Contents:
Introduction
In a Grove
Rashomon
Yam Gruel
The Martyr
Kesa and Morito
The Dragon
About In a Grove (from Wikipedia):
“In a Grove” (藪の中, Yabu no Naka) is a short story by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa; it first appeared in the January 1922 edition of the Japanese literature monthly Shinchō. Akira Kurosawa used this story as the basis for the plot of his award-winning 1950 movie Rashōmon.
“In a Grove” is an early modernist short story, as well as a blending of the modernist search for identity with themes from historic Japanese literature, and as such is perhaps the iconic work of Akutagawa’s career. It presents three varying accounts of the murder of a samurai, Kanazawa no Takehiro, whose corpse has been found in a bamboo forest near Kyoto. Each section simultaneously clarifies and obfuscates what the reader knows about the murder, eventually creating a complex and contradictory vision of events that brings into question humanity’s ability or willingness to perceive and transmit objective truth.
About Rashomon (from Wikipedia):
“Rashōmon” (羅生門) is a short story by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa based on tales from the Konjaku Monogatarishū.
The story was first published in 1915 in Teikoku Bungaku. Akira Kurosawa’s film Rashomon (1950) is in fact based primarily on another of Akutagawa’s short stories, “In a Grove”; only the film’s title and some of the material for the frame scenes, such as the theft of a kimono and the discussion of the moral ambiguity of thieving to survive, are borrowed from “Rashōmon”.
