Rashomon and Seventeen Other Stories by Ryûnosuke Akutagawa

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