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.
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
By Ryunosuke Akutagawa
It was one evening at dusk. A servant was waiting under the Rashomon gate for the rain to stop. Beneath the wide gate, there was no one else but this man. Only a cricket clung here and there to the large vermilion-painted pillars where the paint had peeled. Since the Rashomon stood on the Suzaku Avenue, one might have expected, besides this man, two or three more such as women in sedge hats or men in folded caps waiting for the rain to cease. Yet there was no one else but this man.
Why was this? Because for the past two or three years, Kyoto had suffered a succession of disasters—earthquakes, whirlwinds, fires, famines. The desolation of the capital was beyond ordinary measure. According to old records, images of Buddha and Buddhist utensils were smashed, and the wood still coated with vermilion or overlaid with gold and silver foil was piled by the roadside and sold as firewood. Such being the state of the capital, no one of course cared to repair the Rashomon. Taking advantage of its ruin, foxes and raccoon dogs dwelt there, and thieves dwelt there. At last it even became the custom to bring the bodies of those with no claimants and abandon them at this gate. Thus, when night fell, everyone was so ill at ease that none would set foot near the gate.
Instead, crows gathered from somewhere in great numbers. By day one could see them wheeling in flocks, crying as they circled about the high owl-tail ridge ornaments. Especially when the sky above the gate turned red with the evening glow, they stood out as clearly as sesame seeds scattered. The crows, of course, came to peck at the flesh of the dead upon the gate. Yet today, perhaps because it was late, not one was to be seen. Only here and there upon the crumbling stone steps, from whose fissures long grasses grew, one could see white specks of crow droppings clinging. The servant sat upon the topmost of the seven stone steps, his washed-out indigo haori bunched beneath him, and while fretting over a large pimple on his right cheek, he gazed vacantly at the falling rain.
The author wrote above, "the servant was waiting for the rain to stop." Yet the servant had no particular plan for what to do once the rain ceased. Ordinarily, of course, he should have returned to his master's house. But his master had dismissed him some four or five days before. As written earlier, the city of Kyoto was then in extraordinary decline. That this servant, long in his master's employ, had now been dismissed was but a small ripple of that decline. Thus it would be better to say, not "the servant was waiting for the rain to stop," but "the servant, driven in by the rain, had nowhere to go and was at his wits' end." Moreover, the weather that day no little affected the sentimentality of this Heian-period servant. The rain that began falling after the hour of the Monkey showed no sign of letting up. And so the servant, seeking above all to manage his living for the morrow—that is to say, seeking to manage the unmanageable—let his thoughts wander aimlessly as he listened, without really listening, to the sound of the rain falling upon the Suzaku Avenue.
The rain enveloped the Rashomon, gathering a rushing sound from afar. The evening darkness gradually lowered the sky, and looking up, one saw the gate's roof, at the tips of its slanting tiles, bearing up heavy, dim clouds.
To manage the unmanageable, there was no leisure to choose one's means. If one chose, one would only starve to death beneath a fence or on the roadside earth, and then be cast away like a dog atop this gate. But if one did not choose—the servant's thoughts, having circled the same path many times, at last arrived at this point. Yet this "if one did not choose" always remained merely "if." Though the servant affirmed that he would not choose his means, he lacked the courage to positively affirm what must follow: "there is no choice but to become a thief."
The servant gave a great sneeze, then rose with an air of weariness. In the chill of evening Kyoto, it was cold enough to want a brazier. The wind swept unabashed through the gate's pillars along with the dusk. The cricket that had rested on the vermilion pillar was gone somewhere.
The servant drew in his neck, hunched his indigo haori over his safflower-dyed under-robe, and looked about the gate. He wished to pass the night somewhere free of rain and wind and unseen by others. Then he noticed the wide, vermilion-lacquered ladder leading up to the tower above the gate. Up there, even if someone were present, they would only be dead. The servant, mindful that the holy-handled sword at his waist not slip from its scabbard, placed his straw-sandaled foot upon the ladder's lowest rung.
Some minutes later, a man was crouched like a cat upon the middle of the wide ladder ascending to the tower of the Rashomon, holding his breath as he watched what went on above. The firelight from the tower faintly lit his right cheek—a cheek among short whiskers, with a red, pus-filled pimple. The servant had taken for granted that those above were only dead. But climbing two or three rungs, he saw someone had lit a fire above, and was moving it here and there. The murky yellow light flickered upon the cobwebbed ceiling, and he knew at once. On such a rainy night, atop the Rashomon, one lighting a fire could be no ordinary person.
The servant stole up like a gecko, crawling to the topmost rung. Flattening himself as much as he could and stretching his neck forward, he peered fearfully into the tower.
Within, as rumored, several corpses lay abandoned carelessly, but the firelight reached less far than he thought, and he could not tell how many. Only dimly he saw that among them were naked corpses and clothed ones. Of course, both women and men seemed mixed in. These corpses, with mouths agape and arms outstretched, rolled upon the floor like clay dolls, so that one doubted they had ever been living humans. The firelight fell faintly upon raised shoulders and chests, deepening the shadows of lower parts, and they were silent as if forever mute.
The servant involuntarily covered his nose at the stench of rotting corpses. But his hand the next moment forgot to cover it. Some strong emotion had all but stolen his sense of smell.
The servant's eyes then for the first time saw a human crouched among the corpses. A short, thin, white-haired old woman like a monkey, dressed in a cypress-bark robe. Holding a pine torch in her right hand, she peered into the face of one corpse. From the long hair, it was likely a woman's corpse.
Moved by six parts fear and four parts curiosity, the servant forgot even to breathe. To borrow the words of an old chronicler, he felt his "hair stand on end." The old woman stuck the pine torch between the floorboards, then placed both hands upon the corpse's neck she had been eyeing, and began pulling out the long hairs one by one, like a monkey mother picking lice from her child. The hairs came out as her hands pulled.
As each hair was pulled, the servant's fear faded by degrees. And at the same time, a fierce hatred for the old woman stirred within him. Nay, to say "for the old woman" may be misleading. Rather, a revulsion against all evil grew stronger each minute. Had someone then put to him again the question he had pondered beneath the gate—starve or become a thief—he would likely have chosen starvation without regret. So violently did his hatred of evil blaze, like the pine torch stuck in the floor.
The servant, of course, did not know why the old woman pulled the dead woman's hair. Thus he could not reasonably judge it good or evil. But to him, on this rainy night atop the Rashomon, pulling the hair of the dead was in itself an unpardonable evil. Of course, he had entirely forgotten that moments before he had meant to become a thief.
Then the servant braced his legs and leapt up from the ladder. With hand upon his holy-handled sword, he strode toward the old woman. She started in alarm, as if sprung by a crossbow.
"You! Where do you think you're going?"
The servant blocked her path as she stumbled over corpses and fled in panic, and cursed thus. The old woman still tried to push past him. The servant pushed her back, not letting her pass. They grappled in silence among the corpses. But the outcome was clear from the start. The servant seized her arm—a limb of bone and skin like a chicken's leg—and forced her down.
"What were you doing? Come, what were you doing? Speak. Or this!"
The servant flung her off, then suddenly stripped the scabbard from his sword and thrust the white steel before her eyes. Yet the old woman was silent. Her hands trembled, she gasped through her shoulders, and she stared wide, eyes near bulging from their sockets, stubbornly mute as a dummy. Seeing this, the servant first clearly realized that the old woman's life or death lay wholly within his will. This awareness cooled the fierce hatred that had burned, leaving only the calm pride and satisfaction of one who has done a deed accomplished. He looked down at her and softened his voice:
"I am no officer of the kebiishi. I am but a traveler who passed beneath this gate moments ago. I shall not bind you or do aught else. Only tell me what you were doing atop this gate at such an hour."
The old woman stared up, eyes wider, fixed upon the servant's face. With reddened lids, like a bird of prey, she looked sharply. Then her wrinkled lips, near one with her nose, moved as if chewing something. Her thin throat showed a pointed Adam's apple working. From it came a voice like a crow's caw, gasping into the servant's ears:
"I pulled these hairs—pulled this woman's hairs—to make a wig."
The servant was disappointed the answer was so commonplace. And with disappointment came again the old hatred, with cold contempt, into his heart. The old woman, sensing this, still holding the long plucked hairs taken from the corpse's head, muttered in a toad-like voice:
"True, pulling the dead's hair may be wrong. But most of these dead deserved no less. The woman whose hair I pulled sold dried snake cut into four-inch pieces as dried fish to the warriors' camp. Had she not died of plague, she'd still be selling. The warriors bought it gladly for relish, for it tasted fine. I think not her deed evil—she did it lest she starve, of necessity. So too my deed I think not evil—I do it lest I starve, of necessity. And she, knowing necessity, would pardon me."
Thus roughly she spoke.
The servant listened coldly, his left hand on the sword's hilt, his right fretting the red pimple on his cheek. Yet as he listened, a courage was born in him—the courage lacking beneath the gate. And contrary to the courage with which he had seized her atop the gate, it moved in the opposite direction. Not only did he no longer waver between starving and stealing; starvation was now cast quite beyond his thought.
"Is that so?"
When she finished, the servant pressed with a sneer. Stepping forward, he suddenly left his pimple and seized her collar:
"Then you'll not begrudge me my stripping. I too must do so, or starve."
The servant swiftly stripped her cypress-bark robe, then kicked the clinging old woman roughly upon the corpses. The ladder's mouth was but five steps off. Tucking the robe under his arm, he descended the steep ladder into the night's depths in a flash.
Soon after, the old woman, who had lain as dead, raised her naked body among the corpses. Muttering, moaning, by the failing firelight she crawled to the ladder's mouth. There she hung her short white hair upside down and peered beneath the gate. Outside was only a black, gaping night.
The servant had already braved the rain, hastening into Kyoto to rob.
