Prevod

Long ago, in the province of Kai, there lived a sumo wrestler named Ōi no Mitsutō. He was a broad, burly, formidable man, immensely strong and swift of foot, remarkable in his looks, his bearing, and everything about him. He had a younger sister of about twenty-six or twenty-seven, a handsome woman of graceful manners and slender figure. She lived in a house adjoining his. One day a man, fleeing from pursuers, drew his sword and dashed through her gate. He seized her as a hostage and sat down with the blade pressed against her belly. Someone ran to her brother Mitsutō and told him, “Your sister has been taken hostage!” Mitsutō replied, “It would take someone like Ujinaga of Satsuma to hold that lady hostage,” and remained sitting there quite unconcerned. Puzzled, the messenger went back and peered into the house from behind cover. It was about the ninth month, and the lady was wearing a single pale-purple robe over crimson trousers. She sat with her mouth covered by her sleeve. Her captor was a large, frightening-looking fellow. He held a great sword in a reverse grip, its point against her belly, and had his legs wrapped around her from behind. The lady covered her face with her left hand and wept. With her right, she idly picked up some roughly fashioned arrow shafts—there were twenty or thirty lying before her—and, pressing each one against the floorboards with her fingers just below a joint, twisted it. The shafts crumbled as readily as soft, rotten wood. The thief noticed what she was doing and watched in astonishment. “What a fearsome woman I have got hold of!” he thought. “Even a hammer could hardly smash them like that. What dreadful strength! At this rate she may seize me and crush me at any moment. There is nothing to be gained by staying here. I had better escape.” Watching for a moment when no one was looking, he sprang out and fled. But farther along, some men ran up, caught him, bound him, and brought him to Mitsutō. “What made you run away?” Mitsutō asked. The thief replied, “She was crushing the joints of those thick arrow shafts as though they were rotten wood. I could scarcely believe my eyes, and I fled in terror.” Mitsutō laughed. “Whatever you might have tried, you could never have stabbed that lady. If she had caught the hand you meant to stab her with, twisted your arm, and thrust it upward, your shoulder bone would have come out of its socket and your arm would have been wrenched right around. You would certainly have had your arm torn off. It was your good fortune that she did not twist it. Why, even I could kill you with my bare hands. If I twisted your arm and stamped on your belly and chest, do you suppose you would live? Yet that lady has the strength of two men like me put together. Slender and womanly as she looks, when I catch her arm in play, if she catches mine in return, she forces my hand open and makes me let go. Ah, if only she had been born a boy! There would have been no match for her. What a pity she is a woman.” Hearing this, the thief felt as though he would die. He had thought that, being a woman, she would make an excellent hostage, but he had been sadly mistaken. “I ought to kill you,” Mitsutō went on, “but I would only do that if my sister’s life had been in danger. It was you who were about to die. You did well to get away so quickly! Why, she can put a great stag’s antler across her knee and snap it as easily as one might break a thin twig of brittle wood.” With that, he drove the thief away and let him go.