Collected Fictions by Jorge Luis Borges, Andrew Hurley Read Free Book Online

inspiration of Japanese filmmaking. The minutely detailed glory which those ardent tributes attest is more than justifiable—it is immediately just, in anyone's view.
    I follow the story as told by A. B. Mitford, who omits those continual distractions lent by "local color," preferring instead to focus on the movement of the glorious episode. That admirable lack of "Orientalism" allows one to suspect that he has taken his version directly from the Japanese.

    THE UNTIED RIBBON
    In the now faded spring of 1702, Asano Takumino Kami, the illustrious lord of the castle of Ako, was obliged to receive an envoy from the emperor and offer the hospitality and entertainment of his home to him. Two thou-sand three hundred years of courtesy (some mythological) had brought the rituals of reception to a fine point of anguished complication. The ambassador represented the emperor, but did so by way of allusion, or symbolically—and this was a nuance which one emphasized too greatly or too little only at one's peril. In order to avoid errors which might all too easily prove fatal, an official of the court at Yedo was sent beforehand to teach the proper ceremonies to be observed. Far from the comforts of the court, and sentenced to this backwoods villégiature (which to him must have seemed more like a banishment than a holiday), Kira Kôtsuké no Suké imparted his instructions most ungraciously. At times the magisterial tone of his voice bordered on the insolent. His student, the lord of the castle of Ako, affected to ignore these affronts; he could find no suitable reply, and discipline forbade the slightest violence. One morning, however, the ribbon on the courtier's sock came untied, and he requested that the lord of the castle of Ako tie it up for him again. This gentleman did so, humbly yet with inward indignation. The uncivil teacher of court etiquette told him that he was truly incorrigible—only an ill-bred country bumpkin was capable of tying a knot as clumsily as that. At these words, the lord of the castle of Ako drew his sword and slashed at the uncivil courtier, who fled—the graceful flourish of a delicate thread of blood upon his forehead-----A few days later, the military court handed down its sentence against the attacker: the lord of the castle of Ako was to be allowed to commit hará kiri. In the central courtyard of the castle of Ako, a dais was erected and covered in red felt, and to it the condemned man was led; he was given a short knife of gold and gems, he confessed his crime publicly, he allowed his upper garments to slip down to his girdle so that he was naked to the waist, and he cut open his abdomen with the two ritual movements of the dirk. He died like a Samurai; the more distant spectators saw no blood, for the felt was red. A white-haired man of great attention to detail—the councillor Oishi Kuranosuké, his second—decapitated his lord with a saber.

    THE FEIGNER OF INIQUITIES
    Takumi no Kami's castle was confiscated, his family ruined and eclipsed, his name linked to execration. His retainers became Rônins.*One rumor has it that the same night the lord committed hará kiri, forty-seven of these Rônins met on the summit of a mountain, where in minute detail they planned the act that took place one year later. But the fact is that the retainers acted with well-justified delay, and at least one of their confabulations took place not on the difficult peak of a mountain, but in a chapel in a forest, an undistinguished pavilion of white-painted wood, unadorned save for the rectangular box that held a mirror.
    The Rônins hungered for revenge, but revenge must have seemed unattainable. Kira Kôtsuké no Suké, the hated teacher of court etiquette, had fortified his house, and a cloud of archers and swordsmen swarmed about his palanquin. Among his retinue were incorruptible, secret spies upon whom no detail was lost, and no man did they so closely spy upon and follow as the councillor Kuranosuké, the