The Samurai's Grave

Trudging home at nightfall from a hard day's work in the provincial city of Hikari, Laborer Noboru Kawamura, 30, passed a group of giggling girls. Drawing closer, Kawamura saw that they were crowded around a thin, bearded fortuneteller who was reading their palms. On impulse. Kawamura got in line and, when his turn came, paid over the fee of 25-c-.

Flood or Fire. What he wanted to know, said Kawamura, was why he had been hagridden by bad luck since birth? "My parents died when I was a child; I have no living kin. I never met a girl who would marry me. I am being haunted, but I don't know what my crime has been." He poured out more of his woes: when he got a job, he was either fired or the company went bankrupt; when he tried to be a peddler, no one would buy his combs and bits of ribbon; he had failed as a vendor of hot potatoes. If people were catching cold. Kawamura sneezed before anyone else; if there was a typhoon, flood or fire, Kawamura's few possessions were the first to be destroyed. "Why does everything happen to me?" he moaned.

The fortuneteller studied Kawamura's palm, said gravely: "You are indeed accursed. But I can tell you how to end all your troubles. Go to the little field that lies outside your home. There you will find a neglected grave, the burial place of an ancient samurai. His spirit is angry and is taking revenge on the nearest living person, and that happens to be you. It is necessary that you appease him."

Nervously, Kawamura suggested it might be simpler to move away.

"Not so, not so." intoned the fortuneteller. "Now that the samurai's spirit has identified you with the neglect of his grave, you would be followed all over the world." He told Kawamura to clear away the earth and brambles from the tombstone, "then burn incense before it and pray. This will console the samurai."

Six-Foot Pit. Hurrying home to his tiny, rented straw-mat room in an overcrowded shack on the city's outskirts, Kawamura eagerly told his fellow tenants what he had learned. Sure enough, they remembered that there was an old tombstone in the field, so deeply buried that only its top showed above the earth. Nobody knew whose grave it was. It had always been there.

At dawn, dressed in his usual rags and with his long, uncut hair bound by a kerchief, Kawamura borrowed a spade and rushed into the field. Passersby paused to watch and to jeer and cheer him as he dug all morning long. It was a much bigger job than he-had expected. By noon Kawamura had dug down 6 ft. of earth and uncovered one face of the tombstone--a massive slab 1 ft. thick and 4 ft. wide. Apparently bent on a rest, he started to clamber out of the 6-ft. pit. But. at just that moment, the huge gravestone toppled forward and crashed down on the luckless Kawamura. What the fortuneteller had prophesied had, in a fashion, come to pass: Kawamura's bad luck was at last at an end. He was dead.

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