Rashomon and Seventeen Other Stories by Ryûnosuke Akutagawa Read Free Book Online Page B

with the image of the crumbling Rash ō mon gate that dominates his story. Director Kurosawa Akira borrowed Akutagawa’s gate and went him one better, picturing it as a truly disintegrating structure, entirely bereft of its Heian lacquer finish, and suggestive of the moral decay against which his characters struggle. His film
Rash ō mon
(1950) was based on two of Akutagawa’s stories, “Rash ō mon” and “In a Bamboo Grove.” Both—themselves based on tales from the twelfth century—reach far more skeptical conclusions than the film regarding the dependability of human nature and its potential for good. 2
    â€œRash ō mon” was one of Akutagawa’s earliest stories, and in it he showed himself to be a master of setting and texture. He went on to become a master of voice. (He would learn not to throw French vocabulary—
sentimentalisme
—into narratives about ancient Japan for one thing.) The teller of the tale is usually a major character in his stories: a piece set in the late Heian Period could be narrated by an imagined member of the society (“Hell Screen”), by a quasi-scholarly modern observer who refers to “old records” (“Rash ō mon”), by a disembodied editor who somehow manages to assemble several spoken eyewitness accounts of a single incident (“In a Bamboo Grove”), or by an objective-seeming writer who hardly acknowledges that he exists at all (“The Nose”).
    Two of these stories use the Heian setting to focus on the comical foibles of human nature. “The Nose” and “Dragon: The Old Potter’s Tale” depict men of religion who are more concerned with their physical appearance than with nobler matters of the spirit, and both suggest that crass reality is far more important to people than the otherworldly questions of religion. 3 “Dragon” toys with the likelihood that religion is nothing more than mass hysteria, a force so powerful that even the fabricator of an object of veneration can be taken in by it.
    â€œThe Spider Thread” is included here despite its being timeless rather than set in any specific period. Given the “peep-box” mentioned near the beginning, the
telling
of the story might be said to have occurred in the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries when such mechanical contraptions were an important form of entertainment. The story’s sinful robber/protagonist, Kandata, is meant to be Indian, and the tale has been traced to sources as diverse as Fyodor Dostoevsky’s “The Onion” (from
The Brothers Karamazov
(1880)) and an 1894 story in
The Open Court
, an American journal “Devoted to the Work of Establishing Ethics and Religion Upon a Scientific Basis.” 4 Its despairing view of human nature, however, fits the tone of the other stories of “a world in decay,” and its traditional images of Hell reflect medieval Japanese religious conceptions and provide an ideal introduction to “Hell Screen.” My translation of “The Spider Thread” follows Akutagawa’s manuscript (as in CARZ) rather than the edited version that appeared in the children’s magazine for which it was written (as in IARZ).
    â€œHell Screen,” the story of an artist, can be seen as Akutagawa’s examination of his devotion to his own art, but it works on a more universal level by pitting animal instinct against human intellect and questioning their place in human relationships. Based on a far simpler thirteenth-century classic, 5 the work is almost operatic in its bravura presentation of the doomed events, but it stops short of shrillness thanks to the measured tones of the narrator’s voice. The elderly retainer of the Great Lord of Horikawa is not only a restrained commentator, but in denying what we all know to be true, he allows us to maintain the tension between denial and dread right up to the climactic fire.