In a Grove

------------------------------------------------------- 【Regarding the symbols appearing in the text】

：ruby （example）kebiishi (police official)

：a symbol to specify the beginning of a string of characters with ruby （example）last autumn, at Toribe-dera temple,

：inputter's note, mainly explanations of external characters and specifications of the position of side dots （example）(December, Taisho 10) -------------------------------------------------------

The woodcutter's story, as told to the questioning kebiishi

Yes, it was indeed I who found that corpse. I went this morning, as usual, to cut cedars on the mountain behind my home. There, in the thicket on the shaded side of the mountain, lay that corpse. Where was it, you ask? It would be some four or five chō distant from the Yamashina post road. It was a deserted spot where slender cedars mingled with bamboo. 　The corpse was lying on its back, still wearing a pale-blue hitatare and a worn court-style eboshi. Though it was but a single stab wound, it was to the chest, and so the bamboo fallen leaves around the corpse seemed soaked in a dark red. No, the blood was no longer flowing. The wound too seemed dried up. And moreover, there was a horsefly there, stuck fast as if not even hearing my footsteps. 　Did I see a sword or anything? No, there was nothing. Only at the base of a cedar nearby lay a single coil of rope. And then—yes, yes, besides the rope there was also a comb. Those two were all that were around the corpse. But the grass and bamboo leaves were trampled all over, and so that man must surely have put up a fierce struggle before being killed. What, was there no horse? That place is one where a horse cannot enter at all. After all, it is separated from the horse path by a single thicket.

The traveling priest's story, as told to the questioning kebiishi

I certainly met that dead man yesterday. Yesterday—around noon, I should think. The place was on the way from Sekiyama toward Yamashina. That man was walking toward Sekiyama together with a woman on horseback. The woman had her mugai lowered, so I could not see her face. All I saw was the color of what seemed to be a layered hagi-patterned robe. The horse was a dappled gray—certainly, I believe, a monk's-hair horse. Its height? Its height was perhaps over four shaku?—But being a monk, I do not know such things precisely. The man—no, he wore a sword at his side and carried bow and arrows. In particular, I remember clearly even now the more than twenty war arrows stuck in a black-lacquered quiver. 　I never dreamed that man would come to such an end, but truly the life of man is surely like dew, like lightning. Alas, a most pitiable thing, beyond words.

The released prisoner's story, as told to the questioning kebiishi

The man I captured? This is certainly the notorious bandit called Tajōmaru. However, when I captured him he had fallen from his horse, groaning on the stone bridge at Awataguchi. The time? It was around the beginning of night last evening. The time I failed to catch him before, he too was wearing this indigo hitatare and a decorated sword. Now besides that, as you see, he carries even bow and arrows. Is that so? The dead man also had those—then the murderer must surely be this Tajōmaru. The leather-wrapped bow, the black-lacquered quiver, seventeen hawk-feather war arrows—these were all surely what that man had. Yes. The horse too, as you say, is a monk's-hair dappled gray. To be thrown by that beast must be some karma. It was a little beyond the stone bridge, eating the blue miscanthus by the roadside with a long lead still trailing. 　This Tajōmaru, among the bandits prowling the capital, is one who loves women. Last autumn, a wife who had come on pilgrimage to the rear mountain of the Pindola at Toribe-dera, together with a young girl, was killed—they say it was his doing. If this woman who rode that dappled gray was also done away with after he killed that man, where she went or what became of her is unknown. Pardon my forwardness, but please investigate that as well.

“Stories of the world, in your language.”