Tales Grotesque and Curious quotes

The Pipe

Tobacco did not grow in Japan in the beginning.

And the records do not agree as to when it was introduced. Some put it in the Keichō Period (1596–1615) and some in the Tembun Period (1532–55). But the plant seems to have been already widely under cultivation by about the tenth year of Keichō.

any historian would answer that it was by the Portuguese or the Spaniards. But these are not necessarily the only answers. There is, besides, one more in the form of a tradition. According to it, tobacco was brought here from somewhere by the Devil.

And the Devil was brought all the way over to Japan by a Catholic Padre, perhaps St. Francis.

When I say this, Catholic believers may find fault with me for slandering their Padres. But for myself, I cannot but believe it probable.

Paul’s and began to dig furiously in the field. For when, bathed in the warm sunshine, he heard this calm bell, his heart was strangely relaxed.

He had no more mind to work evil than to do good.

At this rate, his crossing the sea on purpose to tempt the Japanese would be all in vain.

The records give practically no further information on the Devil. Only it is exceedingly regrettable that we are unable to learn of his movements since he came back to Japan a second time after the Restoration of Meiji.

There was nobody at Ike-no-O who did not know about the nose of Zenchi Naigu.

It was five or six inches long and hung down from above his upper lip to below his chin. As for its shape, it was equally thick at base and tip.

It was five or six inches long and hung down from above his upper lip to below his chin. As for its shape, it was equally thick at base and tip.

A long and slender sausage, so to speak, dangled from the middle of his face.

The Naigu, who was over fifty, had always grieved in secret at this nose of his from the far-off days when he was an acolyte to the present, when he had reached the position of an attendant at the palace chapel.

So he noticed neither their wide-sleeved hunting coats of deep blue nor their white summer garments. Naturally the orange-colored caps and the sober brown robes of the priests, in that he was accustomed to them, did not exist for him at all.

He did not see the people; he only saw their noses.

But though there were hooked noses, he failed to find a single one like his own. With the repetition of his failure, his heart became more and more unhappy.

The disciple, as the Naigu had expected, began eagerly to urge him to try the method. And the Naigu himself, also in accordance with his expectation, finally followed this earnest counsel.

The method was the very simple one of just boiling his nose in hot water and letting someone trample on it.

Water was boiled daily in the temple bath-room. So the disciple poured water so hot that he could not stand his finger in it directly into a bucket and brought it from the bath-room.

In the human heart there are two feelings mutually contradictory.

Of course there is no one who does not sympathize at the misfortune of another. But if that other somehow manages to escape from that misfortune, then he who has sympathized somehow feels unsatisfied.

To exaggerate a little, he is even disposed to cast the sufferer back into the same misfortune once more. And before he is aware of it, he unconsciously comes to harbor a certain hostility against him.

… the card into the book for a marker, he laid the book down on the chair and, ill at ease, adjusted the front of his unlined kimono of coarse silk, giving the while, another little glance at the Gifu lantern in front of his nose.

It is probably always true in such cases that the host who keeps the visitor waiting is more impatient than the visitor who is kept waiting.

Of course I need not go out of my way to explain that, since the professor had always been an austere man, this would be true in this case even if his visitor had not been such an unknown woman as had come this day.

It was evening. A solitary lackey sat under Rashōmon waiting for the rain to clear.

Beneath the broad gate, there was not another soul. Only, on a big round pillar, from which the vermilion lacquer had peeled off here and there, sat one lone cricket.

… following a rambling train of thought on the one vital and immediate question of how he could ever manage to live through the morrow—that is, how he could ever do the impossible—and listened listlessly to the long rain that kept pounding down in Sujaku Ōji.

The rain, enveloping Rashōmon, mustered a rattling roar from afar.

Darkness gradually lowered in the sky, and overhead the roof of the gate supported a heavy leaden cloud on a point of its obliquely projecting tiles.

For the accomplishment of the impossible, there was no time left in which to choose a plan.

If he took time, he could but choose between starvation under some wall and starvation by some road.

And then he would simply be brought to the loft in this gate and thrown away like a dog. If he did not choose,—again and again the man’s thoughts went over the same winding way and arrived finally at this same place.

This was at once made evident by the dull yellow gleam that danced in reflection on the cobwebs hanging in the corners of the ceiling.

Whoever had struck this light in Rashōmon on this rainy night was surely no ordinary being!

At last, stealing up with muffled steps like a gecko, the lackey, crouching, scaled the ladder to the topmost step. Then lying as flat as he could and craning his neck forward as far as it would go, he peered with dread into the loft.

Moreover, in the boats there was an abundance of lice. And they were not the simple sort of lice that hide themselves in the seams of garments. They swarmed upon the sails. They swarmed upon the masts. They swarmed upon the anchors.

To exaggerate slightly, it was hard to tell whether the boats were for men or for lice.

Of course in such a plethora, scores of the pests swarmed upon their clothes. And whenever they so much as touched the skin of a man, they were straightway elated and fell to till he tingled.

In the matter of going about in pursuit of lice whenever they had leisure, this group was not different from the rest of the party. The only difference was that all they caught, they put one by one faithfully into their bosoms and carefully kept.

But it is seldom in any country in any age that the precursor’s teaching is accepted in its first form by all the people.

In this boat, too, there were many Pharisees who set themselves up against Mori’s doctrines on lice.

Presently the Buddha stood still on the brink of the pond, and through an opening among the leaves which covered the face of the water, suddenly beheld the scene below.

As the floor of Hell lay directly beneath the lotus pond of Paradise, the Sanzu-no-Kawa and Hari-no-Yama were distinctly visible through the crystal water, as through a sterioptiscope.

Then his eye fell on a man named Kandata, who was squirming with the other sinners in the bottom of Hell.

And the sky above the fields, probably because of the hot weather, seemed dull, although the sun was shining bright, and cloud masses floated here and there like bits of rice cake puffed up in an earthen pan.

This story of the wine worm begins with three men out deliberately on a blistering flailing floor under the burning sun.

Strange to say, one of them not only was lying naked on his back on the ground, but, for some reason or other, had his hands and his feet bound up in a long cord. However, he seemed not to be greatly troubled about it.

No one except the mountain priest knew what a wine worm was, or what would happen when it was no longer in the stomach, or what the jar by Liu’s head was for.

Then you may think that Liu lying out in the burning heat naked without knowing what he was doing was a stupid fellow, but ordinary people receiving a school education are really doing very much the same sort of thing.

It was hot. Sweat came out on his forehead little by little, and no sooner would it form into beads than they would suddenly run warmly into his eyes.

Then the mother came back with the question what could sing save a man. And through sheer quickness of wit, the girl replied that it might be a badger.

Through the ages, time and again, has love taught such wit to women.

When morning came, the mother spoke of having heard the song to an old woman of the neighborhood who wove straw mats. And the old woman was one of those who had heard the song.

He did not begin to bewitch them, but it came to be thought that he did, you may say.

But how much difference is there after all between being bewitched and believing that one is bewitched?

This is true not only in the case of badgers. Is it not a fact that all things that exist for us are in the end but things in the existence of which we believe?

This is true not only in the case of badgers.

Is it not a fact that all things that exist for us are in the end but things in the existence of which we believe?

It is written in “The Celtic Twilight,” by Yeats, that some children on Lake Gill believed without a doubt that a little Protestant girl in blue and white garments was the Holy Mother Mary herself.

She could see between the sea of people flashes of curtains of purple silk crape with the Imperial crest dyed into them, and the gay silver or sober gold of the chrysanthemums in the vases under Chinese flags on which blue claw-spread dragons writhed.

And the sea of people, stirred up by the wind of gay melody from the German orchestra that came bubbling over it like champagne, never stopped for a moment its dizzy commotion.

When she and one of her friends, also dancing, saw each other, they nodded happily as they went busily by. But at that moment, another dancer, whirling like a big moth, appeared between them from nowhere in particular.

There a red and blue firework, throwing its spider legs out against the darkness, was just on the verge of dying away.

To Akiko, for some reason or other, that firework was so beautiful that it almost made her sad.

“I was thinking of the fireworks. The fireworks, like our lives,” said the French naval officer, looking gently down into Akiko’s face and speaking as if teaching her.

Moreover, Narihiro, who begrudged not even a pure gold pipe, naturally was not averse to giving away a silver pipe. Whenever he was asked for one, he promptly tossed it away ungrudgingly.

Finally even he himself could not say whether he gave away a pipe when he went to the castle or went to the castle to give away a pipe,—⁠at least, he hardly could.

At this, Yamazaki, Iwata and Ueki knit their brows and conferred again. Now at last there was nothing for it but to make brass pipes as Ueki had proposed.