検非違使に問われたる旅法師の物語

That dead man — yes, I am certain I met him yesterday. Yesterday, about — well, it would have been around noon. The place was on the road going from Sekiyama toward Yamashina. He was walking toward Sekiyama, together with a woman on horseback. The woman had let down her veil — a gauze riding-veil — so I could not see her face. All I made out was the color of her robes, which seemed to be in the bush-clover layering. The horse was a roan — a roan, I think, with a priest-cropped mane. Its height? Four sun over, perhaps — but I am only a monk, sir, and cannot rightly say. The man — yes, he bore a long sword, and carried a bow and arrows besides. The black-lacquered quiver in particular, set with a good twenty war-arrows — that I remember clearly even now.

That such a fate should befall him — I never dreamed of it; yet truly a man’s life is as a dewdrop, as a lightning-flash, no surer than that. Ah, well — a pitiable thing, beyond anything I can say.