Three Strange Tales

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Return to Book Page. Paperback , pages. To see what your friends thought of this book, please sign up. To ask other readers questions about 3 Strange Tales , please sign up. Lists with This Book. This book is not yet featured on Listopia. Nov 08, Rise rated it really liked it. I met the couple yesterday, a little past noon.

The breeze blew through and pulled back the silk scarf draped over the woman and I saw her face for just a moment.

Roo Bardookie ~ Three Strange Tales

It was just a second, because then I couldn't see it anymore. Maybe that was the reason, I'm not sure, but she looked like she'd fallen from heaven and I made up my mind then and there to steal her away, even if it meant killing the man. The speaker, the notorious bandit Tajomaru, was confessing to the crime. All he needed was just a se I met the couple yesterday, a little past noon.

All he needed was just a second to be waylaid. He wasn't sure what compelled him to do harm. He thought it was the breeze momentarily revealing the face of a woman. Maybe that was the reason, I'm not sure. But he made up his mind there and then. But you didn't see her face. You didn't see the way her eyes burned when she said it. When I saw her face, let God strike me dead, I had to have her for my wife.

I had to have her—that was the only thought in my head.

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They are rash, impulsive. They are strange because they went unexplained. Or the explanation was insufficient—You didn't see her face. The characters decide things rather quickly, without regard for the consequences of their acts. The moment I stood the man kicked me to the ground, and it was just then that I saw the glint—it's hard to describe it, but there was a glint in my husband's eyes. I don't know how to describe it, but just the memory of it sends shivers down my spine.

The woman's testimony, contradicting the bandit's, was equally strange. She knew what she had seen—a glint—and was terrified of it. There was uncertainty on her part it's hard to describe it I don't know how to describe it but she nonetheless left an indelible image— a glint —that will be very hard to forget.

Trending Macabrely

The last story from the recent translation 3 Strange Tales. It was in fact the fourth story, a "bonus story" after the first three. The inexact number of stories in the title may be fitting, given the set of unreliable narrators in "In a Grove" whose testimonies regarding what happened on the day a man was killed were oddly at odds with each other. All four stories were unified by a mood of passionate intensity. The characters were impulsive, highly sensitive, slaves to their feelings.

Their violent deeds were executed with no fuss. In moments of desperation, they were, moreover, not quite themselves. They seemed to be possessed by somebody else. Here was the murdered victim of "In a Grove", his testimony spoken through a medium , no less. The grove was silent, or I thought it was. Straining my ears in the quiet, I could just make out the sound of someone crying. Soon I discovered that it was only my own quiet sobs that filled the clearing.

Yet another kind of possession was at work in the third story, "Agni", which appeared here in translation for the very first time.

The story was about an Indian woman, a witch, who kidnapped a young girl which she forcefully used as the medium for Agni, a powerful Indian god who could tell the future. The witch was notorious as a fortune teller; she was selling Agni's prophecies to rich buyers. At the start of the tale, a man called on the witch to ask when Japan and America will go to war. A possession was scheduled at midnight so the woman could give the answer in the morning. With the help of a man who was searching for the girl, the girl hatched a plan to escape the witch.

She would pretend a false possession by Agni right before she went to sleep. As Agni, she would then command the witch to immediately return her to her father or else she will be killed.

STRANGE TALES

Will the girl be able to pull it off? Will she be able to pretend as being possessed before she went to sleep and became actually possessed by Agni? And, in that case, will she be able to convince the witch? This "possession", a kind of wholesale transformation of character, was an essential device for Akutagawa. The transformation may be brought about by an actual possession, or it may be compelled by extreme events and circumstances, but the result was the same. A character was changed into someone else, someone violent.

The other two stories in the slim collection—"Rashomon" and "A Christian Death"—were widely anthologized. They also closely followed the framework of unpredictability brought about by the characters' sudden emotional outbursts and violent actions. They captured the strange territory of the rashomonesque , the relative notion of good and evil. But this time, the stories unfolded within apocalyptic settings. A servant, newly dismissed by his master, was contemplating the surrounding wasteland below the gate of Rashomon. It was raining and he was trapped. The moral decay around him was essential to understanding the moral choice he made at the end of the story, while confronting an old woman in a tower.

The choice—his conviction—suddenly came to him, as if it possessed him. As he listened he was gripped by a new conviction, one that worked on him in precisely the opposite way than his earlier ruminations on evil had when he leapt into the tower and grappled with the woman. It was the very conviction that he had lacked when he sat under the gate. She is laying in a room, with her hands tied behind her, her boobs naked and there are about very hungry babies who all seem to spy her nipples at the same time. They begin to crawl toward her with hungry little mouths. Their little hands and mouths were upon her.

When she screamed, it made some babies cry. They fought and bit, and she bled milk and blood. I was travelling with mommy and daddy on a cruise liner bound for Hawaii, when I started to hear strange bumps against the ship during the night. The next morning, the passengers who would normally be getting excited because the island was in sight, were excited about something else. This was causing a buzz as they gathered at the rails at the front and sides of the ship. There were rafts and bodies and rafts with bodies on them with live and dead men, women and children.

The living were calling out to the ship.

They were like skeletons on little pirate ships, mining for death amongst the blue and green of the emerald and sapphire waters. Bodies were bobbing like real fishing bobbers, because they were getting bites. They were getting bites as a great feeding frenzy took place from below and above as sharks, fish and sea birds tore chunks from them. Some birds and fish were so full, they vomited back up human gore, which was re-eaten.

This scene caused some of the passengers to become ill too. Their vomit mixed with the sea and animal puke to make a great soup of death.

My father worked for a company that opened doors and got things done. He demanded to see the captain. After a phone call, he was granted a behind-closed-doors meeting.

They put their pets in the Humane Society. Which means the federal government was in on this also. Looking back, I do recall how absolutely beautiful Waikiki was without the tents and shopping carts. There were less people at the AA and NA meeting. When we came to the imaginary line of where you can discharge bilge water and human waste, it mixed with the previous human, animal and bird waste. It made a stew of death, cooking in the summer sun. The feeding frenzy grew in size. I also recall two passengers clinking champagne glasses together.

They said it was about time somebody did something about the homeless in Hawaii.

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