The Corpse's Arm

Kobayashi Monzō staggered drunkenly out of the MisonoTheater. A mysterious chorus—the desperately high pitch of the girls on stage and the splendid bellowing from the responding audience—clamored inside his head, and even after leaving the shack he still tottered with a feeling like seasickness. The narrow lane lined with nighttime stalls suddenly seemed to be closing in on him. He walked hurriedly along the bright avenues in the direction of the public park with his chin pressed to his breast, avoiding the faces of the passersby as much as possible. He felt uneasy at the thought that he might be seen stealthily quitting his usual seat in the theater. His pace quickened.

After walking half a block, he reached the entrance to the dimly lit public park. Foot traffic at the wide crossroads had grown sparse. Monzō checked his wristwatch by the light of the red paper lantern of an oden vendor's stall near the iron railing which surrounded the pond. It was already ten o'clock.

"I suppose I should go home, but there won't be anything to do once I get there."

Recalling the still air of the house in which he rented a room, Monzō did not feel inclined to return. Besides, a spring night in Asakusa Park held a strange fascination for him. Walking uncertainly, he entered the park, going in the opposite direction from home.

It was the wonderful charm of this park that one could walk and walk in it without ever seeing everything. Monzō suddenly had the feeling that he might chance upon some unthinkable happening in one of its corners. It seemed to him that he would be able to discover something magnificent.

He walked along the pitch-black avenue which transverses the park. To the right were several plazas wrapped in forest; to the left a small stream paralleled the path. From time to time, the splashing sound of leaping carp came from the stream. A small concrete bridge, roofed in a wisteria trellis, appeared whitish in the gloom.

"Hey, mister."

Monzō realized someone was calling to him out of the darkness. It was an odd, strangled voice.

"What?"

Monzō turned involuntarily with exaggerated surprise, as if he had come upon a holdup.

"Just a minute, mister. Don't tell anyone; it's highly confidential, this is. It's wonderfully interesting, so please be generous and spare me fifty sen."

A man who looked to be about thirty, dressed in a striped kimono and a hunting cap, huddled close to Monzō, grinning broadly.

"What's that?"

The man responded with a low chuckle.

"You say that, even though you already know. You certainly won't fool me like that."

The man glanced restlessly about and then showed a scrap of paper1 against the illumination of a distant streetlight.

"Well then, take it."

Although Monzō had no reason to desire such a thing, he exchanged a silver fifty-sen coin for the scrap of paper out of a sudden impulse of idle curiosity and walked off.

"That's a good omen for tonight," he thought, cowardly yet adventurous.

A company of four or five men who seemed to be drunken merchants on their way back from Yoshiwara2 passed by, tunelessly shouting out popular love songs.

Monzō veered off into a plaza by a public restroom. As always, vagrants were preparing to sleep on the public benches in its corners. Beside every bench lay innumerable banana skins, trampled underfoot: the vagrants' evening meal. In the center two or three people were sharing scraps of food gotten from a nearby restaurant. Tall streetlights cast a pale illumination on the scene.

When he had taken two or three steps, meaning to pass through, he sensed the presence of something squirming in the darkness nearby. Although he could not make it out clearly on account of the darkness, he lingered there seized by an exceedingly strange, somehow abnormal feeling.

For a moment, Monzō felt a mysterious sensation. He wondered if something might not be wrong with his head. But as his eyes became accustomed to the darkness, he gradually came to grasp the nature of his object. There, standing motionless, was a single, pitiable dwarf.

A fine adult face sat like a borrowed thing atop the body of a child of ten. Monzō found the way it stared back at him with the air of a "living doll"3 to be both exceedingly humorous and bizarre. Monzō felt that it was wrong of himself to stare like that. Besides, he had become a little afraid, so he casually walked off. He hesitated to look back over his shoulder.

After that, he walked about from plaza to plaza as usual. The weather was good, so all the benches were full. Most of them were occupied by lone figures in faded workmen's livery, lying down. Some of these men were already snoring, sleeping soundly. The inexperienced vagrants feared police officers and made their beds in the dim thickets enclosed by the iron railing.

It was that time of the day when strange wanderers were about: vagrants searching for a bed, police detectives, uniformed policemen rattling their sabers as they made their rounds every thirty minutes. Seekers after the bizarre such as Monzō were the chief part of them, but there was always another odd race of people who did not belong. They would sit down on a nearby bench for a minute, then immediately stand up again, and repeat this course countless times. When they encountered other wanderers on the narrow paths through the dim groves, they would peer meaningfully into their faces and try to borrow a match, even if they had some themselves. They were well-shaven, with smooth, slippery faces. Most wore a striped kimono tied with a stiff sash.

Monzō had felt a kind of interest in these people before. He wanted to try to ascertain their identities. It was strange that, although it could never be guessed from their way of walking, they were all squalid, elderly men in their thirties and forties.

As he passed by a public bench styled like a roofed arbor, voices which seemed to be quarreling issued from the darkness within it. The vagrants in this public park were uncharacteristically timid, so Monzō, who had thought that there was no possibility of danger, felt a little surprised. Peering inside while preparing to flee, he saw that it was not a fight after all, but a lone gentlemen in Western clothes being made to sit down by a police officer. While a few angry words were shouted, the gentleman was easily restrained with a rope about his waist. The pair walked off in the direction of the local police box in cordial silence. But the gentlemen attempted to conceal the cord with his spring coat as he walked. In the pitch-black public park, there were no rubberneckers to follow after them. On the same bench, a man with the air of a laborer sat lost in thought, as if nothing had occurred.

Monzō climbed a flight of irregular stone steps and came out on top of a hill. In an area about forty yards square, surrounded by a sparse grove of trees, three or four benches were lined up, and three silent, resting figures dotted the place like isolated bronze statues. Aside from the occasional red glow of a cigarette, no one moved. Monzō summoned his courage and sat down on one of the benches.

Even the moving picture houses had closed some time ago, and the brilliant illumination had almost entirely vanished. The scattered streetlights were the only lights in the spacious park. Even the orchestra of Mokuba Hall4, which could be heard anywhere during peak hours, and the commotion of the people in the theater district had already subsided. As might be expected of an amusement quarter, the public park late at night was especially lonely, and it caused Monzō to feel a strange ghastliness. His wristwatch pointed to almost twelve o'clock.

Seating himself, Monzō began to cast sidelong glances at the others who were already there. On one bench was a mustachioed man in formal Western clothing. On another bench was a hatless man with the air of a carouser, who might have been the supervisor of a fish market. And on yet another bench, much to his surprise, that mysterious dwarf he had seen earlier was sitting all alone.

"Perhaps he's been dogging my footsteps like a shadow since I came across him earlier," Monzō thought suddenly, without knowing why. It was strangely uncanny. In addition, the streetlight was inconveniently just at Monzō's back and, filtered through the branches of the trees, illuminated only the area around the dwarf, so he could see the whole body of this deformed child with comparative clarity.

Beneath the thick, disheveled hair was an unusually wide face. Its complexion was deathly pale, and the eyes were absurdly large, out of proportion with the mouth. The features were mostly those of a fully formed adult, but the muscles in the face had a tendency to stiffen, as if with a sudden convulsion. The face seemed sometimes to scowl with a feeling of unpleasantness and sometimes to be taken by a bitter smile. Just then it gave the general impression of a wasp spider that had been crushed by a foot.

The dwarf wore a kimono in a large splash pattern. His arms were folded, but because they were extremely short in relation to the breadth of his shoulders, his fingers did not reach his upper arms and met just in front of his breast, as if he were grasping a sword. It was as if his whole body was made up of head and torso and he wore his limbs merely by way of apology. His short, thick legs, shod in high rain-clogs with magnolia wood supports, swung two or three inches above the ground.

Monzō's own face was fortunately in shadow, so he was able to gaze at the other as if he were viewing an exhibition. He was somewhat uncomfortable at first, but as he watched, he gradually became fascinated by the apparition. The dwarf was most likely employed by a circus troupe or something of the kind, but it made Monzō feel strange to imagine what sort of thoughts this cripple might be carrying inside his large, flat-crowned head.

From the first, the dwarf continued to gaze in one direction with a queer, thieving look in his eyes. Following that gaze, Monzō realized it was falling on two men seated upon a shadowed bench. The gentleman in Western clothes and the man with the air of a carouser had lined up on the same bench without his noticing and were talking together in hushed voices.

"It's surprisingly warm, don't you think?" The one in Western clothes spoke in a muffled voice, stroking his beard.

"Yes. It's been very warm for two or three days," the carouser answered in a quiet voice. It looked as if this was their first meeting, but the pair seemed somehow to have formed an odd companionship. Although both appeared to be nearly forty, one was a formal man with the look of a petty official, and the other was a pure Asakusan. It was truly odd that they should be carelessly discussing the weather so late into the night that even the trains must have stopped running. Almost certainly, they had some mutual scheme. Monzō felt his curiosity slowly mounting.

"How's business?" Western Clothes enquired indifferently, intently surveying the plump body of the other man.

"Oh, the usual." With both elbows on his knees and his head rested upon them, the fat man answered restlessly. This tedious conversation continued for some time. Taking a lesson from the dwarf, Monzō did not take his eyes off the pair.

Eventually, Western Clothes stretched with a gigantic yawn and stood up, staring at Monzō. But, mysteriously, he sat down once again on the same bench, almost touching the fat man. Sensing this, the fat man looked in the direction of the dwarf and quickly returned to his original posture. Then, although he was a balding man in his forties, he fidgeted coquettishly, as if he were ashamed of something.

Western Clothes suddenly stretched his protruding, monkey-like elbows—they really did give one the impression of a monkey—and took the fat man's hand.

Then, after whispering together for some time again, they came to an unspoken agreement, stood up from the bench and went off down the hill practically arm in arm.

Monzō felt a chill. It was an odd comparison, but it resembled the chill he had felt when viewing waxwork anatomical models of the human body at an exhibition on public hygiene. It was a feeling of indescribable discomfort and fear. And the most awful thing was that, in the dimness before him, the dwarf let out a chuckle as he watched the descending pair. (Monzō was unable to forget that uncanny laughing face for a long time afterwards.)

The deformed child went on laughing, putting his hand to his mouth and twisting his body slightly like a young girl. Monzō was unable to flee, however much he struggled to do so. He felt as if he had been bound in a world of nightmares. In his ears he could hear a pounding noise, like the distant roaring of the sea.

A short while later, the dwarf got down from the bench with a comical motion and approached him with unsteady steps. Monzō stiffened involuntarily, thinking that he was about to be accosted. But, luckily, the bench on which he sat lay in the shadow of a large tree, so that the dwarf passed by him, seemingly unaware that anyone was there, and walked over to the top of a flight of stairs.

When the dwarf had taken two or three steps, however, something black tumbled from his pocket. It was a long, thin thing about one foot in length, wrapped in something like a satin cloth. One corner of the cloth had come untied, and Monzō caught just a glimpse of the contents. It was clearly a pale, human hand. The five delicate fingers were grasping at the air in an expression of death agony.

The cripple, perhaps thinking no one was looking, picked up the bundle without any particular concern and, thrusting it into his pocket, set off at a brisk pace.

Monzō sat blankly for a moment. It seemed to him quite ordinary for the dwarf to be carrying a human arm. "What a fool, keeping a dead person's arm in his pocket as if it were valuable," he thought to himself. He felt it was rather humorous.

But the next moment, he grew extremely agitated. The combination of the mysterious cripple and a human arm suggested a gruesome scene. He got up suddenly and followed the dwarf, careful not to make a sound as he descended the stone steps. The retreating figure of the deformed child was visible directly in front of him. Without being noticed by his quarry, he shadowed the dwarf, preserving a moderate distance.

Tailing the dwarf in this way, Monzō felt as if he were dreaming. It seemed to him that the dwarf would suddenly turn to face him in a dark place and say "boo." But some strange force pulled him on. For some reason, he could not avert his eyes from the dwarf's retreating figure.

The dwarf hobbled along with a mincing gait, walking with unexpected speed. They turned down several dark, narrow lanes, crossed the grounds of the temple of Kannon and emerged from a back lane, headed in the direction of Azuma Bridge. As Monzō passed from lonely place to lonely place without knowing why, the dwarf, walking all alone down silent streets practically devoid of passersby, appeared even more like a demon.

Finally, they drew near Azuma Bridge. The bridge was practically devoid of people, in stark contrast to its daytime hustle and bustle, and its iron guardrails were visible from a long way off. From time to time an automobile would pass by, shaking the bridge.

The cripple, who had come this far in a hurry, looking neither to right nor left, came to a sudden halt in the middle of the bridge. Then he turned suddenly about. Monzō, tailing him at a distance of just twenty yards, was startled by this surprise attack. The view on the bridge was unobstructed, and he had no time to conceal himself. So he had no choice but to pretend to be an ordinary pedestrian and to keep walking. The dwarf, however, seemed fully aware that he had been followed. He had inserted a hand a little way into his pocket and was taking out the bundle, but, seeing Monzō, he hastily withdrew his hand and walked off again with an air of innocence.

"It looks as if he planned to throw the woman's arm into the river."

Monzō realized at last that this was no trivial matter.

He had once read an article concerning time-honored methods of concealing corpses. It said that killers often cut them up and that for the purpose of carrying off a corpse it is most convenient to divide it into six or seven parts. It then went on to enumerate many examples of crimes in which a head had been buried under a paving stone, a torso thrown into a flood gate, or legs tossed into a ditch. According to the article, it seemed that criminals wanted to conceal the different parts of a corpse separately and as far away from themselves as possible.

The thought that he had been perceived by his quarry frightened Monzō a little, but he was determined not to give up the pursuit, so he followed nervously after the dwarf at a much greater distance than before.

There was a police box at the end of Azuma Bridge and a single uniformed officer was idly standing watch under its red electric light. When he saw that, Monzō wanted to begin running to it at once, but a certain thought compelled him to hold his ground. It would be rather disappointing to inform the police now. He certainly hadn't undertaken his pursuit for the sake of justice; it was merely a hunt for something out of the ordinary, into which he had allowed his fervently adventurous heart to persuade him. He wanted to push further on his way and see a gory spectacle. Not only that, he would not have minded being caught up in the whirlpool of a criminal case. Though he was a coward, there was at the same time a part of him that was reckless and desperate.

Monzō cast a sidelong glance at the police box and, feeling a slight pride grow within him, he continued his pursuit. From the main street the dwarf entered into the many back lanes of Nakanogō. There were slums thereabouts, and the place had become so labyrinthine as to make one think, There are places like this even in Tokyo? His quarry turned back and forth through the maze countless times, so that shadowing him became more and more difficult. Before he had walked even three blocks from the police box, Monzō began to have regrets.

On one side were dark houses with closed doors, and on the other a cemetery surrounded by a sparse cryptomeria hedge. Only a single five-candela street lamp illuminated the fallen stone monuments. There, the big-headed monster, hurrying with unsteady steps, seemed somehow unreal. Monzō felt that all the night's happenings had been a dream. It seemed as if at any moment someone might say, "Hey, Monzō, Monzō," and shake him awake.

For a long time the dwarf, perhaps unaware of his pursuer, did not look behind him even once. Even so, Monzō was cautious, not showing himself until after the other had turned a corner and sneaking along from shadow to shadow beneath the overhanging roofs.

As they turned toward the graveyard, the gate of a small temple came into view. There, the dwarf looked over his shoulder briefly and, having made certain that he was alone, opened a side door with a creak and vanished inside the gate. Monzō emerged from his hiding place and hurried up to the gate. After pondering the situation for a short time, he tried pushing gently against the side door, but it seemed to be barred from the inside and did not budge even slightly. The side door had not been locked, so perhaps the dwarf lived at this temple. But that was far from certain. He might have been making his escape through the graveyard at the rear of the temple.

In a great hurry, Monzō retraced his steps to the previous street and peered at the back of the temple through a break in the cryptomeria hedge. He saw a building which seemed to be the priests' quarters on the other side of the graveyard. Just then its door opened and someone went inside. The figure illuminated by the light leaking through the gap of the door was undoubtedly that of the misshapen dwarf. As the figure vanished inside the priests' quarters, a metallic sound like the fastening of a door was faintly audible.

There was no longer room for doubt. Much to Monzō's surprise, the dwarf was a resident of this temple. But, just to make sure, he passed through the breach in the cryptomeria hedge and, drawing near to the priests' quarters, kept watch for some time. No light was to be seen, as if the electric light inside had been turned off. Monzō strained his ears, but there was no sound, not even a songbird.

The next day, Kobayashi Monzō slept in until around ten o'clock. The daylight was filtering through the gaps in the shutters and shining dazzlingly off the tip of his oily nose when he was suddenly awakened by boisterous shouting from the athletic field at the neighborhood elementary school. Stretching a hand from his bedding, he half-opened the shutters and began to smoke a cigarette while still lying on his belly in the futon.

"I wonder what I was doing last night. Perhaps I spent it at the theater," he said to himself, his words jumbled by waking.

It was all like a dream. As he stood before the darkened priests' quarters, guessing at the situation within, his excitement cooled by degrees. It was as if the midnight chill had pierced his body. Backlit by the distant street lamps, the pitch-black outlines of the stone monuments looked like a crowd of goblins. A different fear began to assail him.

Somewhere, a chicken squawked unpleasantly, as if it had been crushed. Hearing that, he could stand it no longer and fled. When he passed through the cemetery he had a feeling that he was being pursued by something. After that, he managed with great difficulty to make his way through the complicated labyrinth, which was like the streets in a dream, with no way of escape no matter where he went, and finally arrived at the main street along which the railway tracks ran. He flagged down a vacant taxi, which happened to be passing by just then and seemed to be on its way home, and returned to the boardinghouse. When the driver asked his destination as if it were a bother, he almost gave the name of his place of play by accident, but changed his mind and informed the driver of the name of the neighborhood in which the boardinghouse was. Somehow, he was extremely tired.

It must have been a hallucination. A human arm covered in a wrapping cloth; it's really quite absurd.

The spring sunshine filling the room made his mood entirely cheerful. The weird feelings of the previous night seemed unreal.

He gave one great stretch and, picking up the newspaper the landlady had left by his pillow, scanned the society page first, as was his habit. He did not find any particularly interesting articles. Almost all the two- and three-column headlines were bloody crime stories, but when he read the articles, all of them seemed to describe incidents in some other country and did not commend themselves to his attention. But turning to another page, a certain article suddenly drew his interest. Seeing it, somehow he could not help being startled. Under a three-line headline that said 'Woman's leg found in ditch: bizarre murder case?' was the following article:

Yesterday afternoon, the sixth, a human leg was found in the suburban district of Senjumachi, Nakagumi by a laborer, Sanjirō Kida, who was cleaning out a roadside ditch. The leg, which was wrapped in a striped cotton wrapping cloth, was discovered with a small stone weight, amid the scooped-up mud and caused a great commotion. According to the expert opinion of Dr. Toyama, M.D., the right leg of a healthy woman of about twenty, was severed at the knee about three days ago. Although a look at the severed end establishes that the cutter was no surgeon, neither a murder case answering to the above nor the disappearance of a woman has been reported in the vicinity, and the identity of the victim is unknown. The police are conducting a rigorous investigation into whether an exceedingly clever murder may have been carried out.

The paper had no reason to treat the matter as especially important and the article was phrased quite simply, but to Monzō's eyes it seemed as if it were bursting into flame. He rose abruptly from his futon and, almost unconsciously, re-read the article five or six times.

"It's probably a coincidence. Besides, last night may have been nothing but a hallucination."

Although he forced himself to calm down in this way, soon afterwards, the image of that strange dwarf—standing at the edge of a ditch in a lonely district on the outskirts of the city, tossing in a bundle covered in a wrapping cloth, his expression horrible—rose vividly before Monzō's eyes.

Aimlessly, and feeling as if he were being driven on by something, he rose from his bedding and began to dress in a great hurry.

Unsure of what he planned to do, Monzō removed a newly-tailored sack coat and a spring overcoat from his chest of Western clothes and put them on. He had left school but not yet gained employment, so this was his only good suit for going out, and he was quite proud of it. Both the jacket and pants were a fashionable sky-blue, which harmonized well with his personal appearance.

As he passed through the living room below, the landlady called out from behind, "Oh my, you're all dressed up. Where are you off to?"

"Nowhere in particular." Giving this strange reply, he hurriedly tied his high-laced boots.

But even after exiting the lattice door, he had not the slightest idea where he should go. He thought of making a report to the police, but he lacked have the confidence. Somehow, he still felt that he wanted to keep the secret to himself. In any case, going to the temple of the previous night and checking out the situation seemed best. Might not all of last night's happenings have been nothing more than his own hallucinations? He thought about that incessantly. He could not relax without going once more to make certain under the light of day. Resolutely, he set out for Honjo.

Getting off the train at Kaminari Gate5 and crossing the Azuma Bridge, he entered a vaguely recollected side street. The whole area took on an entirely different appearance by day, so he felt a little as if he had been bewitched by a fox. He went back and forth through countless similar back alleys, and at last came out before a temple gate he recognized. Although the area was surrounded by squalid neighborhoods, there was vacant land there, and that made it seem a strangely lonely place. Outside the gate there was only a single isolated, rustic-looking, small-time candy shop with an old woman basking drowsily in the sun before the storefront.

Monzō entered the gate, making sure his footsteps would be heard. Then, standing before the entrance to the priests' quarters he had seen the previous night, he boldly opened the sliding paper doors. They made an awful clattering sound.

"May I come in?"

"Yes, but who might you be?"

In an empty, dim room about ten mats in area sat a Buddhist priest wearing a white kimono. He looked to be in his forties. "If I might ask, might there be, well, a physically disabled person residing in this place?"

"Eh, what's that you say? A physically disabled person?" The priest replied, blinking with surprise.

"A short person. I think he must have returned extremely late last night."

Aware that he had begun the discussion in an odd manner, Monzō grew still more flustered. He had completely forgotten the stratagems he had thought up on his way.

"Perhaps you are calling at the wrong house. There are no lodgers here. I know nothing of any short, disabled person."

"I feel certain that it was this temple. There aren't any other temples in the neighborhood, are there?" Monzō gazed doubtfully about the interior of the priests' quarters as he spoke.

"Not nearby. But there is no person like the one you described here." The priest glared at Monzō and answered bluntly, stopping just short of saying "What an odd fellow!"

Monzō couldn't hold out any longer and thought of leaving it at that and going home, but he summoned his courage and continued.

"No, actually, I saw a strange thing in this place last night." As he spoke, Monzō abruptly entered and sat down on the doorsill. "You see, I saw a small person, such as often appears in shows, enter the priests' quarters here carrying a certain item. Naturally, I saw him from the other side of the hedge over there. Are you sure you don't know anything about it?"

Monzō felt that the affair was becoming stranger and stranger as he related it.

"Oh, is that so?" The priest took an extremely mocking tone. "I know nothing at all. You've made a mistake. Could such a ludicrous thing as you describe have taken place?" He guffawed loudly.