Read Online Rashomon and Seventeen Other Stories by Ryûnosuke Akutagawa - Free Book Online Page A

an English translation of the original see Mills,
Collection of Tales from Uji
, pp. 196–7.
    6 . As noted in IARZ 12:390–91.
    7 . On correspondences between “Spinning Gears” and Strindberg’s
Inferno
, see Mats Arne Karlsson, “Boku wa kono ang ō o bukimi ni omoi… Akutagawa Ry ū nosuke ‘Haguruma,’ Sutorindoberi, soshite k ō yki,” in
Nichibunken F ō ramu
, No. 177 (Kyoto: Kokusai Nihon bunka kenky ū sent ã , 2005). See August Strindberg,
Inferno and From an Occult Diary
, tr. and with an introduction by Mary Sandbach (Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics, 1979).
    8 . For a complete translation of the first under the original title, “Dragon,” see
Rashomon and Other Stories
, tr. Takashi Kojima (New York: Liveright, 1952), pp. 102–19. On Oana Ry ū ichi, see Chronology (1927).
    9 . Kikuchi Hiroshi et al. (eds.),
Akutagawa Ry Å« nosuke jiten
(Meiji shoin, 1985); Sekiguchi Yasuyoshi and Sh ō ji Tatsuya (eds.),
Akutagawa Ry Å« nosuke zensakuhin jiten
(Bensei shuppan, 2000); Sekiguchi Yasuyoshi (ed.),
Akutagawa Ry Å« nosuke shin-jiten
(Kanrin shob ō , 2003).

A WORLD IN DECAY
RASH Ō MON
    Evening, and a lowly servant sat beneath the Rash ō mon, waiting for the rain to end. *
    Under the broad gate there was no one else, just a single cricket clinging to a huge red pillar from which the lacquer was peeling here and there. Situated on a thoroughfare as important as Suzaku Avenue, the Rash ō mon could have been sheltering at least a few others from the rain—perhaps a woman in a lacquered reed hat, or a courtier with a soft black cap. Yet there was no one besides the man.
    This was because Kyoto had been struck by one calamity after another in recent years—earthquakes, whirlwinds, fires, famine—leading to the capital’s extraordinary decline. Old records tell us that people would smash Buddhist statues and other devotional gear, pile the pieces by the roadside with flecks of paint and gold and silver foil still clinging to them, and sell them as firewood. With the whole city in such turmoil, no one bothered to maintain the Rash ō mon. Foxes and badgers came to live in the dilapidated structure, and they were soon joined by thieves. Finally, it became the custom to abandon unclaimed corpses in the upper story of the gate, which made the neighborhood an eerie place everyone avoided after the sun went down.
    Crows, on the other hand, flocked here in great numbers. During the day they would always be cawing and circling the roof’s high fish-tail ornaments. And when the sky above the gate turned red after sunset, the crows stood out against it likea scattering of sesame seeds. They came to the upper chamber of the gate to peck the flesh of the dead. Today, however, with the late hour, there were no crows to be seen. The only sign of them was their white droppings on the gate’s crumbling steps, where long weeds sprouted from cracks between the stones. In his faded blue robe, the man had settled on the topmost of the seven steps and, worrying a large pimple that had formed on his right cheek, fixed his vacant stare on the falling rain.
    We noted earlier that the servant was “waiting for the rain to end,” but in fact the man had no idea what he was going to do once that happened. Ordinarily, of course, he would have returned to his master’s house, but he had been dismissed from service some days before, and (as also noted earlier), Kyoto was in an unusual state of decline. His dismissal by a master he had served for many years was one small consequence of that decline. Rather than say that the servant was “waiting for the rain to end,” it would have been more appropriate to write that “a lowly servant trapped by the rain had no place to go and no idea what to do.” The weather, too, contributed to the
sentimentalisme
of this Heian Period menial. The rain had been falling since late