Chapter Chapter 4 · RASHŌMON

. RASHŌMON

It was evening. A solitary lackey sat under Rashōmon waiting for the

rain to clear.

Beneath the broad gate, there was not another soul. Only, on a big

round pillar, from which the vermilion lacquer had peeled off here

and there, sat one lone cricket. Since Rashōmon was in the great

thoroughfare Sujaku Ōji, it would seem that there should also have been

two or three tradeswomen in wide straw hats and men in citizen’s caps

sheltering there from the rain. All the same, besides this single man,

there was no one.

This was because for the past two or three years in Kyōto one calamity

after another--earthquakes, cyclones, fires and famines--had followed

each other in rapid succession. Wherefore, throughout the capital the

desolation was extraordinary. According to the old records, things

had come to such a pass that Buddhist images and temple furniture

were broken up and, with their red lacquer and gold and silver foil

clinging to them, were heaped along the streets and sold for fire wood.

With the whole town in such a state, of course no one took the least

thought for the upkeep of Rashōmon. So turning its abandonment to their

profit, foxes and badgers found habitation there. Thieves abode there.

And finally it even became a custom with men to bring unclaimed bodies

there and leave them in the gate. Whence, when day had closed his

eye, the place was abhorred of all, and no man would set foot in the

neighborhood.

Instead, swarms of ravens from nobody knows where congregated there.

By day the innumerable rout described a circle and wheeled crying

about the ornamental grampuses high on the roof. Especially when the

sky above the gate was aflare with the sunset glow, did they stand

out distinctly like a scattering of sesamum seeds. Of course, they

were there to pick the flesh from the corpses up in the gate. However,

on this day, perhaps because of the lateness of the hour, not a bird

was to be seen. Only here and there on the crumbling stone steps,

where grass grew long in the crevices, their droppings shone in white

splashes. The lackey sat in a threadbare coat of dark blue on the

topmost of the seven steps and, fingering a great carbuncle on his

right cheek, looked vacantly at the falling rain.

I have said that he was waiting for the rain to clear. But even if it

did clear, he had nothing in particular he wished to do. Ordinarily, of

course, he must have gone back to his master’s house. But four or five

days before, he had been turned out. As I have already said, Kyōto was

in unprecedented decay. And the dismissal of this man by a master whom

he had served for years was one small ripple on this sea of troubles.

Wherefore, rather than that he was waiting for the rain to clear, it

would be more to the point to say that, driven to shelter by the storm,

this lackey who had no place to go was at a loss what to do. Besides,

the gloomy sky that day had no small effect on the sentimentalism of

this man of the Heian period. The rain, which had been falling since a

little after the hour of the monkey, still showed no sign of letting

up. So the servant sat following a rambling train of thought on the

one vital and immediate question of how he could ever manage to live

through the morrow--that is, how he could ever do the impossible--and

listened listlessly to the long rain that kept pounding down in Sujaku

Ōji.

The rain, enveloping Rashōmon, mustered a rattling roar from afar.

Darkness gradually lowered in the sky, and overhead the roof of the

gate supported a heavy leaden cloud on a point of its obliquely

projecting tiles.

For the accomplishment of the impossible, there was no time left in

which to choose a plan. If he took time, he could but choose between

starvation under some wall and starvation by some road. And then he

would simply be brought to the loft in this gate and thrown away like

a dog. If he did not choose,--again and again the man’s thoughts went

over the same winding way and arrived finally at this same place. But

no matter how often this “if” came up, it remained still in the end

but “if.” Even though he did not choose any plan, yet he had not the

courage to make the positive admission naturally necessary to the

settlement of the “if,” that there was nothing for it but to turn thief.

He sneezed a great sneeze and then got up laboriously. Night-chilled

Kyōto was cold enough to suggest the comfort of a fire. The pitiless

wind swept with the deepening darkness between the pillars of the gate.

And the cricket that had clung to the red lacquer of one of them had

disappeared.

Drawing in his neck and lifting his shoulders high in the bright

yellow shirt which he wore under his dark blue coat, the lackey looked

all about the gate. If he could find a place, out of the wind and

rain and free from the gaze of men, where he could pass one night in

peaceful sleep, there anyway, he fain would rest until the dawn. Then

fortunately his eyes fell upon a wide ladder, likewise red, mounting up

into the tower of the gate. Above, though there might be men, they were

but dead men after all. Then, taking heed lest the great plain-handled

sword swinging at his side should slip in its scabbard, he planted a

straw-sandaled foot on the bottom step of the ladder.

A few minutes elapsed. In the middle of the wide ladder leading to the

tower of Rashōmon the man crouched like a cat and, holding his breath,

took in the state of affairs above. A ray of light shining from the

tower faintly illumined his right cheek. It was the cheek on which the

festering red carbuncle gleamed in his short beard. He had lightly

calculated from the first that everybody up there was dead. But when he

had climbed up two or three steps, it appeared that not only had some

one above struck a light but that he was moving it to and fro. This was

at once made evident by the dull yellow gleam that danced in reflection

on the cobwebs hanging in the corners of the ceiling. Whoever had

struck this light in Rashōmon on this rainy night was surely no

ordinary being!

At last, stealing up with muffled steps like a gecko, the lackey,

crouching, scaled the ladder to the topmost step. Then lying as flat

as he could and craning his neck forward as far as it would go, he

peered with dread into the loft.

He peered, and the loft, as rumor had it, was full of corpses flung

carelessly away, but, the circle illuminated by the light being smaller

than had at first seemed apparent, he was not able to judge how many

there might be. Only, he could make out vaguely that there were among

them both clothed and unclothed cadavers. Of course, men and women

appeared all to be jumbled up together. And like so many dolls of

kneaded clay, these bodies sprawled on the floor with open mouths and

out-thrown arms in such confusion as to make one doubt even that they

had once been living beings. Moreover, while the wan light played on

their shoulders, breasts and more elevated parts, the shadows of their

depressions were intensified, and they lay in silence like eternal

mutes that had never known speech.

In the stench of decaying flesh, the lackey involuntarily covered his

nose. But the next moment his hand had forgotten its work. Excess of

feeling had almost completely deprived him of his olfactory sense.

For the first time he had just caught sight of a living mortal

squatting down among the dead. It was a monkey-like old hag in a dark

brown kimono, short, skinny and white-headed. With a blazing splinter

of pine in her right hand, she was peering fixedly into the face of one

of the corpses. From its long hair, it seemed to be the body of a woman.

For a space, the lackey, moved by six parts of horror and four of

curiosity, forgot even to breathe. To borrow the words of an old

writer, he felt that “the hair on his head and body swelled.” Then

sticking the pine splinter into a crack in the floor, the hag took the

head at which she had been gazing and, just like an old monkey picking