RASHMON AND OTHER STORIES (1915)
(Original Story written by Akutagawa Ryunosuke)

Gina Barresi
Great Neck North High School, New York

Type of work:
Short story

Grade levels:
This work is suitable for all grade levels, although it would work better with 11th and 12th graders because it is a highly conceptual piece. It can be used in literature, psychology, and social studies classes, as Akutagawa leaves the reader to struggle to understand the motivations of the characters.

Summary:
Rashomon and Other Stories contain six brief and highly readable stories. "In a Grove" presents a crime from five perspectives. "Rashomon" is an eerie tale of a desperate old woman surviving by pilfering the hair of corpses. "Yam Gruel" has pathetic central character whose single ambition is to eat his fill of yam gruel. "The Martyr" tells a tale of virtue and renunciation." Mesa and Merritt" deals with questions of perception, infatuation and love. "The Dragon" questions the reliability of memory. For this lesson, however, I have provided questions and suggestions on his two most popular tales: "Rashomon" and "In a Grove."

Bibliography and filmography:
Akutagawa, Ryunosuke. Rashomon and Other Stories. Translated by Takashi Kojima. New York: Live Right Publishing, 1970.

The remarkable 1951 film by Akira Kurosawa, Rashomon, combines elements from two of Akutagawa's stories, "In a Grove" and "Rashomon."

Suggestions on how to teach "Rashomon":
"Rashomon," which is set in the late twelfth century, concerns a crucial decision in the life of a male servant who has recently been dismissed by his master. Pondering how to survive in the chaos of the times, this servant is reluctant to follow the obvious course of turning to thievery. However, as he listens to an old woman explain that she plucks the hair from corpses to make wigs, he begins to lose his scruples. If she must violate another human being to make her living, why should he not do likewise? Turning the woman's self-justification against her, the man strips off her garment and flees into the night with this booty, suggesting that people have the morality they can afford.

I. Thoughts for Consideration:
Have the students discuss why they think Ryunosuke set the tale in the late twelfth century. Then ask them to consider what they think Ryunosuke's story illustrates about man's morality and ethics.

When students are done discussing the story, have them read Ryunosuke's "In the Grove," which examines a crime from the perspective of five different people, each of whom has a completely different version of how the crime was committed. Because the story deals with our inability to ever attain an absolute truth, "In the Grove" would be an excellent supplemental lesson with Tim O'Brien's novel The Things They Carried.

II. Thoughts for Consideration:
Have the students debate why Ryunosuke creates five different characters, each of whom relates a different version of the man's murder. Have them consider the following questions:

1) What does this story reveal about the nature of truth? Why is it impossible to ever know an absolute truth?
2) What does the story teach about morality and ethics?
3) What does the story teach about psychological motivations?
4) Does the person's role in that society influence the response he or she gives? If so, what does the story teach us about these roles in Japanese society?

After students have exhausted their discussions, show them Kurosawa's film Rashomon. Remind them that Kurosawa has adapted his film from both "Rashomon" and "In the Grove." I recommend that teachers show the beginning and the end of the film. Much of the middle can be edited so that students see only the five different characters' versions of the murder. While they are viewing the film, ask them why Kurosawa might have decided to combine the two tales. What do they have in common? Then, when they are done watching the film, ask them what they think Kurosawa is attempting to illustrate about mankind. And finally, ask them if Kurosawa's depiction of mankind in his film mirrors the ideas that Ryunosuke was attempting to express in his short story. These questions should open the door to a rich debate.

III. Summary:
1) To what extent do you think this tale is representative of Japanese culture?
2) What does it tell us about the Japanese people?
3) How might this story be valid for American students today? What examples can you give of the "universality" of this tale?

IV. Application:
Have students write a comparable story based upon contemporary events.

Biography of Akutagawa Ryunosuke
(March 1, 1892 - July 24, 1927)

Ryunosuke Akutagawa was born in 1892 in Tokyo. Even though he committed suicide in 1927 at the tender age of thirty-five, he accomplished much during his short writing career. Excelling in the finely crafted short tale, Akutagawa also wrote poetry and several acclaimed prose works. After honing his skills on mostly impersonal tales, he composed several hauntingly personal pieces. Only eight years after Akutagawa's death, his stature was officially recognized through the establishment of the Akutagawa Prize for literature. Awarded twice a year, this prize recognizes new literary talent and has become probably the most coveted literary award in Japan.

Before turning to his own life for inspiration as a writer, Akutagawa often relied on other literary works. Japanese scholar Yoshida Seiichi has traced 62 of Akutagawa's 150 or so compositions to various kinds of literary sources. A reader with wide tastes, Akutagawa adopted ideas from modern Western writers such as Guy de Maupassant, Edgar Allan Poe and Nikolay Gogol as well as from collections of medieval Japanese stories. Well-schooled in both Chinese and English, Akutagawa possessed a level of cosmopolitan erudition close to that of Natsume Soseki, an older writer and intellectual who predicted a great future for Akutagawa.

At the time of Akutagawa's birth, his father was forty-two years old and his mother was thirty-three years old - a combination that, according to a peculiar folk belief that holds these ages to be inauspicious, marked the infant as vulnerable to misfortune. As a protective measure, Ryunosuke immediately had to undergo the ritual of "abandonment and recovery" - that is, to be adopted briefly by another family before being returned to his parents' home. A more serious complication arose when his mother, evidently because she felt responsible for the death of her younger daughter, became deranged within a year of Ryunosuke's birth and died shortly thereafter. His father, toward whom he felt a great resentment, was a failure who gave the young child to relatives for adoption. Akutagawa was eventually raised in his uncle's house by a spinster aunt. More than a decade after the move, this familial arrangement was officially recognized when Ryunosuke was formally adopted into the Akutagawa family.

A morbidly sensitive child, Akutagawa was fascinated with books, and his adoptive family provided a nurturing cultural environment for him. Dosho, his uncle, was an adept composer of haiku, a classical form of poetry containing only three lines and usually consisting of five, seven, and five syllables, respectively. The entire household took instruction in reciting joruri, texts of the classical puppet theater, and this may have encouraged Akutagawa's attachment to ghostly and grotesque tales of the Edo Period.

Akutagawa attended excellent elementary and secondary schools in Tokyo and finished his formal education by majoring in English literature at the Tokyo Imperial University, the pinnacle of the Japanese education system. A brilliant student of literature at Tokyo Imperial University, he had already published his first stories before graduating in 1916. When Akutagawa published a brief tale, "Hana," Natsume Soseki told Akutagawa that he would be without peer in Japanese literary circles if he could produce twenty to thirty such tales, and various commercial magazines began to request that Akutagawa submit work to them. In 1918, the year in which he married, Akutagawa signed a contract with a newspaper. While leaving him free to publish in magazines, this contract prevented him from publishing any of his stories with other newspapers. For his contributions, the newspaper paid him an annual stipend as well as a commission, so Akutagawa escaped the financial trials that many Japanese writers underwent early in their careers. In addition to writing for the newspaper, he taught English to support his wife and three sons.

In 1915, he published his arresting psychological novella Rashomon, which was to gain international recognition and eventually become a hugely successful film by Kurosawa. After a period of severe depression, the increasingly unstable Akutagawa took his own life with an overdose of pills in 1927. His suicide letter, "A Note to a Certain Old Friend," is contained below.

Much of this material has been adapted from the following website:
http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/Li... athr&IoclD=gnlopacplus&OPcontains a note to a certain old friend

Probably no one who attempts suicide, as Regnier shows in one of his short stories, is fully aware of all his motives, which are usually too complex. At least in my case it is prompted by a vague sense of anxiety, a vague sense of anxiety about my own future.

Over the last two years or so I have thought only of death, and with special interest read a remarkable account of the process of death. While the author did this in abstract terms, I will be as concrete as I can, even to the point of sounding inhuman. At this point I am duty bound to be honest. As for my vague sense of anxiety about my own future, I think I analyzed it all in "A Fool's Life," except for a social factor, namely the shadow of feudalism cast over my life. This I omitted purposely, not at all certain that I could really clarify the social context in which I lived.

Once deciding on suicide (I do not regard it as a sin, as Westerners do), I worked out the least painful means of carrying it out. Thus I precluded hanging, shooting, leaping, and other manners of suicide for aesthetic and practical reasons. Use of a drug seemed to be perhaps the most satisfactory way. As for place, it had to be my own house, whatever inconvenience to my surviving family. As a sort of springboard I, as Kleist and Racine had done, thought of some company, for instance, a lover or friend, but, having soon grown confident of myself, I decided to go ahead alone. And the last thing I had to weigh was to insure perfect execution without the knowledge of my family. After several months' preparation I have at last become certain of its possibility.

We humans, being human animals, do have an animal fear of death. The so-called vitality is but another name for animal strength. I myself am one of these human animals. And this animal strength, it seems, has gradually drained out of my system, judging by the fact that I am left with little appetite for food and women. The world I am now in is one of diseased nerves, lucid as ice. Such voluntary death must give us peace, if not happiness. Now that I am ready, I find nature more beautiful than ever, paradoxical as this may sound. I have seen, loved, and understood more than others. In this at least I have a measure of satisfaction, despite all the pain I have thus far had to endure.

P.S. Reading a life of Empedocles, I felt how old is this desire to make a god of oneself. This letter, so far as I am conscious, never attempts this. On the contrary, I consider myself one of the most common humans. You may recall those days of twenty years ago when we discussed "Empedocles on Etna" - under the linden trees. In those days I was one who wished to make a god of myself.