Like much 19th-century horror, "The Moonlit Road" is largely built out of documentary texts, in this case more or less legal depositions. But these documents don't jibe, they differ in small critical ways and don't illuminate so much as confuse the open issues further. A man disappears whose wife has been murdered. It's not clear whether the murder is ever solved. It's not even clear they're talking about the same case. The story is short, divided into three sections, each one a separate individual's statement. The incidents they recount harmonize in some ways but diverge in others. It seems like the same case yet the parts don't fit. The first statement comes from Joel Hetman Jr., the son of the man who disappeared and woman who was murdered, and it's about as straightforward as this story gets, laying out the basic elements of the incident, with nary a ghost or mention of dreaming in sight. The second statement, disjointed and defiant, is from "Caspar Grattan" (he says the name is an alias), a man about to be executed for the murder of his wife. His case sounds just like Hetman's in the details, with shifts in perception arising out of the suggestion of shifts in motive. Yet even as he finishes his account Grattan begins to talk about it as if it were all only a dream he had. As if it never really happened, even though he has described it vividly.
The third section has the most obvious tie to the Kurosawa movie, with a statement from the woman who was murdered obtained by way of a spiritual medium. I always took this part of the movie to be reflecting something unique to Japan's past, allowing this type of testimony in a legal proceeding, and here it turns out to be something dreamed up by a writer in San Francisco, California! The medium, by the way, is identified as "Bayrolles," who also appears as the medium obtaining information in at least one more story by Bierce, "An Inhabitant of Carcosa" (along the way inventing Carcosa, a lost ancient city that would later figure in the work of Robert W. Chambers, H.P. Lovecraft, and many others).
So who killed this poor woman and why? An intruder who escaped in the night or her jealous husband enraged to discover her infidelity (or appearance of infidelity)? And why did the husband run away—because seeing her ghost on a moonlit road filled him with unbearable guilt? And what does Caspar Grattan have to do with it? Alas, we never learn. Each account affirms some elements from the others, but each also has perfectly unexplained elements too. The woman didn't see her killer and can't say with certainty who it was. "The sum of what we knew at death is the measure of what we know afterward," is the way she explains her lack of afterlife omniscience. There are certain eerie parallels in this story with Bierce's life too. He divorced his wife in 1904 after discovering her infidelity. And he famously disappeared himself in 1913 and no one knows what became of him, though he's presumed murdered. Perhaps the way Kurosawa's Rashomon is most faithful to Bierce's "Moonlit Road" is that there appears to be no getting to the bottom of it, no matter how many layers you peel back.
The Big Book of the Masters of Horror, Weird and Supernatural Short Stories, pub. Dark Chaos
Read story online.
Curious figure. In his lifetime he was a big time post-Civil War Hearst journalist but not much known for his fiction. "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" is one of those few Lit 101 short stories that has always stayed with me. I need to check out a good biography.
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