Rashomon and Other Stories

by Ryunosuke Akutagawa, Takashi Kojima (Translator), M. Kuwata (Illustrator), Howard Hibbett (Introduction)

Overview

This fascinating collection gave birth to a new paradigm when Akira Kurosawa made famous Akutagawa's disturbing tale of seven people recounting the same incident from shockingly different perspectives.

Writing at the beginning of the twentieth century, Ryunosuke Akutagawa created disturbing stories out of Japan's cultural upheaval. Whether his fictions are set centuries past or close to the present, Akutagawa was a modernist, writing in polished, superbly nuanced prose subtly exposing human needs and flaws. "In a Grove," which was the basis for Kurosawa's classic film Rashomon, tells the chilling story of the killing of a samurai through the testimony of witnesses, including the spirit of the murdered man. The fable-like "Yam Gruel" is an account of desire and humiliation, but one in which the reader's sympathy is thoroughly unsettled. And in "The Martyr," a beloved orphan raised by Jesuit priests is exiled when he refuses to admit that he made a local girl pregnant. He regains their love and respect only at the price of his life. All six tales in the collection show Akutagawa as a master storyteller and an exciting voice of modern Japanese literature.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780871401731
Publisher:	Liveright Publishing Corporation
Publication date:	12/17/1999
Edition description:	Reissue
Pages:	96
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.30(h) x 0.40(d)
Lexile:	1030L (what's this?)

About the Author

Ryunosuke Akutagawa (1892–1927) was one of the most famous Japanese writers of the last century and was the author of Rashomon and other works. The Akutagawa Prize is named in his honor.

Table of Contents

	Introduction	11
	In a Grove	17
	Rashomon	31
	Yam Gruel	41
	The Martyr	66
	Kesa and Morito	82
	The Dragon	94

Editorial Reviews

"Because I was a Japanese major in college, a very nice edition of a translation of Rashomon and Other Stories by Ryunosuke Akutagawa had been left for me at my bedside, to read while I was there and to take with me when I left. Thoughtful, I thought. And fitting. Even more fitting, that friend and I no longer speak, and I am sure we have very different versions as to why that is."

The New York Times Book Review - David Rakoff

"Clear-eyed glimpses of human behavior in the extremities of poverty, stupidity, greed, vanity … Story-telling of an unconventional sort, with most of the substance beneath the shining, enameled surface." —The New York Times Book Review

"There are enough Swiftian touches in Akutagawa to show his hatred of stupidity, greed, hypocrisy and the rising jingoism of the day. But Akutagawa's artistic integrity kept him from joining his contemporaries in the easy social criticism or naive introspection … What he did was question the values of his society, dramatize the complexities of human psychology, and study, with a Zen taste for paradox, the precarious balance of illusion and reality." —Howard Hibbett, from the Introduction to Rashomon and Other Stories

From the Publisher