Story of a Pheasant
In the Toyama district of the province of Bishū, there formerly lived a young farmer and his wife. Their farm was situated in a lonely place, among the hills.
One night the wife dreamed that her father-in-law, who had died some years before, came to her and said, “To-morrow I shall be in great danger: try to save me if you can!” In the morning she told this to her husband; and they talked about the dream. Both imagined that the dead man wanted something; but neither could imagine what the words of the vision signified.
After breakfast, the husband went to the fields; but the wife remained at her loom. Presently she was startled by a great shouting outside. She went to the door, and saw the Jitō1 of the district, with a hunting party, approaching the farm. While she stood watching them, a pheasant ran by her into the house; and she suddenly remembered her dream. “Perhaps it is my father-in-law,” she thought to herself;—“I must try to save it!” Then, hurrying in after the bird,—a fine male pheasant,—she caught it without any difficulty, put it into the empty rice-pot, and covered the pot with the lid.
A moment later some of the Jitō’s followers entered, and asked her whether she had seen a pheasant. She answered boldly that she had not; but one of the hunters declared that he had seen the bird run into the house. So the party searched for it, peeping into every nook and corner; but nobody thought of looking into the rice-pot. After looking everywhere else to no purpose, the men decided that the bird must have escaped through some hole; and they went away.
When the farmer came home his wife told him about the pheasant, which she had left in the rice-pot, so that he might see it. “When I caught it,” she said, “it did not struggle in the least; and it remained very quiet in the pot. I really think that it is father-in-law.” The farmer went to the pot, lifted the lid, and took out the bird. It remained still in his hands, as if tame, and looked at him as if accustomed to his presence. One of its eyes was blind. “Father was blind of one eye,” the farmer said,—“the right eye; and the right eye of this bird is blind. Really, I think it is father. See! it looks at us just as father used to do!... Poor father must have thought to himself, ‘Now that I am a bird, better to give my body to my children for food than to let the hunters have it.’... And that explains your dream of last night,” he added,—turning to his wife with an evil smile as he wrung the pheasant’s neck.
At the sight of that brutal act, the woman screamed, and cried out:—
“Oh, you wicked man! Oh, you devil! Only a man with the heart of a devil could do what you have done!... And I would rather die than continue to be the wife of such a man!”
And she sprang to the door, without waiting even to put on her sandals. He caught her sleeve as she leaped; but she broke away from him, and ran out, sobbing as she ran. And she ceased not to run, barefooted, till she reached the town, when she hastened directly to the residence of the Jitō. Then, with many tears, she told the Jitō everything: her dream of the night before the hunting, and how she had hidden the pheasant in order to save it, and how her husband had mocked her, and had killed it.
The Jitō spoke to her kindly, and gave orders that she should be well cared for; but he commanded his officers to seize her husband.
Next day the farmer was brought up for judgment; and, after he had been made to confess the truth concerning the killing of the pheasant, sentence was pronounced. The Jitō said to him:—
“Only a person of evil heart could have acted as you have acted; and the presence of so perverse a being is a misfortune to the community in which he happens to reside. The people under Our jurisdiction are people who respect the sentiment of filial piety; and among them you cannot be suffered to live.”
So the farmer was banished from the district, and forbidden ever to return to it on pain of death. But to the woman the Jitō made a donation of land; and at a later time he caused her to be provided with a good husband.
Notes
1 The lord of the district, who acted both as governor and magistrate.