コスモピア AI研究室

part1-最初の約50センテンス

part2-次の約50センテンス

part3-次の約50センテンス

It was one evening at dusk.A servant was waiting for the rain to stop under Rashomon. Apart from this man, there was no one else under the wide gate.
Only a single cricket perched on a large pillar, its vermilion lacquer peeling in places. Since Rashomon was located on Suzaku Avenue, one would expect at least two or three others—wearing city hats or squeezed hats—taking shelter from the rain besides this man. However, there was no one else but him.

The reason was that, in the past two or three years, Kyoto had been struck by successive calamities such as earthquakes, whirlwinds, fires, and famines. Consequently, the desolation of the capital was unparalleled. According to old records, people smashed Buddhist statues and altar fittings and piled up the wood covered with vermilion and gold or silver leaf by the roadside to sell as firewood. Given the state of the city, no one cared to repair Rashomon.
Taking advantage of this ruin, foxes and raccoons made it their home, thieves moved in, and eventually, it became customary to bring unclaimed corpses to this gate and abandon them. As a result, when darkness fell, people avoided coming near the gate due to the creepy atmosphere.

In exchange, many crows gathered from somewhere. During the day, one could see these crows flying in circles around the high ridgepole, cawing as they went. Particularly when the sky above the gate turned red with the evening glow, the crows looked as if sprinkled with sesame seeds, clearly visible. The crows, of course, came to peck at the flesh of the corpses lying on the gate. However, perhaps because it was late today, not a single crow was visible. Only the white spots of crow droppings stuck here and there on the stone steps, which were crumbling in places and had long grass growing from the cracks, could be seen. The servant sat on the top step of the seven-storied stone steps, placing the hem of his washed-out navy-blue kimono on the step, idly gazing at the falling rain while worrying about a large pimple on his right cheek.

Earlier, the author wrote that the servant was waiting for the rain to stop. However, the servant had no particular plans even if the rain stopped. Normally, he would have returned to his master’s house. But a few days ago, his master had dismissed him. As mentioned before, the city of Kyoto was in a state of unprecedented decline.
The fact that this servant was dismissed by his master, for whom he had worked for many years, was a small ripple caused by this decline. Therefore, it would be more accurate to say that the servant, caught in the rain, had nowhere to go and was at a loss, rather than saying he was waiting for the rain to stop.

Furthermore, today’s weather had not a little influence on this Heian era servant’s sentimentality. The rain that began falling in the late afternoon showed no signs of stopping. Thus, the servant, trying to find a way to get through tomorrow’s livelihood—attempting to do the impossible—had been absentmindedly listening to the sound of rain falling on Suzaku Avenue for some time.

The rain enveloped Rashomon, gathering the sound from afar with a loud roar. The evening twilight gradually lowered the sky, making the roof of the gate, with its eaves protruding obliquely, appear to support heavy, dark clouds.

To do the impossible, there was no time to be choosy about means. If he were choosy, he would simply starve to death on the ground under the mud wall or by the roadside. And then he would be brought to this gate and thrown away like a dog.
If he were not choosy—after repeatedly treading the same path of thought, the servant finally reached this conclusion.
However, this “if” was still an “if” indefinitely. Even though the servant acknowledged the need to be unchoosy about means, he still lacked the courage to positively affirm that he had no choice but to become a thief to resolve this “if.”

The servant sneezed loudly and then stood up reluctantly. Kyoto was so chilly that an iron brazier was almost necessary. The wind blew freely between the gate’s pillars along with the evening twilight. The cricket that had perched on the vermilion pillar had already gone somewhere.

The servant hunched his shoulders, raised the collar of his navy kimono over his yellow undergarment, and looked around the gate. He thought if he could find a place free from rain and wind, where he could sleep comfortably without being seen, he would spend the night there. Fortunately, he noticed a wide ladder, also painted in vermilion, leading up to the loft of the gate. If he went up, even if there were people, they would only be corpses. The servant, careful not to let the tachi (long sword) at his waist slip from its scabbard, placed his straw-sandaled foot on the bottom step of the ladder.

A few minutes later, the man was crouching like a cat, holding his breath, on the middle step of the wide ladder leading up to the Rashomon loft, peering up to see what was happening. The faint light from above barely illuminated the man’s right cheek. His cheek, with a red pimple amidst short stubble, caught the light. The servant had assumed from the start that only corpses were up there. However, after climbing two or three steps, he saw someone had lit a fire up there and was moving it around. The murky, yellowish light flickered across the cobweb-covered ceiling, making it immediately clear. Given that someone had lit a fire in Rashomon on this rainy night, they were certainly no ordinary person.

The servant, stealing his way up like a gecko, crawled up the steep ladder to the very top. Flattening his body as much as possible, stretching his neck as far forward as he could, he cautiously peered into the loft.

Inside the loft, as the rumors had it, several corpses were carelessly thrown about. But the light’s reach was narrower than expected, making it impossible to count the bodies. He could vaguely tell that some corpses were naked while others were clothed. Apparently, there were both men and women among them. The corpses lay sprawled across the floor, with their mouths open and arms outstretched, so lifeless that it was hard to believe they had once been alive.
The dim light from the fire cast shadows, making the high parts of their shoulders and chests stand out, rendering the low parts even darker, leaving them eternally silent like dumb figures.

The servant instinctively covered his nose against the stench of the rotting corpses. But the next moment, he forgot about covering his nose. A strong emotion almost entirely stole his sense of smell.

The servant’s eyes, for the first time, spotted a person squatting among the corpses. A short, skinny old woman with white hair like a monkey, wearing a hinoki (cypress) colored kimono. The old woman held a lit pinewood splinter in her right hand, peering intently into the face of one of the corpses. Seeing the long hair, it was probably a woman’s corpse.

Moved by sixty percent fear and forty percent curiosity, the servant temporarily forgot to breathe. Borrowing the words of the old records’ author, he felt as if his body hair stood on end. Then the old woman stuck the pinewood splinter between the floorboards and began pulling out the hair of the corpse she had been staring at, like a monkey picking lice off its young. The hair seemed to come out easily.

As each strand of hair was pulled out, the servant’s fear gradually diminished. Simultaneously, a fierce hatred toward the old woman arose. — To say “toward the old woman” might be misleading. Rather, an increasing aversion to all evil grew by the minute. If someone had now presented the servant with the dilemma he faced under the gate earlier — starving to death or becoming a thief — he would have unhesitatingly chosen to starve. His hatred for evil was now burning fiercely, like the pinewood splinter the old woman had stuck in the floor.

Of course, the servant didn’t understand why the old woman was pulling out the dead woman’s hair. Therefore, he couldn’t logically decide if it was good or bad. However, for the servant, just the act of pulling out a dead person’s hair on this rainy night in Rashomon was already an unforgivable evil. Of course, he had long forgotten his earlier thoughts of becoming a thief.

So, the servant mustered his strength and suddenly jumped up from the ladder. With his hand on his tachi, he strode up to the old woman in large steps. It goes without saying that the old woman was startled.

Upon seeing the servant, she jumped up as if shot by a crossbow.

“Where do you think you’re going?”

The servant blocked the old woman’s path as she stumbled over the corpses in panic, cursing her. Even so, the old woman tried to push past him. The servant pushed her back, preventing her from escaping. For a while, they wrestled silently among the corpses. However, the outcome was evident from the start. The servant eventually grabbed the old woman’s arm and forcibly threw her down. Her arm was as thin as a chicken’s leg, all bones and skin.

“What were you doing? Tell me. If you don’t, this is what you’ll get.”

The servant pushed the old woman away and quickly drew his tachi, thrusting the white steel in front of her eyes.
But the old woman remained silent. Her hands shook uncontrollably, her shoulders heaving as she panted, her eyes bulging out of their sockets in mute defiance. Seeing this, the servant became acutely aware that the old woman’s life was entirely under his control. This awareness quietly cooled the fiery hatred in his heart. What remained was a serene satisfaction and a sense of accomplishment from completing a task. So, looking down at the old woman, the servant softened his voice and said,

“I’m not a police officer from the Kebiishi office. I’m just a traveler who happened to pass by this gate. So I won’t tie you up or anything. All you have to do is tell me what you were doing up here.”

The old woman stared intently at the servant’s face with wide, sharp eyes, like those of a carnivorous bird. Then she moved her almost indistinguishable lips, which were so wrinkled they seemed fused with her nose, as if chewing on something. Her thin throat moved, and the sharp Adam’s apple was visible. Then, from that throat, a voice like a crow’s cawing, broken and raspy, reached the servant’s ears.

“I was pulling out this hair… to make a wig.”

The servant was disappointed by the old woman’s unexpectedly ordinary answer. And simultaneously with the disappointment, his previous hatred, mixed with a cold contempt, seeped back into his heart. This sentiment seemed to reach the old woman. Still holding the long hair taken from the corpse’s head, the old woman mumbled, her voice croaking like a toad.

“Indeed, pulling out dead people’s hair might be bad. But all these dead people here deserve such treatment. That woman whose hair I was pulling out was selling snake meat cut into four-inch pieces as dried fish to the samurai.
If she hadn’t died of disease, she would still be selling it now. Moreover, the dried fish she sold was so tasty that the samurai never missed buying it as a side dish. I don’t think what she did was bad. She did it because she would starve otherwise. So, I don’t think what I was doing was bad either. I have to do this, too, to avoid starving.
This woman, who knew the necessity of my actions, would surely understand what I was doing.”

The old woman roughly said this.

The servant, sheathing his tachi and holding the hilt with his left hand, listened coldly to her story. Of course, with his right hand, he absently touched the large pimple on his cheek. But as he listened, a certain courage grew in his heart. It was the courage that had been missing when he was under the gate earlier. And it was entirely opposite to the courage he had when he climbed the gate and captured the old woman. The servant no longer hesitated between starving and becoming a thief. At that moment, starving to death was so far from his consciousness that he couldn’t even consider it.

“Is that so?”

When the old woman finished her story, the servant mockingly confirmed. Then he took a step forward, suddenly removing his right hand from his pimple and grabbing the old woman’s collar, saying,

“Then you won’t mind if I rob you. I have to do it too, or I’ll starve.”

The servant swiftly tore off the old woman’s kimono. Then, he roughly kicked her, who tried to cling to his legs, onto the corpses. It was barely five steps to the mouth of the ladder. With the hinoki-colored kimono tucked under his arm, the servant descended the steep ladder into the night in a flash.

Shortly after, the old woman, who had been lying motionless among the corpses, slowly rose, groaning and muttering.
Using the remaining firelight, she crawled to the mouth of the ladder. Peering out with her short white hair hanging down, she saw only the pitch-black night outside.

No one knew where the servant had gone.

One evening, a servant was waiting for the rain to stop under the Rashomon gate. Besides him, there was no one else under the wide gate, except for a cricket perched on a large, partially peeled red pillar. Given that the Rashomon was on Suzaku Avenue, there should have been at least two or three others, wearing ichimegasa hats or eboshi caps, taking shelter from the rain. However, there was no one else but him.

The reason for this was that in the past few years, Kyoto had been struck by disasters such as earthquakes, tornadoes, fires, and famines. As a result, the city had fallen into significant decline. According to historical records, people would smash Buddhist statues and ornaments, pile the timber coated with red or gold leaf by the roadside, and sell it as firewood. Given this state of affairs, no one bothered to repair the Rashomon gate, allowing it to become a haven for foxes and thieves. Eventually, people began to bring unclaimed corpses to the gate and leave them there. Consequently, as darkness fell, everyone avoided the gate, finding it eerie.

In contrast, crows gathered in large numbers from somewhere. During the day, they could be seen flying around the high shibi (decorative ridge-end tiles) of the gate, crying and circling. Particularly when the sky above the gate turned red with the evening glow, the crows appeared clearly like sprinkled sesame seeds. Of course, the crows came to peck at the flesh of the corpses on top of the gate. However, today, perhaps because it was late, not a single crow was visible. Only the white crow droppings were scattered here and there on the crumbling stone steps overgrown with long grass. The servant sat at the top of the seven stone steps, his washed-out navy blue kimono trailing behind him, idly watching the rain while picking at a large pimple on his right cheek.

The author wrote earlier that the servant was waiting for the rain to stop. However, the servant had no particular plan even if the rain stopped. Normally, he would have returned to his master’s house, but his master had dismissed him four or five days ago. As previously mentioned, Kyoto was in a state of decline at that time. The fact that the servant, who had been employed by his master for many years, was now dismissed was a small ripple of this decline. Therefore, it would be more accurate to say that the servant, caught in the rain, had nowhere to go and was at a loss.

Moreover, today’s weather affected the servant’s sentiment. The rain that had started falling since late afternoon showed no sign of letting up. Thus, the servant, contemplating his immediate future and how to survive the next day—trying to find a solution to an unsolvable problem—listened absentmindedly to the sound of the rain falling on Suzaku Avenue.

The rain enveloped the Rashomon, gathering distant sounds. The twilight gradually lowered the sky, and looking up, the roof of the gate, with its protruding eaves, supported heavy, dark clouds.

To deal with an impossible situation, one cannot afford to be choosy about the means. If one were to be selective, one would end up starving to death either under the earthen wall or on the roadside. Then, one’s body would be brought to this gate and discarded like a dog. If one were not selective, the servant’s thoughts, after repeatedly traversing the same path, finally reached this conclusion. However, this “if” remained a mere “if.” Although the servant affirmed that he could not afford to be choosy, he lacked the courage to affirm positively that “there is no choice but to become a thief.”

The servant sneezed loudly and then stood up laboriously. Kyoto, chilled by the evening cold, was now cold enough to need a firebox. The wind blew unreservedly through the pillars of the gate, along with the twilight. The cricket perched on the red-painted pillar had already gone somewhere.

The servant, shrinking his neck and raising his shoulders in the navy blue kimono over a yellow kosode, looked around the gate. He thought that if there was a place where he could spend the night comfortably without fear of the rain and wind or being seen, he would stay there. Fortunately, he noticed a wide red-painted ladder leading up to the gate’s upper story. If there were people up there, they would only be corpses. The servant cautiously placed his foot on the lowest rung of the ladder, ensuring that the sword at his waist did not make a sound.

A few minutes later, a man crouched like a cat on the middle rung of the wide ladder leading to the Rashomon’s upper story, holding his breath and peering up. The faint light from above dimly illuminated his right cheek, covered in short stubble and a large pimple filled with pus. The servant had assumed from the beginning that only corpses would be up there. However, when he climbed two or three rungs, he saw that someone above had lit a fire and was moving it around. This was immediately apparent from the yellow, murky light reflecting off the ceiling, covered in cobwebs. Since someone had lit a fire in this Rashomon on a rainy night, they were certainly no ordinary person.

The servant crept up the steep ladder like a gecko, eventually reaching the top rung. Flattening his body as much as possible, he craned his neck forward and cautiously peered into the upper story.

He saw, as rumored, several corpses lying carelessly, but the range of the fire’s light was narrower than he expected, so he couldn’t tell how many there were. He could vaguely discern that some corpses were naked, while others wore clothes. Men and women seemed to be mixed among them. These corpses, looking more like clay dolls than once-living humans, lay sprawled on the floor, mouths open, hands outstretched. The parts of the bodies illuminated by the fire’s dim light made the shadows of the lower parts even darker, remaining eternally silent like the mute.

The servant instinctively covered his nose against the stench of the rotting corpses. However, the next moment, he forgot about covering his nose, as a powerful emotion almost entirely overwhelmed his sense of smell.

For the first time, the servant saw a living person among the corpses. It was a short, thin, white-haired old woman dressed in a hinoki-bark-colored kimono. She held a lit pinewood splinter in her right hand and was peering intently at one of the corpses’ faces, presumably that of a woman, given the long hair.

Driven by a mix of 60% fear and 40% curiosity, the servant momentarily forgot to breathe. Borrowing the words of an old chronicler, “even his hair stood on end.” The old woman then stuck the pinewood splinter between the floorboards and began to pluck the long hair from the corpse’s head one by one, like a monkey picking fleas from its young. The hair seemed to come out easily.

As the hair was plucked one by one, the servant’s fear gradually diminished. Simultaneously, his intense hatred for the old woman began to grow. To be precise, his aversion to all evil increased by the minute. If someone had brought up the question of whether to starve to death or become a thief, as he had pondered earlier under the gate, he would have chosen to starve without hesitation. Such was his burning hatred for evil, as fierce as the flame in the old woman’s pinewood splinter.

The servant had no idea why the old woman was plucking the corpse’s hair. Thus, he did not know whether to judge it good or evil. However, for him, the mere act of plucking a dead person’s hair on a rainy night in Rashomon was already unforgivable evil. Of course, he had long forgotten that he had considered becoming a thief just moments before.

With this resolve, the servant gathered his strength and leaped from the ladder. Holding his hand on the hilt of his sword, he strode towards the old woman. The old woman was undoubtedly startled.

At the sight of the servant, the old woman sprang up as if shot from a bow.
“Where do you think you’re going?”
The servant blocked the old woman’s way as she tried to flee in a panic, cursing her. The old woman still tried to push past him. The servant, too, tried to stop her. The two grappled in silence among the corpses. However, the outcome was clear from the start. The servant finally grabbed the old woman’s arm and forcibly twisted it, just like a chicken’s leg, all skin and bones.
“What were you doing? Speak! If you don’t, I’ll cut you down!”
The servant thrust his sword’s white steel blade in front of her eyes after shoving her aside. But the old woman remained silent, her hands trembling, her breath ragged, her eyes bulging. Seeing this, the servant realized for the first time that the old woman’s life was entirely in his hands. This realization unexpectedly cooled the burning hatred in his heart, leaving only the calm satisfaction of having completed a task.

Looking down at the old woman, the servant softened his voice a little.
“I am not an official of the Keibii-shi (imperial police). I am merely a traveler who happened to pass by this gate. I have no intention of tying you up or anything like that. Just tell me what you were doing up here.”
The old woman, still wide-eyed, stared intently at the servant’s face. Her hawk-like, sharp eyes with red-tinged eyelids scrutinized him. Then, moving her lips as if chewing something, her thin throat revealing the movement of her pointed Adam’s apple, she croaked out in a voice like a crow’s:
“I was plucking this hair, plucking this hair, to make a wig.”
The servant was disappointed by the old woman’s surprisingly mundane response. As disappointment set in, the previous hatred, now tinged with cold contempt, returned to his heart. Sensing this change, the old woman, still holding the long hair she had plucked from the corpse’s head, mumbled like a croaking toad:
“Indeed, plucking a dead person’s hair may be wrong. But all the dead here are people who deserve such treatment. The woman whose hair I just plucked used to sell dried snake pieces as dried fish to samurai. If she hadn’t died of disease, she would still be selling them. Her dried fish were so tasty that the samurai bought them regularly. I don’t think what she did was wrong. She did it out of necessity to avoid starvation. So, I don’t think what I’m doing is wrong either. I’m doing it out of necessity to avoid starvation. This woman would likely understand my situation and overlook what I’m doing.”
The old woman roughly conveyed this meaning.

The servant listened coldly, holding the sword hilt in his left hand and fiddling with the large, pus-filled pimple on his cheek with his right hand. However, as he listened, a certain courage welled up within him—a courage he lacked when he contemplated starvation or theft earlier. This courage was entirely different from the one he felt when capturing the old woman. The servant was no longer torn between starving to death or becoming a thief. In fact, from his current state of mind, the idea of starving seemed almost absurd, having been pushed entirely out of his consciousness.
“Is that so?”
The servant sarcastically confirmed the old woman’s story. Then, stepping forward, he suddenly released his hand from the pimple and grabbed the old woman’s collar, biting out:
“Then you won’t mind if I rob you. I have to do this to avoid starving.”
The servant quickly stripped the old woman’s kimono and roughly kicked her onto the corpses as she clung to his legs. The ladder was only five steps away. The servant, clutching the stolen hinoki-bark-colored kimono, quickly descended the ladder into the darkness.

Not long after, the old woman, who had lain as if dead among the corpses, raised her naked body. Muttering and groaning, she crawled to the ladder’s edge by the light of the still-burning fire and looked down. Outside, there was nothing but the vast darkness of the night.
No one knew where the servant had gone.