羅生門

Why it matters

Rashōmon is a short story set under a broken city gate in a ruined Kyoto, where unclaimed corpses were sometimes dumped. A servant, newly dismissed, must decide whether to starve honestly or become a thief. The question sounds old, and Akutagawa makes it concrete: rain, hunger, an old woman, a ladder and a small flame. The story is about how fast a conviction can change when the conditions that sustained it vanish, and it reads as alive because that change happens in a few minutes of scene and not in a speech. It is also a very short, tightly built story that rewards a rereading.

Akutagawa published it in 1915 in the magazine Teikoku Bungaku, based on tales from the twelfth-century collection Konjaku Monogatarishū. His friends mostly criticised it, according to the English Wikipedia, and his fame came a year later: after The Nose (1916), Natsume Sōseki wrote him a letter of praise. The Akutagawa Prize was founded in 1935 by his friend Kikuchi Kan to honour new writers. The title is more widely known abroad through Akira Kurosawa’s 1950 film Rashomon; but the film is based mainly on a different Akutagawa story, In a Grove, and takes only its title and the gate framing scene from this one. Reading the original shows how little of the film this story contains and how much it contains of its own.

While reading, notice how the weather and the setting are used: the rain, the dusk, the crows, the gate’s decay and the climb up into its loft are all part of the argument. Watch the servant’s thoughts, which move by small steps while the story moves fast, and notice who speaks last. Akutagawa’s Japanese is brisk and slightly ironic, and the tale is written in a modern voice about a medieval world. Readers of Vietnamese may know the title as La Sinh Môn; the story rewards comparison with the film that borrowed its title. A content note: corpses are described, and the tone is bleak.

Introduction written for LitMundi with AI assistance and checked against the sources listed below.