The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 18 May 2008
by Ryunosuke Akutagawa
In 1950, a motion picture from Japan changed the way many people saw the role and structure of movies. This movie, said to be the motivating factor behind the Best Foreign Feature Academy Award, was Rashomon. The title, itself, has entered the lexicon to allude to any story that changes with the telling by several witnesses. This is, of course, the basic plot of the movie, which has its origins in two of the short stories in this collection. Ryunosuke Akutagawa was an early 20th century, early modernist writer who died an early death by his own hand. He left behind stories that became small landmarks in Japanese literature. This small book (in a Norton Liveright edition first published in 1952) collects six of Akutagawa's stories, illustrating some of his range as an author. The title story refers to a large gate on the edge of ancient Kyoto. In later years, the gate became the hideout for thieves and, more creepy, the dumping ground for anonymous corpses. The story gives the setting for Kurosawa's movie, but also draws an eerie portrait of desperate souls on the fringes of society when a released servant encounters a crone harvesting the hair from the corpses. The plot of Rashomon, the movie, comes from In a Grove, in which seven witnesses give brief accounts of a murder in a bamboo grove, each account profoundly different from the next, and each a kind of confession. The remaining stories, also, are rich with metaphor. They, no doubt, would benefit from the reader knowing a bit more about the era in which they were written, Japan's coming-of-age in the decades before World War 2. Each story has a subtle and offbeat moral that can have a modern or classical meaning. In the longest and most compelling story in the book, Yam Gruel, we read of one man's simplistic gluttony, the cruelty of men in the face of simplicity, and the true basic joys of longing and desire. The stories here, in translation, have a simple and direct language, evoking storytellers from another time. The scenes and morals are darkly exotic enough to make the book a rich and thoughtful entertainment.