Rashomon and Other Stories
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About this ebook
Widely acknowledged as "the father of the Japanese short story," Ryunosuke Akutagawa remains one of the most influential Japanese writers of all time. Rashomon and Other Stories, a collection of his most celebrated work, resonates as strongly today as when it first published a century ago.
This volume includes:
- In a Grove: An iconic, contradictory tale of the murder of a samurai in a forest near Kyoto told through three varying accounts
- Rashomon: A masterless samurai contemplates following a life of crime as he encounters an old woman at the old Rashomon gate outside Kyoto
- Yam Gruel: A low-ranking court official laments his position all the while yearning for his favorite, yet humble, dish
- The Martyr: Set in Japan's Christian missionary era, a young boy is excommunicated for fathering an illegitimate child, but not all is as it seems
- Kesa and Morito: An adulterous couple plots to kill the woman's husband as the situation threatens to spin out of control
- The Dragon: A priest concocts a prank involving a dragon, but the tall tale begins to take on a life of its own
Ryunosuke Akutagawa
Ryūnosuke Akutagawa was one of Japan's leading literary figures in the Taishō period. Regarded as the father of the Japanese short story, he produced over 150 in his short lifetime. Haunted by the fear that he would inherit his mother's madness, Akutagawa suffered from worsening mental health problems towards the end of his life and committed suicide aged 35 by taking an overdose of barbiturates.
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Reviews for Rashomon and Other Stories
13 ratings4 reviews
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Superb!! Everyone should reading this at least once in a lifetime!
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5A set of brilliant and highly readable stories, enjoyable because of the imagery and the unusual situations they create, creating tension and thwarting expectations, and finally, leading to deep reflections on their meaning and how the author manages to take us in with his own techniques. A brilliant introduction to the mind and style of Akutagawa, which I had never read before, only encountered in Rashomon by Kurosawa.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Unusual short stories written by a bright mind. A refreshing change from the soetimes too formulaic prose of our current days.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5This book was like pure poetry. Each story as good as the last.
Book preview
Rashomon and Other Stories - Ryunosuke Akutagawa
TRANSLATOR’S PREFACE
The six stories of this collection were chosen with the aim of presenting Akutagawa’s finest and most representative writings. Only one of them (Rashōmon) has appeared in an earlier translation.
I wish to express my thanks to the following persons, for their kind assistance, and for their many valuable suggestions and criticisms: Mr. C. G. Wells, Chief Writer of the Far East Network; Mr. Walter E. Morgan, Chief of the School Administration and Finance Branch, CIE, SCAP; Mr. Harold Gosling and Mr. John Rockard, correspondents of the British Commonwealth Public Relations; Mr. Richard B. Farnsworth, formerly of CIE, SCAP; and Lieutenant D. L. Donohugh, formerly of the Press Advisory Division, SCAP.
TAKASHI KOJIMA
TOKYO, Japan
FOREWORD
In the last year of his life, Ryūnosuke Akutagawa (1892–1927) was involved in a public exchange with novelist Jun’ichirō Tanizaki (1886–1965), which would become known as the plotless novel
debate. Tanizaki decried what he saw as the lack of an ability to construct structurally complex narratives among Japanese writers, while Akutagawa downplayed the importance of plot, arguing for the value of fiction without a proper story.
He claimed that this was the purest form of fiction, one that is closest to poetry. Critics have sometimes construed Akutagawa’s plotless novel
to be a reference to the then-prevalent confessional genre known as the I-novel,
yet it is clear that Akutagawa actually had in mind something along the lines of modernist experimentation with form, exemplified by painters such as Cézanne and Kandinsky. In fact, formal experimentation was a hallmark of Akutagawa’s last writings, in which he wrote in a variety of genres, including the film scenario, autobiography, aphorism, satire and literary criticism.
As Akutagawa himself noted in the debate with Tanizaki, he supported the plotless novel despite the fact that much of his own writing career had been built around the foundation of a proper story.
His historical fiction, in particular, took the form of finely crafted short stories, often utilizing historically or geographically distant settings, in which uncanny or fantastic incidents momentarily illuminate the depths of the human psyche. Reflecting Akutagawa’s remarkable erudition, they drew heavily from sources in ancient Chinese and Japanese texts as well as contemporary European and American letters. If, as Walter Benjamin wrote, storytelling is always the art of repeating stories,
then Akutagawa was a storyteller in the truest sense, weaving his fictional texts through acts of citation and rewriting.*
These aspects of Akutagawa’s writings are on full display in the present volume, which has historical value as one of the earliest collections of his fiction to appear in English when it was first published in 1952. While it represents only a small portion of Akutagawa’s substantial work, it includes a number of his early, representative masterpieces that serve to highlight key qualities of his writing. We see in these stories both his trademark satirical depictions of vanity and desire (embodied, for example, by the low-ranking courtier of Yam Gruel
(1916) who yearns to eat his fill of the humble delicacy, or the long-nosed monk of The Dragon
(1919) whose simple prank takes on a life of its own), as well as the exploration of the dark side of human nature for which Akutagawa is renowned.
At the same time, this collection shows that Akutagawa’s early works were, in their own way, as experimental as his late writings. There is the striking narrative structure of In a Grove
(1922), its jarring montage of irreconcilable perspectives, which we also find in nascent form in Kesa and Moritō
(1918), or the invocation of multiple literary styles in works such as The Martyr
(1918), which utilizes a premodern language of narration. Above all, we can see in these works that Akutagawa is not merely deploying his skill as a storyteller, reviving an archaic mode of literary narrative, but rather questioning the very act of narration as one of his core themes. Telling stories is a key part of how his characters shape their reality, including their relations to themselves, to one another, and to the world.
Rashōmon
(1915) was among the very first of Akutagawa’s stories to be published, appearing when he was still a student at Tokyo Imperial University. It also provided the title for his first collection of short stories, published in 1917, and it remains one of his most widely read works today. In some measure, and this is especially true outside of Japan, its fame derives from the international success of Akira Kurosawa’s 1950 film Rashōmon, which took the title and setting from Akutagawa’s story, but which was more substantially based on the later work In a Grove.
Thanks to Kurosawa’s film, the word Rashomon
has entered the English-language lexicon as a marker of the way in which participants in an event experience and narrate it in radically different terms.
In the story, however, Rashōmon has a very different meaning. The Rashōmon was a massive gate that once marked the main southern entry into the ancient capital of Heiankyō (present-day Kyoto) until it fell into a state of neglect and dilapidation, finally being destroyed in a storm in the late tenth century, never to be rebuilt. Akutagawa’s story is based on an account found in the twelfth-century Konjaku Monogatari (Collection of Tales of Times Now Past) that tells of a thief who climbed to the tower room of the gate to find an old woman plucking the hair from an abandoned corpse. In Akutagawa’s account the man is described as a servant, and in giving him the decisive quality of modern interiority, marked by inner psychological and ethical struggle, Akutagawa fashioned the Rashōmon into one of the great literary images of modern fiction.
The servant of Akutagawa’s story has recently been dismissed from service, and, as he waits out a rainstorm under the eaves of the crumbling gate, he faces a choice of either following a life of crime or descending into starvation. As commentators have pointed out, the gate, which marks the border between the inside and the outside of the capital city, becomes in this sense a barrier between good and evil, order and chaos. But the barrier lies in ruin, unable to hold the two realms separate. When the servant enters the upper floor in the rainswept night, he finds the ghastly sight mentioned in the ancient tale, but the details here render it one of the most memorable scenes from Akutagawa’s writings. Among the fragments of decomposing bodies illuminated by flickering torchlight, an old woman—perhaps a ghoul—pulls the strands of hair one by one from a woman’s body.
Like the mind of the servant, in which impulses toward both good and evil coexist, the gate’s shadowy tower room is a space on the borderline of this world and the next. Yet here in this early work we also glimpse the power of narrative to shape reality—it is the woman’s account of her own struggle to survive as well as her story of the dead woman whose corpse she defiles that ultimately set the servant on his course of action, sending him off into the cavernous blackness of the night.
In the later work In a Grove,
the power of storytelling takes center stage. Comparing In a Grove
to Kurosawa’s film only highlights the cutting-edge quality of Akutagawa’s story. There is no frame here, no concrete space or objective perspective to cling to, only a series of first-person narratives, fragments that cannot be resolved into any coherent reality. Kurosawa felt the need to add another testimonial, that of the woodcutter, who represents an observer to the crime, however compromised his account may be. No doubt, in the postwar context of Kurosawa’s film, the figure of a bystander to traumatic events who is ultimately shown to be complicit in them was an important part of the film’s impact. Yet, in the absence of any frame, of any ground from which to even try to