the sky that evening roused his sentimentality. The rain showed no signs of letting up. It fell in torrents over the street, exciting his private anxieties. How would he make a living? How could he fix what could not be fixed?
The rain enveloped Rashomon and filled the world with its echoing static. With night the clouds fell low in the sky. Dark and pregnant with rain, they seemed pinned in place by the tiled shingles that pointed, needlelike, from the roof of Rashomon.
There was no time to imagine solutions to impossible problems. If he chose to do nothing, he would surely starve and die in a gutter or against a wall. They would take him and throw him away at the top of the gate like a dead dog. But if he chose to do something... He followed the train of thought time after time, and he always came up against this “but”, his only other remaining option. And why should he deny it? If he did nothing he would die, but if he became a thief.
He let out a loud sneeze then rose wearily to his feet. It was cold. He longed for a fire. Wind rushed between the columns of Rashomon, and brought with it the dark of night. The grasshopper had long since vanished from its perch.
The servant tucked his chin into his chest against the cold and tugged the shoulders of his kimono over his yellow underclothes. He looked around. If only there was a place where he could get some shelter, some privacy—if only there was a place he could get a decent night’s sleep. His eyes came to rest on a red, lacquered ladder that led up to the tower at the top of the gate. If there was anyone up there, they were sure to be dead. So the servant, taking care that his old sword did not slip from its sheath, plodded over to the bottom rung in his straw sandals.
A few minutes passed. He was halfway up the ladder, curled like a cat against himself, when he caught a glimpse of the room in the tower. Soft firelight from the room fell upon his right cheek, where his enormous pimple, taut with red pus, protruded from among the black stubble. There shouldn’t be anyone up there, he thought, climbing two or three rungs. And yet it seemed as though someone had not only lit a fire, but was moving it around the room. It was clear from the way the dank, yellow light caught the spiderwebs in the corners of the ceiling and made their shadows quiver. What kind of person would crawl into Rashomon, in the rain, and light a fire? He wasn’t sure, but he didn’t want to meet them.
Finally, silent as a lizard, he crept to the top of the ladder. He flattened his body as much as he could, stuck out his neck, and carefully, secretly, stole a glance into the room.
The space was filled with corpses tossed in random piles, just as he had heard, but the light did not fill the room as he had imagined, and he could not make out how many bodies there were. He only saw that some of them were naked, while others were in kimonos. There was a mix of men and women. Heaped in rambling piles about the floor with the
ir arms splayed at odd angles and their mouths open wide, it was hard to imagine they were once living human beings. They could have been clay dolls. Their chests and shoulders caught a little of the light where they jutted from the piles, but the rest of their bodies lay in darkness, and they would remain that way—for-ever mute.
The rancid air fuming from the rotting bodies caused the man to cover his nose. But in the next moment, his hand dropped away as a powerful emotion robbed him of his sense of smell.
There was someone crouching among the bodies. It was an old woman dressed in a deep red kimono, short, thin, and gray-haired. Stooped over like an ape, she held a burning scrap of pine in her right hand, and used the light to peer at the face of a long-haired corpse—probably a woman.
The sight filled him with a mixture of fear and curiosity. Caught up in the scene, he forgot to breathe for a time. The hair on his head and body stood up on end. The old woman stuck the burning pine into a gap in the floorboards. Then, like a monkey picking lice from its young, she brought her hands up to the head of the dead woman and, one by one, began to pluck long strands of hair from it.
With each plucked hair, the servant’s terror left him. In its place grew a blistering hatred for the woman— or perhaps not for the woman after all. It was an abhorrence of all things evil in the world, and it grew stronger by the minute. If, at that exact moment, someone were to ask him what he had been thinking of under the gate, whether to die of starvation or to become a thief, he would have chosen death without a moment’s hesitation. So intense was his sudden hatred of all things evil, it burned in him like the scrap of pine the women shoved between the floorboards.
He had no idea why she was plucking the hair from the heads of the dead; there was no rational way for him to know if it was good or evil. And yet he had already made up his mind that pulling hairs from the scalps of the dead, here at the top of Rashomon—and on such a rainy night no less!—was an unforgivable act of evil. Of course, he had forgotten that he had been considering a life of thievery only moments earlier.
The servant steeled himself, braced his feet against the top rung of the ladder, and leapt into the tower. Quickly, his hand on the hilt of his sword, he confronted the woman.
With one look at the servant, the old woman sprung to her feet as if shot from a cannon. Tripping over the corpses, she tried to run but he blocked her path.
“Where do you think you’re going?” he barked.
Again, she ducked and tried to rush past him, but he caught and shoved her back. For a moment the two grappled among the bodies in silence, but there was no doubt as to who would win. A moment later the servant had a grip on her arm. It was just skin and bone, like the foot of a chicken. He twisted her down to the floorboards.
“What are you doing? Tell me!” He let the woman go, pulled his sword from its sheath, and held the steel up to her eye. “If you don’t, we’ll settle this the hard way.”
The woman remained silent. Her hands trembled and her shoulders heaved up and down with every breath. She fixed her eyes on him—they seemed to balloon out from under her eyelids. She was silent as a mute. The servant saw the desperation on her face and realized that he held her life in his hands. And before he was even aware of it, the pathetic scene began to suffocate the flames of hatred that had been burning inside of him. In its place came that feeling of satisfaction, that cool feeling of accomplishment one has on the completion of a particularly trying job. Looking down at the old woman, his voice softer and more amiable than before, he spoke:
“Look, I’m no policeman. I’m just a traveller who happened to be passing under the gate. So I’m not going to hurt you. Just tell me what you were doing.”
Her eyes grew even wider than before as she studied his face. Her eyelids burned red at the corners, like the severe eyes of a bird of prey. Her lips, lost in wrinkles as if they were drooping out of her nose, wiggled as though she was chewing something. He could see her pointed adam’s apple move up and down her thin throat. Her voice crawled from her throat and stumbled out from her mouth like the labored screech of a crow.
“I’m gonna take these hairs—I’m gonna take ‘em and make a wig out of ‘em.”
He was disappointed at the banality of her answer. Disappointed and, at the same time, infuriated. The hatred he felt for her before returned, accompanied with a frigid contempt.
The woman must have sensed the change in his mood. Still clutching the hairs she pulled from the body at her feet, she argued her case to him. She tripped over her words, and her voice came in ragged wisps like the dying moans of a toad.
“Maybe it’s a bad thing to come and take these hairs here. But—don’t you get it? All these people deserve to be treated like this. This woman here, you wanna know how she lived? She cut up snakes. She cut ‘em up and hung em’ up and told everyone it was fish. She went to the guard’s camp and sold it to ‘em. Told ‘em it tasted good and they believed her and bought tons of it. Then she up and died of the plague, but you can bet that if she hadn’t she’d still be doin’ the same thing. Was she so wrong? I don’t think so. If she hadn’t done it she’d have starved t’death. She had to do it—no sense in judging her for it. Am I so different? You think I got a choice? I’ll keel over dead if I don’t do it. This lady here, this lady knew what it was like—she’d have sympathy for me.”
The servant listened carefully to her. He slid his sword into its sheath and held it there with his left hand. His right hand, as always, was preoccupied with the red, pus-filled zit on his cheek. As he listened he was gripped by a new conviction, one that worked on him in precisely the opposite way than his earlier ruminations on evil had when he leapt into the tower and grappled with the woman. It was the very conviction that he had lacked when he sat under the gate.
The servant had been profoundly troubled when confronted with a choice between death and a life of crime. But now—now, the very concept of starvation had left him entirely. He was no longer able to consider the option.
“You’re right,” he answered, almost sneering at her. He had made up his mind.
He took a step forward, and in a flash his right hand flew from his zit and ceased the woman by the collar.
“Then you won’t mind if I take this—I’m not ready to join the dead just yet!” he hissed, tearing the kimono from her body. She tried to cling to his feet, but he kicked her roughly into the pile of corpses. The top of the ladder was only five paces away. He tucked the red kimono under his arm and sped down the ladder into the pitch black of night.
For a short time the woman lay collapsed as if dead. Eventually, she raised her naked body from the mound of corpses. Her voice came out in rough moans and sobs, soft as whispers. By the still flickering light of her scrap of pine, she crawled to the top of the ladder. Her gray head lolled from the hole in the floor. She peered down to the bottom of the gate, but there was nothing to see but the thick, leaden black of night.
No one knows where he went.
A Christian Death
Even if one liveth to be three hundred years of age in excess of pleasure, it is but as a dream compared with everlasting pleasure. –Guide do Pecador
He who walketh the path of goodness shall enjoy the mysterious sweetness which pervadeth the doctrine. – Imitatione Christi
One Christmas night many years ago a Japanese boy named Lorenzo collapsed, starving and exhausted, at the door to the Santa Lucia church in Nagasaki. The Jesuit brothers who were coming into the church for worship took him in, and led by the compassion of the Father Superior, they decided to raise him as one of their own. When they ventured to inquire further of his origins, he made only vague claims as, “My home is heaven” and “My father’s name is LORD.” He never admitted to them further details, but his disarming smile absolved him of further questioning. The brothers’ minds were put further at ease by the sapphire rosary beads draped about his wrists, which indicated that his parents had not been heathens. The young boy’s piety amazed even the the elder
s of the church that they soon came to regard him as a child of heaven. Despite his clouded and mysterious past, he was never thought of as a suspicious outsider. No—he was their cherub, delivered to them from above.
The boy’s face was smooth and round, and his kind and delicate voice pulled the heartstrings of everyone, earning him the sympathy and love of all the brothers. A young Japanese brother named Simeon came to look on Lorenzo as a younger brother, and the two of them could often be seen hand in hand as they walked in and out the church gate. Born into a warrior family, Simeon had once served a famous nobleman. The tallest and strongest of the brothers by far, he had defended the fathers from the stones of heathens on more than one occasion. His friendship with Lorenzo evoked an image of a mountain eagle caring for a dove—or a cypress tree on the slopes of Mt. Lebanon, draped in grape vines just coming into bloom.
Three years went by without incident, and the time came for Lorenzo to celebrate his coming of age ceremony. But gossip of the most wicked kind had begun to creep through the doors of the Santa Lucia: Lorenzo had grown intimate with the daughter of an umbrella-maker from a nearby town. The old umbrella-maker was also a Christian, and he came to Santa Lucia with his daughter often. During prayer time, when Lorenzo would remove the incense burners, the girl would fix her eyes on him. When entering and leaving the church she would pause to ensure that her hair was styled just-so before casting her hopeful gaze in his direction. This began to attract the attention of the congregation, and before long some said she had once even stepped on his foot for attention, while others claimed that the two of them were exchanging love letters.
The Father Superior deemed it time for him to intervene. One day, he called for Lorenzo. “I’ve heard rumors of you and the daughter of the umbrella-maker, but I assume there is nothing to them,” he said, chewing at his beard and looking kindly on Lorenzo. “Am I wrong?”