Free Rashomon and Seventeen Other Stories by Ryûnosuke Akutagawa Page A

servant’s ears like the cawing of a crow.
    â€œI—I was pulling—I was pulling out hair to make a wig.”
    The servant was startled, and disappointed at how ordinary the woman’s answer turned out to be. But along with his disappointment, the earlier hatred and a cold contempt came back to fill his heart. The woman seemed to sense what he was feeling. Still holding in one hand the long hairs she had stolen from the corpse, she mumbled and croaked like a toad as she offered this explanation:
    â€œI 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.”
    The servant returned his sword to its sheath and, resting his left hand on the hilt, listened coolly to her story. Meanwhile, his right hand played with the festering pimple on his cheek. As he listened, a new kind of courage began to germinate in his heart—a courage he had lacked earlier beneath the gate: one that was moving in a direction opposite to the courage that had impelled him to seize the old woman. He was no longer torn between starving to death or becoming a thief. In his current state of mind, the very thought of starving to death was so nearly banished from his consciousness that it became all but unthinkable for him.
    â€œYou’re sure she would, eh?” the servant pressed her, with mockery in his voice. Then, stepping toward her, he suddenly shot his right hand from his pimple to the scruff of her neck. As he grasped her, his words all but bit into her flesh: “Youwon’t blame me, then, for taking your clothes. That’s what
I
have to do to keep from starving to death.”
    He stripped the old woman of her robe, and when she tried to clutch at his ankles he gave her a kick that sent her sprawling onto the corpses. Five swift steps brought him to the opening at the top of the stairs. Tucking her robe under his arm, he plunged down the steep stairway into the depth of the night.
    It did not take long for the crone, who had been lying there as if dead, to raise her naked body from among the corpses. Muttering and groaning, she crawled to the top of the stairway in the still-burning torchlight. Her short white hair hung forward from her head as she peered down toward the bottom of the gate. She saw only the cavernous blackness of the night.
    What happened to the lowly servant, no one knows.
    (September 1915)

IN A BAMBOO GROVE
The Testimony of a Woodcutter under Questioning by the Magistrate
    That is true, Your Honor. I am the one who found the body. I went out as usual this morning to cut cedar in the hills behind my place. The body was in a bamboo grove on the other side of the mountain. Its exact location? A few hundred yards off the Yamashina post road. A deserted place where a few scrub cedar trees are mixed in with the bamboo.
    The man was lying on his back in his pale blue robe with the sleeves tied up and one of those fancy Kyoto-style black hats with the sharp creases. He had only one stab wound, but it was right in the middle of his chest; the bamboo leaves around the body were soaked with dark red blood. No, the bleeding had stopped. The wound looked dry, and I remember it had a big horsefly sucking on it so hard the thing didn’t even