Rashomon and Seventeen Other Stories

“If the master does not behave like a master, the retainer need not behave like a retainer”

“Throughout heaven and earth, I alone am the honored one.”

By then, however, Yoshihide numbered among those who are no longer of this world. The night after he finished the screen, he tied a rope to a beam in his room and hanged himself. I suspect that, having sent his daughter on ahead to the other world, he could not bear to go on living here as if nothing had happened. His body lies buried in the ruins of his home. The little stone marker is probably so cloaked in moss now, after decades of exposure to the wind and rain, that no one can tell whose grave it is anymore.

Almost no one spoke ill of Yoshihide after that—at least not in the mansion. Could it be because all who saw the screen—even those who had always hated him—were struck by strangely solemn feelings when they witnessed the tortures of the Hell of Searing Heat in all their reality?

The lotuses of the Lotus Pond, however, were unperturbed. They swayed their perfect pearl-white blossoms near the feet of Lord Shakyamuni, and from their golden centers wafted forth each time a never-ending fragrance wonderful beyond description. I think it must have been close to noon in Paradise.

I myself caught a glimpse of the man once or twice in the Kōfukuji Temple grounds, and I can tell you he had a magnificent red monster of a snout that really did look as big as a storehouse.

“I know, I know, it may be wrong to pull out dead people’s hair. But these people here deserve what they get. Take this woman, the one I was pulling the hair from: she used to cut snakes into four-inch pieces and dry them and sell them as dried fish at the palace guardhouse. If she hadn’t died in the epidemic, she’d still be out there selling her wares. The guards loved her ‘fish’ and they bought it for every meal. I don’t think she was wrong to do it. She did it to keep from starving to death. She couldn’t help it. And I don’t think what I’m doing is wrong, either. It’s the same thing: I can’t help it. If I don’t do it, I’ll starve to death. This woman knew what it was to do what you have to do. I think she’d understand what I’m doing to her.”

Perhaps the true reason that Akutagawa Ryūnosuke continues to be read and admired today as a “national writer” lies in this—in the realization and determination that effectively pushed him into a dead end. He started out as one of the chosen few: a Japanese intellectual with a consciousness torn between the West and Japan’s traditional culture, in the border regions of which he succeeded in erecting a uniquely vigorous world of story.

Surely it would be no exaggeration to say that writing these late works effectively shortened his life, but it is also true that he was unable to find a way to go on living as a writer without writing works of this nature—and once he could no longer live as a writer, his life would cease to have meaning.

In Japanese there is the expression, “Let the enemy cut your flesh so that you can cut his bone.” This is precisely what Akutagawa has accomplished in “Spinning Gears.”