To avoid being seen, the man stole up to the gate’s top storey, which formed an upstairs room. A dim light was burning in the gloom. Strange! The man peered in through the latticework windows and, stretched before him, he saw the corpse of a young woman …
Cardboard tags on fine wires dangle from the big toe of each cadaver, each tag inscribed with a name, an age and a date. Your friend bends over one of the corpses and begins to peel back the skin of its face with his scalpel, gradually exposing an expanse of yellow fat, the hair of the corpse dangling over the edge of the table …
The light by her head, an ancient crone was roughly picking out the corpse’s hair. For all the frightened thief knew, this old crone could be a demon or a ghost …
You are afraid, afraid again. You do not want to look, but you must look, you must; you are writing a story set in the Heian era, a story of corpses. But you have been unable to finish your work, unable to balance the fantastic and the authentic. And so you have asked to be here; you have asked to see a corpse – ‘Look, Ryūnosuke! Look! You cannot turn your face from horror, you cannot look away from death. You cannot hide, you have to look. So look, Ryūnosuke! Look and see …’ – And now you look, and yes, you see. See the corpse and see the hair. And now you reach out, reach out to touch the hair, but then you stop, you stop. The smell overpowering, a stench of rotting apricots. You steel yourself, and step closer …
The thief opened the door, drew his dagger and charged in with a shout. The terrified crone wrung her hands in a frantic plea for mercy, mercy …
‘You’re lucky,’ laughs your friend, still working away with his scalpel. ‘You know, we’re actually running out of decent cadavers these days.’
‘Who are you, what are you doing here,’ snarled the thief …
You reach out again, and now you touch the hair, the hair of the corpse. The hair slips easily into your hand …
‘My mistress died, sir, and there was no one to do the needful for her, so I brought her up here. You see, sir, her hair is longer than she was tall, and I am picking it out to make a wig. Please, sir, don’t kill me!’
Pen in hand, at your desk, under the gate, you are under the gate, in the upstairs room, you are in that room, in that place and in that time. The stench of death, the sound of rain. A flash of lightning, a peal of thunder. You strip the old woman of her robes, you tear the hair from her hands. She clutches at your legs, she clings to your ankles. You kick her, you kick her, violently, violently, sending her sprawling, sprawling back, back among the corpses, back among the dead, then you turn, you turn, turn and descend, down the steep stairs, stair by stair, into the darkness, and into the night …
The thief took the corpse’s clothes and the old woman’s, too, picked up the pile of loose hair, dashed back down the stairs and fled …
The old woman lies among the corpses now, naked as if dead, her tiny face ashen, her tiny body lifeless, as though she is already no longer here, always never really there. Then murmuring and muttering, now sighing and groaning, she crawls, she crawls, over the corpses, to the top of the stairs, her hair hanging down, down over her face, she peers down the stairs, staring under the gate, staring out, out, into the dark and empty night …
Yes, the upper storey of the Rashōmon Gate used to be filled with human corpses and skeletons. If people couldn’t provide a proper funeral, they would sometimes bring the corpse to the upper storey of the gate and leave it there instead. The thief told people about what had happened to him, and thus this story came to be handed down to us today.
At your desk, you stop writing, you look up. For a moment, you do not recognise this place, do not recognise this world. You were in the current and the light that flow through nature and through time, through life and through art, a light more powerful than a thousand shattered stars, a current faster than any river, flowing through your blood, sweeping through your mind, taking the faint spark which glimmers within, turning that spark into a flame, kindling that flame until it burns and burns, brighter and brighter, illuminating your way, forcing you on, moving your hand and moving your pen, word after word, for page after page, absorbing you, consuming you, in letters, in writing. But then, the next moment, it is gone again, gone again. And the instant you lose sight of it, the very moment it is gone, you are overcome by the immense and endless darkness that looms around you now, at your desk, in your study, leaving you lost again, alone again, in the dark and empty night, lost and alone, waiting, just waiting.
*
Once again upon a time, beneath the branches of the red pine, before the blackened gravestone, the child said to the man, No, no. Those are the stories, the narratives you tell yourself, you write yourself, in the mirror in the bathroom, at your desk in your study, you keep telling yourself, will keep writing yourself, these stories, these narratives that do not hold, which will not hold, that break apart, will break apart, in the mirror in the bathroom, at your desk in your study, breaking you apart, tearing you apart, splintering and splattering you, in remembered scenes, on erected screens, until it’s all too late, all too late, and all that remains, all that remains are those erected screens,
