Rashōmon and Seventeen Other Stories

Rashōmon and Seventeen Other Stories (2009) is a collection of works by Ryunosuke Akutagawa (1892–1927).

I’d seen Akira Kurosawa’s 1950 film Rashomon a couple of times but had never read the story on which it’s based. It turns out the film is more a retelling of Akutagawa’s 1922 short story “In a Grove,” which is the second of the seventeen stories in this book.

“Rashomon,” the story, is the first in the collection and is grouped under the editor’s heading “A World in Decay.” This section also includes the imaginative tales “The Nose” and “Hell Screen,” the latter recounting the unraveling sanity of a renowned artist, “the greatest painter in the land,” who is commissioned to paint his vision of Buddhist hell on a folding screen. His obsession with accuracy and truth eventually drives him over the edge.

The other sections are “Under the Sword,” “Modern Tragicomedy,” and “Akutagawa’s Own Story.” Reading through these groupings, you get a strong sense of the author’s arc, from early success to his decline due to drug use and mental instability, described by him as “wracked nerves,” before his suicide at the age of thirty-five.

A prodigy in his youth, Akutagawa published in popular magazines and newspapers and gained the respect of many well-known Japanese writers. Later he experimented with different forms, including tragicomedy, autobiographical writing, and possibly a play he may have destroyed. He eventually produced what read like diary fragments, many of them dark and at times cryptic.

I really enjoyed the collection for how clearly it reflects this trajectory. Akutagawa was a painstakingly honest writer, not only in expressing his sensitivities but also in creating richly textured, vivid imagery. His style feels strikingly modern, too. It’s remarkable that many of these stories were written around 100 years ago.

He was also deeply afraid of losing his sanity. His mother went mad during his adolescence, and this fear appears in several of the stories. The first and final sections are the most absorbing. The first stands out for its strong imagery and elements of horror, while the last is compelling for Akutagawa’s honesty, often in the third person, as he writes about his own life and suffering. “The Life of a Stupid Man” and “Spinning Gears” stand out in particular. The cover art is impressive too, and I like the paperback’s rough-cut pages, along with the introduction by Haruki Murakami.

Akutagawa Ryunosuke