Rashomon

﫸

Rashomon, and Other Stories Ryunosuke Akutagawa
* * *
Preface
Introduction
Rashomon and Other Stories
* In a Grove
* The Testimony of a Woodcutter Questioned by a High Police Commissioner
* The Testimony of a Traveling Buddhist Priest Questioned by a High Police Commissioner
* The Testimony of a Policeman Questioned by a High Police Commissioner
* The Testimony of an Old Woman Questioned by a High Police Commissioner
* The Confession of a Woman Who Has Come to the Shimizu Temple
* The Story of the Murdered Man, as Told Through a Medium
Yam Gruel
The Martyr
* Postscript
Kesa and Morito
*
Part I
* Morito's Monologue
*
Part II
* Kesa's Monologue
The Dragon
* * *
PREFACE
THE SIX STORIES of this collection were chosen with the aim of presenting Akutagawa's finest and most representative writings. Only one of them (Rashomon) has appeared in an earlier translation.
I wish to express my thanks to the following persons, for their kind assistance, and for their many valuable suggestions and criticisms: Mr. C. G. Wells, Chief Writer of the Far East Network; Mr. Walter E. Morgan, Chief of the School Administration and Finance Branch, CIE, SCAP; Mr. Harold Gosling and Mr. John Rockard, correspondents of the British Commonwealth Public Relations; Mr. Richard B. Farnsworth, formerly of CIE, SCAP; and Lieutenant D. L. Donohugh, formerly of the Press Advisory Division, SCAP.
Takashi Kojima Tokyo, Japan.

INTRODUCTION
TO SKETCH THE background and temperament of Akutagawa Ryu-nosuke is to risk a melancholy clich?. He was brilliant, sensitive, cynical, neurotic; he lived in Tokyo, went to the University, taught briefly, and joined the literary staff of a newspaper. Even his early suicide (in 1927, at thirty-five) only heightens the portrait of a modern Japanese intellectual, the double victim of an unsympathetic society and a split culture. But it is a vague composite portrait. For Akutagawa himself, aloof, elusive, individual, remains withdrawn behind the polished fa?ade of his collected works. All that needs to be known about their author, besides the name stamped on the binding, may be found within these poems, essays, miscellaneous writings, and more than a hundred beautifully finished stories.
The stories have a dazzling and perhaps deceptive sheen. Superficial critics called Akutagawa precious, or decadent, or dismissed him as a fatiguingly clever dilettante. Unprepared for the strength of his later satires, they supposed him to care only for the superb texture of his prose. Translation protects us from the seductions of this style, yet encourages a similar error, since the nuances of Akutagawa's prose are what conveys the essence of his thought. Like Natsume So-seki and Hori O?gai, whom he admired, Akutagawa used his language delicately, precisely, and with a richness enhanced by a knowledge of several literatures. It is significant that his first published writings were translations of Yeats and Anatole France. He remarked once that words must yield more than the bare dictionary meanings; he had a poet's feeling for their shapes and flavors, as well as their ambiguities, and he combined them with such freshness and economy that his phrasing never lacks distinction. Like Picasso, Akutagawa often varied his style, but always, whatever the particular blend of vernacular and mandarin, he controlled it with scrupulous precision. A master of tone, he gave his stories a cool classic surface, colored but never marred by the wit and warmth underlying that perfect glaze. The composure of his style is undisturbed even by vivid accents of the sordid or the bizarre.
Detachment was a key strategy to Akutagawa. As a narrator, he liked to be unseen, impersonal; he cultivated the oblique glance. When he did enter his stories, it was usually in the slight role of the observer or the suave self-effacing compiler. Old tales and legends, historical settings of the remote Heian Period or the feudal ages which followed ?these he used not to turn his elaborate erudition to account, but to enrich and extend the implications of his themes, and to maintain aesthetic distance. The early era of Christian conversion in Japan, in the sixteenth century, was a favorite of his; in Ho?kyo?nin no shi (The Martyr) he exploited it to the point of hoax by supporting an archaic style with a source reference which, after an interval for learned controversy, he acknowledged to be fictitious. It suited his ironic taste to play the illusionist who leaves his audience staring blankly into a mirror.
But Akutagawa did more than deceive scholars and baffle the unwary: he antagonized ruling critical opinion. His attention to style, his preference for techniques of indirection and restraint, his indifference to current dogma ? such attitudes were heresy to both the leading literary schools. The Proletarian writers, flourishing in the '20's, found nothing in common between Akutagawa's subtle stories and their own carefully chosen but grossly cut slices-of-life. The Naturalists, their rivals, had moved toward romantic individualism, forgetting Zola's concept of social inquiry. Dominant since the Russo-Japanese War, they sanctioned only the literary method