Short Fiction

himself, Akutagawa coolly set down at considerable length an explanation of the ending of his short life (naming all the suicides of Eastern and Western history, including even Christ) on highly reasoned and philosophical grounds, which do not matter much here, for the simple truth seems to be that he was at the time a physical and nervous wreck, having been all his life a high-strung and frail man. Though he mentions an unnamed woman as furnishing some immediate excuse for it (he was a normal husband and father), and though the poetess Byakuren has gone out of her way to drop a hint that this woman was her own very good friend Kujō Takeko, the poetess and woman of letters whom public sentiment has made the ideal woman of modern Japan, Akutagawa seems simply to have been world-weary and, after coldly contemplating death for years, not able himself to say exactly what did drive him to it. All that can be said surely about it is that it took the vast majority of his countrymen greatly by surprise.

Then here ends the story of a sort of literary ascetic, whose history, as one biographer puts it, is really little more than a list of the dates on which he published his stories and the names of the magazines in which they appeared. But there can be no doubt that he had more individuality than any other writer of his time and has left in Japanese literature a mass of artistic work, often grotesque and curious, that, while it undoubtedly angers the proletarian experimenters who now hold the stage and fight with lusty pens and a highly developed class consciousness against all that he stood for, will continue to live as long as men go on treasuring the fancies their fellows from time to time set down with care on paper.

The translation of “Rashōmon” here given was first published in the English study magazine, Eigo Seinen, in 1920, three years after Akutagawa published the original in his first book. “Lice” was published in the same magazine in 1921. I am grateful to the magazine for permission to republish them in this volume. I am once more grateful, too, to my very sympathetic Japanese colleagues, whom I have always used freely when, from time to time, dictionaries and my own imagination have failed me. And finally I am grateful to the author, whom, though his days of seeing and hearing are over, I here address as would a Japanese: Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, at last I am publishing the book I started with your approval years ago. May you find it pleasing.

Glenn W. Shaw

Osaka, June 10, 1930.

Short Fiction

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 Kyoto 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, Kyoto 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