Chapter II: Introduction (2)

Finally, calculating the time, the professor opened the door of his reception room. At practically the same moment that he entered the room and let go the knob, a lady who appeared to be about forty arose from a chair in which she was sitting. She went beyond his ability to make her out, being dressed in an elegant unlined garment of steel grey satin, with, where her haori of black silk finely striped in the fabric hung a little open at the front, a chrysoprase sash-fastener embossed in a chaste diamond-shaped design. Even the professor, who usually took no notice of such trifles, at once saw that her hair was done up in the coiffure of a married woman. With the round face and amber skin peculiar to Japanese, she seemed to be a so-called “wise mother.”

“I’m Hasegawa,” the professor said, bowing amiably. For he thought that if he spoke thus, she would probably say something, if they had ever met before.

“I’m Nishiyama Kenichirō’s mother,” said the lady in a clear voice, politely returning his bow.

At the name, “Nishiyama Kenichirō,” the professor remembered. Nishiyama was one of those students who wrote critical articles on Ibsen and Strindberg, whose special study, he seemed to remember, was German Law, and who, even after he entered the university, had often come to the professor’s house with problems of thought to discuss. In the spring, he had fallen ill of peritonitis and entered the university hospital, and the professor had taken advantage of some opportunities and inquired after him once or twice. It was not mere accident that the professor thought he had seen the lady’s face somewhere. That cheerful youth with heavy eyebrows and this woman were as surprisingly alike as the two melons in the Japanese popular saying.

“Ah, Nishiyama Kun’s,--is that so?”

The professor, nodding to himself, pointed to a chair on the opposite side of a small table.

“Please--take that chair.”

The lady, after first apologizing for her abrupt visit, again bowed politely and sat down in the chair indicated. As she did so, she took something white, which seemed to be a handkerchief, out of her sleeve. When he saw this, the professor quickly offered her a Korean fan that lay on the table and sat down in the chair opposite.

“This is a fine house,” said the lady, looking round the room a little unnaturally.

“Oh, no, it’s only big, and I don’t take any care of it at all.”

The professor, who was accustomed to such greetings, having the maid put the chilled tea she had just brought before his guest, immediately turned the subject of conversation toward her.

“How is Nishiyama Kun? Is there any change in his condition?”

“Yes.”

The lady paused for a moment modestly, putting her hands, one on the other, on her knees, and then spoke quietly. Her tone continued to be calm and smooth.

“In truth it was about my son that I came to-day; finally nothing could be done for him. While he was alive, you were very kind to him and--”

The professor, who had taken it for reserve in her that the lady did not touch her tea, was at this moment just going to put his cup to his lips. For he thought it would be better to set an example by sipping his own tea than to urge her repeatedly and importunately to take hers. But before the cup had reached his soft mustache, her words suddenly smote his ears. Should he drink or should he not? This question, entirely independent of the youth’s death, plagued him for a moment. But he could not go on holding the cup where it was forever. So he resolutely swallowed half his tea and, knitting his brows the least bit, said in a choked voice, “That’s too bad.”

“He often spoke of you while he was in the hospital, so though I felt that you must be busy, thinking that, by way of letting you know, I’d express my thanks,--”

“Oh, not at all.”

The professor put the cup down and, taking up a green waxed fan, said in a daze,

“So finally nothing could be done for him, you say. He was just at the promising age, but,--not having visited the hospital for some time, I never imagined anything but that probably he was just about well. Then when was it--his death?”

“The first seventh-day was just yesterday.”

“And at the hospital--?”

“Yes.”

“Indeed, this is a surprise to me.”

“Anyway, as we did everything that could be done, there’s nothing to do but be resigned, but nevertheless, when I think how we raised him, I can’t keep myself from fits of complaining.”

While conversing thus, the professor became aware of a surprising fact. It was the fact that in neither her attitude nor her demeanor did she seem in the least to be talking about her own son’s death. She had no tears in her eyes. Her voice was natural. Besides, a smile played about the corners of her mouth. So if anybody had simply seen her outward appearance without hearing her words, he surely could have thought nothing but that she was talking of ordinary everyday affairs. To the professor, this was surprising.

Once long before when he was studying in Berlin, it happened that Wilhelm I, the father of the present Kaiser, died. He heard of it at a café he usually frequented, and of course experienced no more than an ordinary impression. Then with a cheerful face and his stick under his arm, he returned to the boarding house as usual, but as soon as he opened the door, the two children who lived there suddenly threw themselves on his neck and burst out crying together. One was a girl of twelve in a brown jacket and the other a boy of nine in dark blue knickers. As the professor, who was fond of children, did not understand, he consoled them, patting their shining hair and eagerly asking them over and over what was the matter. But they simply would not stop crying. Then swallowing their tears, they sobbed, “Our grandpa Emperor is dead.”

The professor thought it strange that the death of the emperor of a country should bring so much sorrow even to the children. It was not only of the question of the relation existing between the imperial house and the people that he was made to think. The impulsive expression of their emotions by occidentals, which had impressed him ever since he came to the West, now surprised, as if it were something new, this professor, a Japanese and a believer in Bushidō. He had never forgotten the feeling, seemingly compounded of suspicion and sympathy, that he experienced at that time. Conversely, he now felt precisely the same degree of surprise at this lady’s not weeping. But a second discovery followed on the heels of the first. It was just as their conversation, after having gone from reminiscences of the dead youth into details of his daily life, was about to turn back again to more reminiscences. The Korean fan chanced to slip from the professor’s hand and fell of a sudden on the marquetry floor. The conversation, of course, was not so urgent as not to permit of a momentary interruption. So, bending forward from his chair and looking down, he stretched out his hand toward the floor. The fan was lying beneath the little table just beside the lady’s white tabi concealed in her slippers.

Then he chanced to notice the lady’s knees. On them, rested her hands holding the handkerchief. Of course this alone was no discovery. But at the same instant he realized that her hands were trembling fearfully. And he noticed that, probably due to her endeavor to suppress the agitation of her emotions, her hands, as they trembled, grasped the handkerchief on her knees so hard that they all but tore it in two. Finally he perceived that the embroidered edge of the wrinkled silk handkerchief moved between her delicate fingers as if stirred by a light breeze. The lady smiled with her face, indeed, but the truth was that she had been weeping with her whole body from the first.

When the professor had picked up the fan and raised his face, there was an expression on it which had not been there before. It was a very complicated expression, as if a reverent feeling at having seen what he should not have seen and a certain satisfaction arising from the consciousness of that feeling had been exaggerated by more or less theatricality.

“Ah, even I who have no children can understand your grief perfectly,” said the professor in a low voice full of feeling, tilting his head back a little as if dazzled by something.

“Thank you. But, whatever we say, it’s beyond help now, so--”

The lady lowered her head the least little bit. A bright smile beamed from her unclouded face as before.

* * * * *

It was two hours later. The professor had taken a bath, finished his supper, eaten some cherries for dessert and settled down comfortably in the cane chair on the veranda.

The twilight of the long summer evening lingered on and, in the large veranda, with its glass windows wide open, there was yet no sign of darkness falling. The professor, with his left knee crossed over his right and his head resting on the back of the chair, was gazing at the tassels of the Gifu lantern in the dim light. Though he had that same book of Strindberg’s in his hand, he appeared not yet to have read another page of it. That was natural. His head was still full of the brave behavior of Nishiyama Atsuko.

During supper, he had told his wife the whole story. And he had praised it as an illustration of the Bushidō of the women of Japan. On hearing it, this lover of Japan and the Japanese could not but sympathize. He had been pleased to find an eager listener in her. His wife, the lady and the Gifu lantern--these three now floated in his consciousness with a certain ethical background.

I do not know how long he was absorbed in such agreeable reflections. But while still in their grasp, he suddenly remembered that he had been asked to send a contribution to a certain magazine. Under the caption, “Letters to the Youth of Today,” that magazine was getting together the opinions on general morality of distinguished men all over the country. Using that day’s incident as material, he would write and send his impressions at once, he thought, and scratched his head a little.

The hand with which the professor scratched his head was the one in which he held the book. Becoming aware of the book, which he had up till now neglected, he opened it where he had inserted the card a while before at the page he had already begun to read. Just then the maid came and lighted the Gifu lantern above his head, so it was not very difficult for him to read the fine type. He cast his eyes casually on the page without any great desire to read. Strindberg said,

“In my youth, people told about Madame Heiberg’s handkerchief, a story which had probably come out of Paris. It was about her double performance of tearing her handkerchief in two with her hands while a smile played over her face. Now we call this claptrap.”

The professor put the book down on his knees. As he put it down open, the card with the name Nishiyama Atsuko on it still lay between its pages. But what was in his mind was no longer the lady. Nor was it either his wife or Japanese civilization. It was a nondescript something that threatened to break the calm harmony of these. The stage trick that Strindberg had scorned was not, of course, the same thing as a question of practical morality. But in the hint he had got from what he had just read, there was something threatening to disturb the care-free feeling he had had since taking his bath. Bushidō and its mannerisms--

The professor shook his head unhappily two or three times and then, with upturned eyes, began again to gaze intently at the bright light of the Gifu lantern covered with pictures of autumn flowers.

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 lice from its young, began to pull out the long hairs one by one. They seemed to yield to her pull.

With every hair that came out, the dread seemed to depart appreciably from the heart of the lackey. And at the same time, intense hatred of the old hag was little by little engendered. No, “of the old hag” may not be just the right words. Rather his antipathy to all evil grew stronger every minute. If some one at that time had broached afresh the question which this man had been considering under the gate a little while before, whether he should starve or turn thief, in all likelihood he would have unhesitatingly chosen starvation. Thus fiercely, like the splint of pine the old hag had stuck in the floor, blazed up this man’s detestation of evil.

The lackey, of course, did not know why the old hag was pulling out the hair of the dead. Consequently, he did not know, rationally, whether her conduct should be set down as good or evil. But to him the pulling of hair from the heads of the dead on that rainy night up in Rashōmon was, on the face of it, an unpardonable crime. Naturally he had already forgot that a little before he had had half a mind to turn thief himself.

So, bracing his two feet firmly, he suddenly sprang from the ladder up into the room. Then, grasping the plain handle of his sword, he advanced with great strides up to the hag. Naturally she was startled out of her wits.

With a glance at the lackey, she sprang up as if shot from a catapult.

“Wretch! Where are you going?” cursed the man, blocking her way, as she stumbled among the corpses in a panic-stricken effort to escape.

All the same, she struggled to push him aside and get by. But peremptorily he forced her back. For a moment, the pair scuffled in silence among the corpses. But from the first there was no doubt of the victor.

In the end, seizing one of her arms, the lackey twisted it and threw her violently down. It was nothing but skin and bone, just like the leg of a hen.

“What are you up to? Look you, what are you up to? Out with it! If you don’t speak, you get this, see!”

And casting her away, he suddenly unsheathed his sword and brandished the white flash of steel before her eyes. But the old hag held her tongue. Her hands trembling, her shoulders heaving as she gasped for breath, and her eyes so wide open that it seemed the balls must burst from their sockets, she persisted in her silence like a mute. At this, the lackey realized clearly for the first time that this old woman’s life and death depended entirely upon his will. And before he was aware, this realization had cooled the fires of detestation that up to this time had blazed so fiercely in his heart. What remained was simply that comfortable pride and satisfaction that follow upon a piece of work wholly carried to completion. Then, looking down upon her, he said in a slightly milder tone:

“I’m no official from the police commissioner’s office. I’m a wanderer who happened to pass under this gate a little while ago. So you won’t be tied with a rope and arrested. All I demand is that you tell me what you’re doing up in this gate at this hour.”

At this, the old hag’s wide-staring eyes grew all the larger, and she fastened them intently on the face of the lackey. They were sharp red-lidded eyes like those of some bird of prey. Then she moved her lips, practically one with her nose among the wrinkles, as if she were chewing something. A sharply projecting Adam’s apple slid up and down in her skinny throat. And at the same time, a voice like the croak of a raven came pantingly from that throat and struck harshly upon his ears.

“I’m pulling out hair, pulling out this woman’s hair, because I’m going to make wigs.”

The servant was disappointed at the unexpected ordinariness of her answer. And at the same time, the hatred he had felt before, mingled with a cold disdain, crept back into his heart again. And its manifestations probably transmitted themselves to the hag. For still holding in one hand the long hair she had pulled from the corpse’s head, she mumbled her case in the croaking voice of a toad.

To be sure, it might be wicked to pull hair from dead bodies, for all she knew. But these dead were mostly people who could well be treated in such a way. For instance, this woman from whose head she had just been pulling hair had cut snakes up into four-inch lengths and sold them for dried fish in the military camps. Had she not fallen prey to the epidemic and died, she might have been selling them yet. What was more, the samurai had found her dried fish tasty and bought them all up to eat with their rice. The hag did not find the woman’s conduct blameworthy. Since she must otherwise have starved to death, she could not well have helped it. Therefore, what she herself now did could not be called bad either. Since this, too, must be done or she would starve, it could not well be helped, and she thought this woman, who well knew her dilemma, would surely forgive her for what she did. Thus, by the large, ran the old hag’s explanation.

The lackey sheathed his sword and, with his left hand on the hilt, listened in cold blood to her recital. Of course, his right hand was busy fingering the festering carbuncle on his fiery cheek. But as he listened, a certain courage was born within him. It was the courage he had lacked under the gate a while before. And, moreover, it was a courage tending to move in just the opposite direction from the courage with which he had a little before mounted up into the gate and seized the old woman. It was not only that he was no longer at a loss whether to starve or turn thief. His emotions were now such that the idea of starving to death had been driven from his consciousness as well-nigh unthinkable.

“Really? Is that true?”

When the old woman had finished her tale, he questioned her in a sneering voice. Then advancing one step forward, he suddenly removed his right hand from his carbuncle and, seizing the hag by the collar, said,

“Then I guess you won’t blame me for turning highwayman, will you? I, too, must starve else.”

Like a flash he stripped off her kimono. Then, as she tried to cling to his legs, he violently kicked her down upon the corpses. It was but five paces to the head of the ladder. With the dark brown kimono under his arm, he ran in a twinkling down the steep steps into the depths of the night.

It was not long before the old woman, who had lain for a space like one dead, raised her naked body up from among the corpses. Murmuring and groaning, she crawled by the help of the light that still burned to the top of the ladder. And from there, with her short white hair hanging about her face, she peered down under the gate. Outside there was nothing but black and cavernous night.

The lackey had already braved the rain and hurried away into the streets of Kyōto to rob.

LICE