Short Fiction

before the door were dimly visible the scattered footprints of a badger.

This story was immediately carried across hundreds of miles of mountain and river to the district of the capital. Then the badgers of Yamashiro changed their shapes. The badgers of Omi changed theirs. Finally the related racoon dog began to assume human form, and in Tokugawa days, a fellow called Sado-no-Danzaburō, who was neither a racoon dog nor a badger, began to bewitch even the people of Echizen Province across the sea.

He did not begin to bewitch them, but it came to be thought that he did, you may say. But how much difference is there after all between being bewitched and believing that one is bewitched?

This is true not only in the case of badgers. Is it not a fact that all things that exist for us are in the end but things in the existence of which we believe?

It is written in The Celtic Twilight, by Yeats, that some children on Lake Gill believed without a doubt that a little Protestant girl in blue and white garments was the Holy Mother Mary herself. When we think of them as both living in the human mind just the same, there is no difference between Mary on the lake and the badger in the wilds.

Should we not believe in that which lives within us just as our forefathers believed that the badger bewitched men? And should we not live as bidden by that in which we believe?

Herein lies reason why we should not despise the badger.

The Spider’s Thread

I

One day the Buddha was sauntering alone on the brink of the lotus pond of Paradise.

The lotus flowers in bloom in the pond were all as white as pearls, and the golden pistils and stamens in their centers ceaselessly filled all the air with ineffable fragrance.

It was morning in Paradise.

Presently the Buddha stood still on the brink of the pond, and through an opening among the leaves which covered the face of the water, suddenly beheld the scene below.

As the floor of Hell lay directly beneath the lotus pond of Paradise, the Sanzu-no-Kawa and Hari-no-Yama were distinctly visible through the crystal water, as through a sterioptiscope.

Then his eye fell on a man named Kandata, who was squirming with the other sinners in the bottom of Hell.

This Kandata was a great robber who had done many evil things, murdering and setting fire to houses, but he had to his credit one good action. Once while on his way through a deep forest, he had noticed a little spider creeping along beside the road.

So quickly lifting his foot, he was about to trample it to death, when he suddenly thought, “No, no, as small as this thing is, it, too, has a soul: it would be rather a shame to recklessly kill it,” and spared the spider’s life.

As he looked down into Hell, the Buddha remembered how this Kandata had spared the spider’s life. And in return for that good deed, he thought, if possible, he would like to deliver him out of Hell. Fortunately when he looked around, he saw a spider of Paradise spinning a beautiful silvery thread on the halcyon-colored lotus leaves.

The Buddha quietly took up the spider’s thread in his hand. And he let it straight down to the bottom of Hell far below through the opening among the pearly white lotus flowers.

II

Here Kandata was rising and sinking with the other sinners in the Pond of Blood on the floor of Hell.

It was pitch black everywhere, and when sometimes a glimpse was caught of something rising from that darkness, it turned out to be the gleam of the needle of the dread Hari-no-Yama, so it was inexpressibly forbidding. Moreover the stillness of the grave reigned everywhere, and the only thing that could at times be heard was the faint sighing of the sinners.

This was because such sinners as had come down to this spot had already been tired out by the other manifold tortures of Hell and had lost even the strength to cry aloud.

So, great robber though he was, Kandata, also suffocated with the blood, could do nothing but struggle in the pond like a dying frog.

But his time came. One day when Kandata lifted his head by chance and looked up at the sky above the Pond of Blood, he saw a silver spider’s thread slipping down toward him from the high, high heavens, glittering slightly in the silent darkness just as if it feared the eyes of man.

When he saw this, his hands clapped themselves for joy. If, clinging to this thread, he climbed as far as it went, he could surely escape from Hell.

Nay, if all went well, he might even enter Paradise. Then he would never be driven on to Hari-no-Yama nor sunk in the Pond of Blood.

As soon as these thoughts came into his mind, he grasped the thread tightly in his two hands and began to climb up and up with all his might.

Because he was a great robber, he had long been thoroughly familiar with such things.

But Hell is nobody-knows-how-many myriads of miles removed from Paradise and, strive as he might, he could not easily get out. After climbing for a while, he was finally exhausted and could not ascend an inch higher.

So since he could do nothing else, he stopped to rest and, hanging to the thread, looked far, far down below him. Now since he had climbed with all his might, the Pond of Blood where he had just been was already, much to his surprise, hidden deep down in the darkness. And the dread Hari-no-Yama glittered dimly under him. If he went up at this rate, he might get out of Hell more easily than he had thought.

With his hand twisted into the spider’s thread, Kandata laughed and cried out in a voice such as he had not uttered during all the years since coming