Rashomon | Page 9

from her, and used to say her fish was tasty. What she did couldn't be wrong, because if she hadn't, she would have starved to death. There was no other choice. If she knew I had to do this in order to live, she probably wouldn't care."
He sheathed his sword, and, with his left hand on its hilt, he listened to her meditatively. His right hand touched the big pimple on his cheek. As he listened, a certain courage was born in his heart-the courage which he had not had when he sat under the gate a little while ago. A strange power was driving him in the opposite direction of the courage which he had had when he seized the old woman. No longer did he wonder whether he should starve to death or become a thief. Starvation was so far from his mind that it was the last thing that would have entered it.
"Are you sure?" he asked in a mocking tone, when she finished talking. He took his right hand from his pimple, and, bending forward, seized her by the neck and said sharply:
"Then it's right if I rob you. I'd starve if I didn't."
He tore her clothes from her body and kicked her roughly down on the corpses as she struggled and tried to clutch his leg. Five steps, and he was at the top of the stairs. The yellow clothes he had wrested off were under his arm, and in a twinkling he had rushed down the steep stairs into the abyss of night. The thunder of his descending steps pounded in the hollow tower, and then it was quiet.
Shortly after that the hag raised up her body from the corpses. Grumbling and groaning, she crawled to the top stair by the still flickering torchlight, and through the gray hair which hung over her face, she peered down to the last stair in the torch light.
Beyond this was only darkness... unknowing and unknown.

YAM GRUEL
THIS STORY MIGHT have taken place about eleven hundred years ago. The exact time does not matter. All that the reader has to know is that the remote past of the Heian period forms its background. In those days there lived in Kyoto a certain samurai in the service of Regent Fujiwara Mototsune. I would specify his name, but unfortunately it is not recorded in the ancient chronicles. Probably he was so ordinary a man as to be unworthy of recording in a chronicle. The writers of these works evidently took very little interest in the lives or stories of common people. In this respect they differ greatly from the present-day writers of the naturalist school. However, the novelists of the Heian period were not as leisurely as might be expected. Anyway, among the samurai in the service of Fujiwara Mototsune there was an official of fifth class court rank. He is the hero of this story. In those days an official of fifth class court rank was a low official. The Japanese word for that rank is "goi." So in this story he will be called "Goi."
Goi was a very plain-looking man. His hollow cheeks made his chin seem unusually long. His lips... if we mentioned his every striking feature, there would be no end. He was extremely homely and sloppy in appearance.
No one knows how he came to serve the Regent. Still it is certain that he had gone about his daily chores for a long time, in his discolored silk robe and soft head-gear. From his mannerisms and his unkempt dress, it was hard to believe he had ever been a young man. He was well past forty. His face gave the impression that ever since birth he had had his cold-looking red nose and unshapely mustache exposed to the wind blowing down the Sujaku Avenue. Everyone from the Regent to the herdsmen believed so and had no doubt about it.
You can easily imagine the kind of treatment Goi received from those around him. His fellow samurai did not care a straw for him. His subordinates, with or without court rank, nearly twenty altogether, were also amazingly indifferent to him. When he was supposed to give them instructions, they disregarded him and carried on with their idle chatter and gossip. His existence no more entered their vision than the air itself. His appearance caused no more ripple of unrest than a drop of water in the Japan Sea. The backwash of this man's helplessness was felt in the samurai's hall, where the Steward, the Chief and all his superiors would have nothing to do with him. They gave him all their commands by visual signs.
It is not by accident that man has a voice. Human speech was not made by a simple process. So sometimes they failed to make