Rashomon and Seventeen Other Stories (8 page)

When my wife raised her face in response to him, she seemed almost spellbound. I had never seen her look so beautiful as she did at that moment. And what do you think this beautiful wife of mine said to the bandit, in my presence—in the presence of her husband bound hand and foot? My spirit may be wandering now between one life and the next, but every time I recall her answer, I burn with indignation. “All right,” she told him, “take me anywhere you like.” (Long silence.)

And that was not her only crime against me. If that were all she did, I would not be suffering so here in the darkness. With him leading her by the hand, she was stepping out of the bamboo grove as if in a dream, when suddenly the color drained from her face and she pointed back to me. “Kill him!” she screamed. “Kill him! I can't be with you as long as he is alive!” Again and again she screamed, as if she had lost her mind, “Kill him!” Even now her words like a windstorm threaten to blow me headlong into the darkest depths. Have such hateful words ever come from the mouth of a human being before? Have such damnable words ever reached the ears of a human being before? Have such— (An explosion of derisive laughter.) Even the bandit went pale when he heard her. She clung to his arm and screamed again, “Kill him!” The bandit stared at her, saying neither that he would kill me nor that he would not. The next thing I knew, however, he sent my wife sprawling on the bamboo leaves with a single kick. (Another explosion of derisive laughter.) The bandit calmly folded his arms and turned to look at me.

“What do you want me to do with her?” he asked. “Kill her or let her go? Just nod to answer. Kill her?” For this if for nothing else, I am ready to forgive the bandit his crimes. (Second long silence.)

When I hesitated with my answer, my wife let out a scream and darted into the depths of the bamboo thicket. He sprang after her, but I don't think he even managed to lay a hand on
her sleeve. I watched the spectacle as if it were some kind of vision.

After my wife ran off, the bandit picked up my sword and bow and arrows, and he cut my ropes at one place. “Now it's my turn to run,” I remember hearing him mutter as he disappeared from the thicket. Then the whole area was quiet. No—I could hear someone weeping. While I was untying myself, I listened to the sound, until I realized—I realized that I was the one crying. (Another long silence.)

I finally raised myself, exhausted, from the foot of the tree. Lying there before me was the dagger that my wife had dropped. I picked it up and shoved it into my chest. Some kind of bloody mass rose to my mouth, but I felt no pain at all. My chest grew cold, and then everything sank into stillness. What perfect silence! In the skies above that grove on the hidden side of the mountain, not a single bird came to sing. The lonely glow of the sun lingered among the high branches of cedar and bamboo. The sun—but gradually, even that began to fade, and with it the cedars and bamboo. I lay there wrapped in a deep silence.

Then stealthy footsteps came up to me. I tried to see who it was, but the darkness had closed in all around me. Someone—that someone gently pulled the dagger from my chest with an invisible hand. Again a rush of blood filled my mouth, but then I sank once and for all into the darkness between lives.

The nose had been a constant source of torment for the Naigu from his earliest days as a young acolyte until now, past the age of fifty, when he had reached his present lofty post. On the surface, of course, he pretended it did not bother him—and not only because he felt it wrong for a priest to worry over his nose when he should be thirsting exclusively for the Pure Land to come. What he hated most of all was for other people to become aware of his concern over his nose. And what he feared most of all was that the word “nose” would come up in conversation.

There were two reasons why his nose was more than the Naigu could manage. One was that it actually got in his way much of the time. He could not eat by himself; whenever he tried to, the tip of his nose would touch the rice in his metal bowl. To deal with this problem, he had a disciple sit across from him at mealtime and hold his nose up with a long, narrow wooden slat, an inch wide and two feet long. This was not an easy thing to do—either for the slat-wielding disciple or for the Naigu himself. A temple page who stood in for the disciple at one meal sneezed and let the nose drop into the rice gruel. The story immediately spread across the river to Kyoto. Still, this
was not the main reason the Naigu was troubled by his nose. He suffered most because of the harm it was doing to his self-esteem.

The people of Ike-no-o used to say that Zenchi Naigu was lucky to be a priest: no woman would ever want to marry a man with a nose like that. Some even claimed it was because of his nose that he had entered the priesthood to begin with. The Naigu himself, however, never felt that he suffered any less over his nose for being a priest. Indeed, his self-esteem was already far too fragile to be affected by such a secondary fact as whether or not he had a wife. And so, by means both active and passive, he sought to repair the damage to his self-esteem.

He tried first of all to find ways to make his nose look shorter. When there was no one around, he would hold up his mirror and, with feverish intensity, examine his reflection from every angle. Sometimes it took more than simply changing the position of his face to comfort him, and he would try one pose after another—resting his cheek on his hand or stroking his chin with his fingertips. Never once, though, was he satisfied that his nose looked any shorter. In fact, he sometimes felt that the harder he tried, the longer it looked. Then, heaving fresh sighs of despair, he would put the mirror away in its box and drag himself back to the scripture stand to resume chanting the Kannon Sutra.
¹

The second way he dealt with his problem was to keep a vigilant eye out for other people's noses. Many public events took place at the Ike-no-o temple—banquets to benefit the priests, lectures on the sutras, and so forth. Row upon row of monks' cells filled the temple grounds, and each day the monks would heat up bath water for the temple's many residents and lay visitors, all of whom the Naigu would study closely. He hoped to gain peace from discovering even one face with a nose like his. And so his eyes took in neither blue robes nor white; orange caps, skirts of gray: the priestly garb he knew so well hardly existed for him. The Naigu saw not people but noses. While a great hooked beak might come into his view now and then, never did he discover a nose like his own. And with each failure to find what he was looking for, the Naigu's resentment
would increase. It was entirely due to this feeling that often, while speaking to a person, he would unconsciously grasp the dangling end of his nose and blush like a youngster.

And finally, the Naigu would comb the Buddhist scriptures and other classic texts, searching for a character with a nose like his own in the hope that it would provide him some measure of comfort. Nowhere, however, was it written that the nose of either Mokuren or Sharihotsu was long. And Ry
Å«
ju and Memyo
ō
, of course, were Bodhisattvas with normal human noses. Listening to a Chinese story once, he heard that Liu Bei, the Shu Han emperor,
²
had long ears. “Oh, if only it had been his nose,” he thought, “how much better I would feel!”

We need hardly mention here that, even as he pursued these passive efforts, the Naigu also took more active steps to shorten his nose. He tried everything: he drank a decoction of boiled snake gourd; he rubbed his nose with rat urine. Nothing did any good, however: the nose continued to dangle six inches down over his lips.

One autumn, however, a disciple of his who had gone to Kyoto—in part on an errand for the Naigu himself—came back to Ike-no-o with a new method for shortening noses that he had learned from a doctor friend. This doctor was a man from China who had become a high-ranking priest at a major Kyoto temple, the Ch
ō
rakuji.

Pretending, as usual, that he was unconcerned about his nose, the Naigu would not at first agree to submit to the new treatment. Instead, at mealtimes he would offer a casual expression of regret that the disciple had gone to so much trouble. Inwardly, of course, he was hoping that the disciple would press him to try the treatment. And the disciple must have been aware of the Naigu's tactics. But his master's very willingness to employ such tactics seemed to rouse the aide to sympathy more than resentment. Just as the Naigu had hoped, the disciple used every argument he could think of to persuade his master to adopt the treatment. And, as he knew he would, the Naigu finally submitted to the disciple's fervent exhortations.

The treatment itself was actually quite simple: boil the nose and have someone tread on it.

Boiling water could be had any day at the temple bathhouse. The disciple immediately brought a bucket full of water that was too hot for him to touch. If the Naigu simply dipped his nose straight into the bucket, however, his face might be scalded by the rising steam. So they bored a hole in a tray, set the tray on the bucket, and lowered the nose through the hole into the boiling water. The nose itself felt no heat at all.

After the nose had been soaking for a short while, the disciple said, “I believe it has cooked long enough, Your Reverence.”

The Naigu gave him a contorted smile. At least, he thought with some satisfaction, no one overhearing this one remark would imagine that the subject was a nose. The boiled nose itself, however, was itching now as if it had been bitten by fleas.

The Naigu withdrew his nose from the hole in the tray, and the disciple began to tread on the still-steaming thing with all his might. The Naigu lay with his nose stretched out on the floorboards, watching the disciple's feet moving up and down before his eyes. Every now and then, the disciple would cast a pitying glance down toward the Naigu's bald head and say, “Does it hurt, Your Reverence? The doctor told me to stamp on it as hard as I could, but… does it hurt?”

The Naigu tried to shake his head to signal that it did not hurt, but with the disciple's feet pressing down on his nose, he was unable to do so. Instead, he turned his eyes upward until he could see the raw cracks in the disciple's chapped feet and gave an angry-sounding shout: “No, it doesn't hurt!”

Far from hurting, his itchy nose almost felt good to have the young man treading on it.

After this had been going on for some time, little bumps like millet grains began to form on the nose until it looked like a bird that had been plucked clean and roasted whole. When he saw this, the disciple stopped his treading and muttered as if to himself, “Now I'm supposed to pull those out with tweezers.”

The Naigu puffed out his cheeks in apparent exasperation as he silently watched the disciple proceed with the treatment.
Not that he was ungrateful for the efforts. But as much as he appreciated the young man's kindness, he did not like having his nose handled like some kind of
thing
. The Naigu watched in apprehension, like a patient being operated on by a doctor he mistrusts, as the disciple plucked beads of fat from the pores of his nose with the tweezers. The beads protruded half an inch from each pore like stumps of feathers.

Once he was through, the disciple said with a look of relief, “Now we just have to cook it again.”

Brows knit in apparent disapproval, the Naigu did as he was told.

After the second boiling, the nose looked far shorter than it ever had before. Indeed, it was not much different from an ordinary hooked nose. Stroking his newly shortened nose, the Naigu darted a few timid glances into the mirror the young man held out to him.

The nose—which once had dangled down below his chin—now had shrunk to such an unbelievable degree that it seemed only to be hanging on above his upper lip by a feeble last breath. The red blotches that marked it were probably left from the trampling. No one would laugh at
this
nose anymore! The face of the Naigu inside the mirror looked at the face of the Naigu outside the mirror, eyelids fluttering in satisfaction.

Still, he felt uneasy for the rest of that day lest his nose grow long again. Whether intoning scriptures or taking his meals, he would unobtrusively reach up at every opportunity and touch his nose. Each time, he would find it exactly where it belonged, above his upper lip, with no sign that it intended to let itself down any lower. Then came a night of sleep, and the first thing he did upon waking the next day was to feel his nose again. It was still short. Only then did the Naigu begin to enjoy the kind of relief he had experienced once before, years ago, when he had accumulated religious merit for having copied out the entire Lotus Sutra by hand.

Not three full days had passed, however, before the Naigu made a surprising discovery. First, a certain samurai with business at the Ike-no-o temple seemed even more amused than before when, barely speaking to the Naigu, he stared hard at the nose.
Then the page who had dropped his nose into the gruel passed him outside the lecture hall; the boy first looked down as he tried to keep his laughter in check, but finally, unable to control himself, he let it burst out. And finally, on more than one occasion, a subordinate priest who remained perfectly respectful while taking orders from the Naigu face-toface would start giggling as soon as the Naigu had turned away.

At first the Naigu ascribed this behavior to the change in his appearance. But that alone did not seem to explain it sufficiently. True, this may have been what caused the laughter of the page and the subordinate. But the way they were laughing now was somehow different from the way they had laughed before, when his nose was long. Perhaps it was simply that they found the unfamiliar short nose funnier than the familiar long one. But there seemed to be more to it than that.

They never laughed so openly before
. Our dear Naigu would sometimes break off intoning the scriptures and mutter this sort of thing to himself, tilting his bald head to one side. His eyes would wander up to the portrait of the Bodhisattva Fugen
³
hanging beside him. And he would sink into gloom, thinking about how it had been for him a few days earlier, when he still had his long nose, “just as he who can now sink no lower fondly recalls his days of glory.” The Naigu, unfortunately, lacked the wisdom to find a solution to this problem.

The human heart harbors two conflicting sentiments. Everyone of course sympathizes with people who suffer misfortunes. Yet when those people manage to overcome their misfortunes, we feel a certain disappointment. We may even feel (to overstate the case somewhat) a desire to plunge them back into those misfortunes. And before we know it, we come (if only passively) to harbor some degree of hostility toward them. It was precisely because he sensed this kind of spectator's egoism in both the lay and the priestly communities of Ike-no-o that the Naigu, while unaware of the reason, felt an indefinable malaise.

And so the Naigu's mood worsened with each passing day. He could hardly say a word to people without snapping at them—until finally, even the disciple who had performed the treatment on his nose began to whisper behind his back: “The
Naigu will be punished for treating us so harshly instead of teaching us Buddha's Law.” The one who made the Naigu especially angry was that mischievous page. One day the Naigu heard some loud barking, and without giving it much thought, he stepped outside to see what was going on. There, he found the page waving a long stick in pursuit of a scrawny long-haired dog. The boy was not simply chasing after the dog, however. He was also shouting as if for the dog, “‘Can't hit my nose! Ha ha! Can't hit my nose!'” The Naigu ripped the stick from the boy's hand and smacked him in the face with it. Then he realized this “stick” was the slat they had used to hold his nose up at mealtimes.

His nose had been shortened all right, thought the Naigu, but he hated what it was doing to him.

And then one night something happened. The wind must have risen quite suddenly after the sun went down, to judge by the annoying jangle of the pagoda wind chimes that reached him at his pillow. The air was much colder as well, and the aging Naigu was finding it impossible to sleep. Eyes wide open in the darkness, he became aware of a new itching sensation in his nose. He reached up and found the nose slightly swollen to the touch. It (and only it) seemed to be feverish as well.

“We took such drastic steps to shorten it: maybe that gave me some kind of illness,” the Naigu muttered to himself, cupping the nose in hands he held as if reverentially offering flowers or incense before the Buddha.

When he woke early as usual the next morning, the Naigu found that the temple's gingko and horse-chestnut trees had dropped their leaves overnight, spreading a bright, golden carpet over the temple grounds. And perhaps because of the frost on the roof of the pagoda, the nine-ring spire atop it flashed in the still-faint glimmer of the rising sun. Standing on the veranda where the latticed shutters had been raised, Zenchi Naigu took a deep breath of morning air.

It was at this moment that an all-but-forgotten sensation returned to him.

The Naigu shot his hand up to his nose, but what he felt there was not the short nose he had touched in the night. It was
the same old long nose he had always had, dangling down a good six inches from above his upper lip to below his chin. In the space of a single night, his nose had grown as long as ever. When he realized this, the Naigu felt that same bright sense of relief he had experienced when his nose became short.