Read Rashomon and Seventeen Other Stories Online
Authors: Ryunosuke Akutagawa
Like an unblemished golden jar, our glorious National Essence stands upon a foundation of belief in the family. We need not ask, then, how grave the responsibilities of the head of any one family might be. Does the head of a family have the right to go
mad any time he feels like it? To this question we must offer a resounding ââNo!'' Imagine what would happen if the husbands of the world suddenly acquired the right to go mad. All, without exception, would leave their families behind for a happy life of song on the road, or wandering over hill and dale, or being kept well fed and clothed in an insane asylum. Then our 2,000-yearold belief in the familyâour very pride in the eyes of the worldâcould not fail to collapse. As the ancient records
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have taught us, ââHate the crime, not the criminal.'' We are not, of course, urging that Mr. Oshino be treated harshly. We must, however, loudly beat the drum
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to condemn his rash crime of having gone mad. No, let this not be limited to Mr. Oshino's crime alone. We must also condemn the utter misfeasance of successive administrations for having neglected our urgent need for a law prohibiting insanity.
Mrs. Oshino tells us that she intends to go on living in the company house on XX Lane for at least one year in the hopes that Mr. Oshino will come home during that period. We express our wholehearted sympathy to this faithful wife, and we sincerely hope that the wise leaders of Mitsubishi will spare no expense in seeing to it that Mrs. Oshino is afforded every opportunity to accomplish her goal.
Six months later, however, Tsuneko, at least, had a new encounter that made it impossible for her to go on contenting herself with this grave misconception. It happened one October twilight as Beijing's willows and pagoda trees were beginning to drop their yellowing leaves. She was sitting on the sofa, sunk in her memories of the past. Her lips no longer wore her eternal smile. Her cheeks had lost their former plumpness. She went on thinking of her vanished husband, the double bed he had sold, those bedbugs of long ago⦠Just then, someone came to the entryway and, after a moment of apparent hesitation, rang the doorbell. She decided not to concern herself with this but to let the houseboy take care of it. He made no appearance, however: perhaps he had gone out. Soon the bell rang again. Tsuneko at last moved away from the sofa and stepped quietly to the entryway.
Stray withered leaves dotted the floor of the entryway, in the dim light of which stood a man without a hat. This lack was not his only distinguishing characteristic, however. He was wearing a torn and dust-smeared suit coat. Tsuneko felt something close to fear at the sight of this man.
ââYes? Can I help you?'' she asked.
The man said nothing but stood there with head bowed, his long hair hanging down. Tsuneko peered through the darkness and again said with trepidation, ââCan⦠can I help you?''
The man finally raised his head.
ââTsunekoâ¦''
This one word was all he spoke. But it was enough to reveal his true form to her as clearly as if he had been bathed in moonlight. Tsuneko caught her breath and went on staring at him as if she had lost her voice. Not only had he let his hair grow long, but he was so emaciated he looked like a different person. The eyes that were focused on her now, however, were undeniably the ones that she had been longing to see.
ââHanzabur
Å
! It's you!''
Tsuneko cried out and began to fly into his arms. No sooner had she taken the first step toward him, however, than she leaped back as if she had stepped on red-hot iron. Beneath the cuffs of his torn trousers, her husband revealed two hairy horse legs. Even in the dim light she could see their chestnut color.
ââHanzabur
Å
!''
Tsuneko felt an indescribable revulsion toward the horse legs, but she also felt that if she missed her chance now, she might never see her husband again. He, meanwhile, went on staring at her with a sorrowful look in his eyes. Again she tried to fly to him. But again her revulsion overwhelmed her courage.
ââHanzabur
Å
!''
The third time she cried out his name, Hanzabur
Å
turned his back to her and started out of the entryway. Tsuneko whipped up her last ounce of courage and tried desperately to cling to him. But before she could take a single step in his direction, she heard the clip-clop of hooves. Utterly pale now, she stared at him moving away from her; she no longer had even the courage
to call him back. Finally, she sank down among the entryway's fallen leaves in a swoonâ¦
After this incident, Tsuneko came to believe in her husband's diary, but all the othersâthe company manager, Hanzabur
Å
's colleagues, Dr. Yamai, and Editor-in-Chief Mudaguchiârefused to believe that Hanzabur
Å
had developed horse legs. What they did believe was that Tsuneko had fallen prey to a hallucination when she thought she saw horse legs on Hanzabur
Å
. While I was living in Beijing, I often met with Dr. Yamai and Mr. Mudaguchi in an attempt to break down their resistance, but derisive laughter was all I got in return. Thereafterâwell, it appears that novelist Okada Sabur
Å
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recently heard the story from someone. He wrote to me to say he could not believe that Hanzabur
Å
actually had horse legs. ââIf this happened at all,'' he said, ââthey probably gave him forelegs. If the legs were the quick, agile sort that are able to perform such stunts as Spanish trotting, they might also manage the feat of kicking, which is unusual for forelegs. Without a skilled trainer such as Major Yuasa, though, I doubt the horse itself would be able to do such kicking.'' To be sure, I have my own doubts regarding these matters, but does it not seem a bit premature to discount not only Hanzabur
Å
's diary but Tsuneko's testimony as well on that basis alone? And in fact, my research has revealed the following article just a few columns down on the very same page of the very same issue of the
Shuntian Times
that had originally reported Hanzabur
Å
's resurrection:
Henry Barrett, president of the U.S.âChina Temperance Society, died suddenly aboard a train on the BeijingâHankou Line. His hand was clutching a medicine bottle, which gave rise to a suspicion of suicide, but analysis of the bottle's contents determined the liquid to be alcoholic in nature.
(January 1925)
âA Mental Landscapeâ
Daid
Å
ji Shinsuke was born near the Ek
Å
in Temple in the Honjo Ward
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of Tokyo. As far as he can remember, Honjo contained not a single streetânot a single houseâof any beauty. His own house in particular was surrounded by drab shopsâa confectionery, a cooper's workshop, a secondhand store. The street they faced on was a permanent muddy swamp that ended at “The Big Ditch” of Otakegura. The Ditch had weeds floating on its surface and it always gave off a terrific stench. Neighborhoods like this certainly made him melancholy, but other neighborhoods only made him feel worse. The fashionable “high city” residential areas in hilly Yamanote he found just as oppressive as those “low city” streets lined with pretty little shops from the Edo Period. No, rather than Hong
Å
or Nihonbashi, it was dreary Honjoâthe Ek
Å
in, Halt-Pony Bridge, Yokoami, the open sewers, Hannoki Horse Ground, the Big Ditchâthat he loved. Perhaps what he felt was closer to pity than to love. In any case, these are the only places that often enter his dreams even now, thirty years later.
Ever since he could remember, Shinsuke had felt love for the Honjo streets. Far from tree lined, they were always dusty, but it was those streets that taught young Shinsuke the beauty of nature. That was how he grew up: eating cheap sweets on the filthy streets of Honjo. The countrysideâespecially the expanse of rice paddies that opened to the east of Honjoâcould never interest a boy who grew up that way. All it did was show him the ugliness of nature, not its beauty. The Honjo streets may have been wanting in nature, but blossoming roof-top grasses
and spring clouds reflected in puddles displayed a sweet, sad kind of beauty. It was thanks to such beautiful things that he came to love nature. To be sure, the streets of Honjo were not the only things that gradually opened his eyes to natural beauty. Books, too, of courseâRoka's
Nature and Man
, which he devoured again and again during his elementary school years, and a Japanese translation of Lubbock's
The Beauties of Nature
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âbooks enlightened him. Still, what most opened his eyes to nature were the neighborhoods of Honjoâtheir oddly shabby houses and trees and streets.
Later, he took short trips to other parts of Japan. The harshness of the mountainous Kiso region made him uneasy. The softness of the sheltered Inland Sea always bored him. He loved the shabbiness of Honjo far more than either of those. He especially loved nature that lived subtly, faintly amid the artificiality of human civilization. The Honjo of thirty years before still retained this kind of natural beauty everywhereâthe willows along the open sewers, the broad courtyard of the Ek
Å
in, the deciduous woods of Otakegura. He was unable to accompany his friends on school outings to such tourist destinations as Nikk
Å
and Kamakura, but he did go walking with his father every morning through the surrounding neighborhoods of Honjo. This was undeniably a great source of joy to Shinsuke at the time, but it was a kind of joy he could never bring himself to boast of to his friends.
One morning, as the early glow was fading in the sky, he and his father walked to a frequent destination of theirs, the Hun-dred-Piling Bank of the Sumida River. There were always plenty of fishermen at this spot, but not on that particular morning. The only things moving were the sea lice crawling in the gaps of the bank's broad stone wall. He started to ask his father why there were no fishermen out this morning, but before he could open his mouth, he found the answer. A shaven-headed corpse lay bobbing on the still-glowing waves of the river where smelly water weeds and garbage clung to the irregularly-spaced pilings.
Shinsuke still vividly remembers the Hundred-Piling Bank from that morning. The Honjo of thirty years ago left numberless memorable landscapes in his impressionable heart, but at
the same time that morning's Hundred-Piling Bankâthat one landscapeâalso stood as the sum total of all the mental shadows cast by Honjo's many neighborhoods.
Shinsuke was a boy who had never sucked his mother's milk.
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A frail woman, she never gave a drop of milk to her one-andonly child, and supporting a wet nurse was out of the question for his financially straitened family. Thus, from the moment of his birth, he was raised on cow's milk. This was a fate that the young Shinsuke could not help cursing. He despised the milk bottles that arrived in the kitchen every morning. And he envied his friends: they might know nothing else, but at least they knew their mother's milk. Around the time he entered grammar school, the breasts of a young aunt who was staying with them over New Year's or some such time became painfully swollen. She tried squeezing the milk into a brass bowl but could not produce any that way. She narrowed her eyes and said to him, half teasing, “How about you, little Shin? I wonder if you can suck it out for me?” Having been raised on cow's milk, though, he would not have known how to do it. Finally, his aunt got a child from next doorâthe cooper's little girlâto suck out her hardened breasts. The breasts were two swollen hemispheres stitched with blue veins. Shinsuke was such a shy little boy that he would never have been able to suck his aunt's breasts even if he had known how. Still, he hated the girl from next door. And he hated the aunt for having the girl from next door suck her breasts. This little incident left him with an oppressive sense of jealousyâthough perhaps it was also the beginning of his
vita sexualis
.
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Shinsuke was ashamed both of the bottled cow's milk and of the fact that he had never tasted his mother's milk. This was his secretâthe lifelong secret that he could never tell another soul and that carried with it a certain superstition. He was a weirdly skinny little boy with a huge head. Not only was he also shy, but his heart would start pounding at the slightest provocationâsay, at the sight of a sharpened butcher's knife.
In this he differed utterly from his father, a man who prided himself on his courage and had undergone enemy gunfire in the battle of Fushimi-Toba.
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Shinsuke firmly believedâthough from what age and by what reasoning, he could not be sureâthat it was the cow's milk that had made him so unlike his father. He believed just as firmly that the cow's milk was responsible for his frail constitution. If he was right about this, then the minute he displayed the slightest weakness, he was sure, his friends would discover his secret. So he took on any challenge that his friends might throw his way. And there were plenty of challenges. One was for him to jump over the Big Ditch without a pole. Another was to climb the big gingko tree in the Ek
Å
in temple grounds without a ladder. And yet another was to have an all-out brawl with one of the friends. When he faced the Big Ditch, he felt his knees trembling, but he clamped his eyes shut and jumped with all his might, straight over the water weeds floating on the ditch's surface. The same sort of fear and hesitation attacked him when he climbed the Ek
Å
in's gingko and when he had his fight with the friend, but he conquered his emotions each time. No matter its superstitious origin, this was Spartan training for him, training that left a permanent scar on his right kneeâand possibly on his character as well. Shinsuke still remembers his father's withering tone: “You can be pretty damned stubborn for such a sissy.”
Fortunately, though, his superstition gradually disappeared. Moreover, in Western history he discovered something that almost seemed to
dis
prove his superstitionânamely, a passage stating that Romulus, the founder of Rome, had been suckled by a wolf. After that, he stopped minding that he had never known his mother's milk. Suddenly it became a point of pride for him that he had grown up on cow's milk. Shinsuke recalls going with his old uncle, the spring he entered middle school, to visit a dairy farm that the uncle owned
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at the time. He recalls with special clarity feeding hay to a white cow that ambled right up to him when he leaned over the fence, the chest of his school uniform just barely coming to the top rail. Looking up at him, the cow quietly pressed its nose into the fistful of hay. There was something nearly human in the cow's eyes, he
felt. Was it his imagination? It could well have been. In his memory, though, he leans over a fence beneath branches filled with apricot blossoms as a big white cow looks up at himâand into himâwith real fondness.