Rashomon (short story)

Rashomon

Rashomon ( Japanese 羅 生 門 , Rashōmon ) is a novella by Akutagawa Ryūnosuke from 1915. Rashōmon, the great city gate of Kyōto, is the name given to Kurosawa's film "Rashomon", German " Rashomon - The Pleasure Grove ", but is only used as a starting point used for the actual act.

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Preliminary note: The story takes place in Kyoto in the 12th century. The great city gate in the far south, the rashomon, stands abandoned there.

A samurai servant stands under the old gate to wait for the rain to end. The city, which was never quite finished, is past its heyday, the families are impoverished, and the servant had just been fired. He ponders his misfortune, thinks about living a life as a thief, rejects it, thinks about it again. Finally he decides to spend the night in the old wooden building.

As he climbs up to find a suitable corner, he notices that something is moving above, sees light. As he had heard from rumors, he found bodies lying around in the building. He can't count them, some are naked, some are clothed. He has to hold his nose. Then he sees a ghostly figure leaning over a corpse. And he sees the figure, an old woman, with a torch in one hand, cutting off the hair of a corpse. His fear disappears, but he begins to hate the woman for what she does.

He stands up and turns to her with one hand on his sword. She is frightened and wants to flee, but he holds her tight. He says he's not from the police but they have to tell him what they're doing here. She replies that she is pulling out her hair to make wigs. Making wigs dead from the hair seemed to be a nasty evil. But she knows the dead woman here, for example, whose beautiful black hair she is pulling off. This would have fraudulently sold snake meat as fish meat. The customers even praised it. Now is she dead.

As he listens, his wondering whether he should die of hunger or become a thief fades. In the scuffle, he tears her clothes off and disappears with the booty. She gets up with her short white hair, moaning and cursing, crawls to the stairs and looks down in the torchlight, where it is only dark. The last sentence is: "Nobody knows where the servant has gone."

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Akutagawa took the core of this story from a collection of stories from the 12th century, the Konjaku Monogatarishū .

Remarks

1. ↑ Model of the rashomon in the Kyōto National Museum . The gate, 32 m wide, was built after the Chinese model when the city was founded in 789.
2. ↑ Akutagawa writes 黒 洞 々 (Kokutōtō), a heightened cave black.

Book editions

• Akutagawa Ryunosuke: Rashomon. Selected stories. From the Japanese. Edited and translated by Jürgen Berndt.
  • Volk und Wissen publishing house, 1964
  • Luchterhand, 2001. ISBN 978-3-630-62012-1 .
• Akutagawa Ryūnosuke: Rashōmon, Hana, Shuju no Kotoba ao Ikubundo-Verlag, Tokyo 1965. (Japanese)