Read Rashomon and Seventeen Other Stories Online
Authors: Ryunosuke Akutagawa
She had a radiant face, like the morning sun on a thin sheet of ice. He was fond of her,
29
but he did not love her, nor had he ever laid a finger on her.
“I've heard you want to die,” she said.
“Yesâor rather, it's not so much that I want to die as that I'm tired of living.”
This dialogue led to a vow to die together.
“It would be a Platonic suicide, I suppose,” she said.
“A Platonic double suicide.”
He was amazed at his own sangfroid.
He did not die with her, but he took a certain satisfaction in his never having touched her. She often spoke with him as though their dialogue had never happened. She did once give him a bottle of cyanide with the remark, “As long as we have this, it will give us both strength.”
And it did indeed give him strength. Sitting in a rattan chair, observing the new growth of a
shii
tree,
30
he often thought of the peace that death would give him.
With the last of his strength, he tried to write his autobiography, but it did not come together as easily as he had hoped. This was because of his remaining pride and skepticism, and a calculation of what was in his own best interest. He couldn't help despising these qualities in himself; but neither could he help feeling that “Everyone is the same under the skin.” He tended to think that Goethe's title “Poetry and Truth”
31
could serve for anyone's autobiography, but he knew that not everyone is moved by literature. His own works were unlikely to appeal to people who were not like him and had not lived a life like hisâthis was another feeling that worked upon him. And so he decided to write his own brief “Poetry and Truth.”
Once he had finished writing “The Life of a Stupid Man,” he happened to see a stuffed swan in a secondhand shop. It stood with its head held high, but its wings were yellowed and moth-eaten. As he thought about his life, he felt both tears and mockery welling up inside him. All that lay before him was madness or suicide. He walked down the darkening street alone, determined now to wait for the destiny that would come to annihilate him.
One of his friends went mad.
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He had always felt close to this man because he understood far more deeply than anyone else the loneliness that lurked beneath his jaunty mask. He visited him a few times after the madness struck.
“You and I are both possessed by a demon,” the friend whispered, “the demon of the
fin de siècle
.”
Two or three days later, he heard, the man ate roses on the way to a hot-spring resort. When the friend was hospitalized, he recalled once sending him a terra cotta piece. It was a bust of the author of
The Inspector General
, one of the friend's favorite writers. Thinking how Gogol, too, had gone mad, he could not help feeling that there was a force governing all of them.
Just as he reached the point of utter exhaustion, he happened to read Raymond Radiguet's dying words, “God's soldiers are coming to get me,”
33
and sensed once again the laughter of the gods. He tried to fight against his own superstitions and sentimentalism, but he was physically incapable of putting up any kind of struggle. The “demon of the
fin de siècle
” was preying on him without a doubt. He envied medieval men's ability to find strength in God. But for him, believing in Godâin God's loveâwas an impossibility, though even Cocteau had done it!
The hand with the pen began to tremble, and before long he was even drooling. The only time his head ever cleared was after a sleep induced by eight-tenths of a gram of Veronal, and even then it never lasted more than thirty minutes or an hour. He barely made it through each day in the gloom, leaning as it were upon a chipped and narrow sword.
(June 1927: posthumous manuscript)
I was on my way to Tokyo for the wedding reception of an acquaintance. Satchel in hand, I urged the taxi driver on toward a station on the T
Å
kaid
Å
Line
1
from my home in a coastal resort town. Thick pinewoods lined both sides of the road. We weren't likely to make the Tokyo-bound train. The other passenger in the cab owned a barbershop. He was plump as a
natsume
2
and wore a short beard. Concerned about the time, I still managed to respond to his occasional remark.
“Strange, the things that happen.I hear they've been seeing a ghost on Mr.X's propertyâeven in the daytime.”
“Even in the daytime, eh?” My response was halfhearted.I stared across to where the western sun struck a pine-covered hill.
“Not on good days, though. Mostly when it rains.”
“Maybe the ghost comes to get wet.”
“That's funny⦠but I
have
heard it wears a raincoat.”
Sounding its horn, the taxi pulled up beside the station.I took leave of the barber and went inside. The Tokyo train had in fact pulled out two or three minutes earlier. One personâa man in a raincoatâsat on the waiting-room bench, blankly staring outside.I recalled the ghost story I had just heard, but gave the thought only a contorted little smile.I decided to wait for the next train in the café across from the station.
Actually, “café” was too grand a name for this place.I sat at a corner table and ordered a cup of cocoa. The table was covered in white oilcloth with a rough grid of narrow blue lines, but the slick coating was worn away in spots, revealing the dingy canvas
beneath.I took a sip of the cocoa, which had a fishy, glue-like smell, and looked around the deserted room. On the grimy walls were slips of paper announcing the dishes available:
Oyakodonburi
,
3
Pork Cutlet, Omelet with Local Eggs.
These paper slips seemed so typical of the countryside near the T
Å
kaid
Å
Line, where modern electric-powered locomotives pulled trains through fields of barley and cabbage.
It was close to sunset by the time I boarded the next Tokyo train.I always rode second class, but this time I decided to go third class.
The train was fairly crowded.I was surrounded by a group of elementary-school girls
4
on their way back from a swim at
Å
iso or some such place.I observed them as I lit a cigarette. They all seemed to be in a merry mood, and most of them jabbered on without a break.
“Mr. Cameraman, what does âlove scene' mean? It's English, isn't it?”
Sitting across from me, the “Mr. Cameraman” in question, who had apparently accompanied the school outing, did his best to avoid a straight answer, but a girl of fourteen or so kept plying him with questions. It suddenly occurred to me that her nasal whine might be due to an infection,
5
and I couldn't help smiling. Then the girl next to me, who must have been twelve or thirteen, went to sit on the lap of the young lady-teacher, hooking her arm around the woman's neck and stroking her cheek. Between remarks to her friends, she would say things like, “You're so pretty, teacher! You have such pretty eyes.”
As a group they seemed to me more like women than schoolgirlsâif you ignored the fact that some were unwrapping caramels or munching on unpeeled apples. But then the one I took to be the oldest girl must have stepped on someone's foot as she passed my seat.“Oh, do forgive me!” she said. Oddly, her very maturity made her seem more like a schoolgirl than the rest.I couldn't help sneering at myself, cigarette in my lips, for my own contradictory impression.
Eventually the train, in which the lights had come on at some point, pulled into a suburban station.I stepped down to the cold, windy platform, crossed a footbridge, and waited for the
connecting train. At that point I ran into T, who worked for a large company. While waiting, we talked about things such as the faltering economy. He, of course, knew a lot more about such matters than I did, but one of his powerful-looking fingers bore a turquoise ring that had nothing to do with hard economic times.
“That's quite a ring,” I said.
“This? Oh, a friend of mine made me buy it from him when he went over to Harbin on business. He's having a tough time, too. He can't deal with the cooperatives
6
anymore.”
The train we boarded was, fortunately, not as crowded as the first one.T and I sat next to each other and kept on talking. He had just returned to Tokyo from an assignment in Paris this past spring, and so Paris tended to dominate our conversation. We talked about Mme. Caillaux's shooting
7
of the owner of
Le Figaro
, about crab cuisine, about an Imperial Prince who was traveling abroadâ¦
“France is having surprisingly little trouble with the economy. The French really hate to pay taxes, though, so their cabinets are always falling.”
“But the franc's gone through the floor.”
“That's if you believe what you read in the papers. Over there, the papers'll tell you Japan has nothing but earthquakes and floods.”
Just then, a man in a raincoat sat down across from us. This gave me an eerie feeling, and I wanted to tell T about the ghost story I had heard, but before I could do so, he tipped the handle of his cane to the left and, still facing forward, quietly said to me, “See that woman over there? The one with the gray woolen shawl.”
“With the Western hairdo?”
“Uh-huh, and the cloth bundle. She was in Karuizawa
8
this summer. Always wearing chic Western clothing.”
She certainly would have looked very shabby to anyone who saw her at the moment, however.I stole a few glances at her while talking with T. There was a hint of insanity between her brows. And protruding from her cloth bundle was a sea sponge with leopard-like spots.
“I heard she was always dancing with some young American in Karuizawa. She's one of those
modern
whatchamacallems.”
9
When I said goodbye to T, I realized that the man in the raincoat had disappeared at some point. Bag in hand, I walked from the station to a hotel. Tall buildings lined both sides of the street. As I walked along, I thought about this morning's pinewoods.I also realized that something strange had entered my field of visionâa set of translucent spinning gears.I had had this experience several times before, and it was always the same: the number of gears would gradually increase until half my field of vision was blocked. This would last only a few moments, and then the gears would vanish, to be replaced by a headache. My eye doctor had often ordered me to cut down on smoking to rid myself of this optical illusion (if that's what it was), but actually I had begun seeing the gears before I turned twenty, well before I started smoking.“Here it comes again,” I told myself, and covered my right eye to test the sight of the left one. The left eye was fine, but behind the lid of the right several gears were spinning.I hurried down the street as the buildings on the right side gradually disappeared.
By the time I entered the hotel, the gears were gone, but the headache was still there. As I was checking my overcoat and hat at the desk, I decided to reserve a room; then I telephoned a magazine publisher to talk about money.
The wedding banquet had apparently long since started.I found a seat at a far corner of the table and began moving my knife and fork. There were more than fifty people seated at the U-shaped table, and all of them, from the bride and groom at the center on down, were naturally in high spirits.I, however, grew increasingly depressed beneath the bright lights. To escape this feeling, I tried chatting with my neighbor, an old gentleman with a white beard like a lion's mane. He was actually a famous scholar of Chinese whose name I knew. Our conversation soon turned to the classics.
“The
kirin
is, finally, a kind of unicorn,” I said.“And the
h
Å
Å
10
corresponds to the Western phoenix.”
He seemed interested in my remarks, but the longer I sustained the mechanical process of making conversation, the more
I began to feel a sick, destructive urge coming on.I declared that the legendary sage emperors Yao and Shun were “of course” fictional creations, and that the author of the
Spring and Autumn Annals
was actually a person of the much later Han period.
11
At this, the China scholar made an open show of his displeasure. He turned away and, with a tiger-like growl, cut me off in mid-sentence.
“If you start saying Yao and Shun never existed, you make a liar out of Confucius, and that sage would never tell a lie.”
I shut up then, of course, and began to slice the meat on my plate.I noticed a tiny maggot silently squirming on the edge of the meat. The maggot called to mind the English word “Worm.” This was probably another word like “
kirin
” or “
h
Å
Å
” designating a legendary creature.
12
I laid down my knife and fork and watched my champagne glass being filled.
When, at last, the banquet ended, I walked down a deserted corridor to shut myself up in the room I had booked. The corridor struck me as more like that of a prison than a hotel, but fortunately my headache had subsided.
They had brought my suitcase to the room, and my hat and coat as well. Hanging on the wall, the coat looked to me like my own standing figure.I hurriedly threw it into a corner wardrobe. Then I went to the mirror and stared at my reflection. My face in the mirror revealed the bones beneath the skin. Into the memory contained in this skull of mine leaped a vivid image of the maggot.
I opened the door, stepped out, and wandered down the hall. In a corner where the corridor joined the lobby stood a tall lamp, its green shade brilliantly reflected against a glass door. The sight gave me a peaceful sensation.I sat in a nearby chair and mused on many things, but I was unable to remain seated there for as long as five minutes: there was another raincoat, this one dangling over the back of the sofa next to me where someone had tossed it.
And this is supposed to be the coldest time of the year!
Thinking this, I headed back down the hallway. At the bellboy station in a corner of the corridor, there was not a bellboy to be seen, though I could hear their voices. In response to some
remark, one said in English, “All right.” All right? I struggled to grasp the meaning of the exchange.“All right”? “All right”? What could possibly be all right?
My room, of course, was silent, but the thought of going through the door I found unsettling. After a moment's hesitation, I steeled myself and went in.I sat at the desk, taking care not to look in the mirror. The seat was an armchair done in a green Moroccan leather like a lizard skin.I opened my bag, took out a sheaf of manuscript paper, and tried to work on a story I had been writing. But even after I had dipped it in ink, my pen would not move. And when at last it did, it just kept writing the same words over and over: “All right⦠All rightâ¦Allright, Sir⦠All right⦔
Suddenly the phone by the bed rang. Startled, I stood up and put the receiver to my ear.
“Who is it?” I asked.
“It's me.
Me
⦔ It was my elder sister's daughter.
“What is it? Is something wrong?”
“Yes, something terrible,” she said.“So I⦠It's so terrible, I called your house, and Auntie told me to⦔
“Is it really so terrible?”
“Yes, reallyâplease come right away. Right away!”
She cut the connection.I set the receiver down and pressed the button to summon a bellboy. My hand moved reflexively, but I was fully aware that it was trembling. No one came in response to the bell. More out of anguish than annoyance, I pressed the button again and again, understanding at last what Fate was trying to tell me with the words “All right.”
That afternoon, in a nearby Tokyo suburb, my sister's husband had been killed by a train. Despite the season, he had been wearing a raincoat.
I am in that same hotel room now, writing the same story. No one goes down the hall in the middle of the night, but sometimes I hear the sound of wings outside my door. Perhaps someone is keeping birds nearby.