Akira Kurosawa’s film Rashomon is based on Ryunosuke Akutagawa’s short story In a Grove, but it gets its title and the temple location from another of his short stories, also named Rashomon.
It is a brief story of a man who finds an old woman plucking hair from the dead and steals her clothes.
But that summary does not do it justice! It doesn’t explain the time, a real era from Japan, when calamities visit Kyoto with earthquakes, whirlwinds, fires, and the disease that comes with them. It does not explore the character’s struggles or justifications for their actions. The summary does not explore the scenery, which was so powerful; it became the icon for Akira Kurosawa’s breakout hit film.
You can read the 2,191 word short story here: https://www.shortstoryproject.com/stories/rashomon/
I took a Japanese literature in translation class in college, and usually we had a tremendous reading load. It was our teacher’s first class as a professor, which was lucky for me because she pushed us so hard. In every class, we would discuss complete novels or movies. Often more than one. But one class period, because of a scheduling conflict, we only had the short story of Rashomon to discuss. We broke into three-person groups and examined the text, looking for something to fill our class discussion time with. My group ran out of ideas quickly and decided to re-read the text together to fill the time. Then we read it again.
“Did anyone notice anything?” the reader asked, trying to find kindling for our discussion. “They referenced lots of animals. That cricket, in the beginning, gets a lot of attention,” someone said. “Really? I hadn’t noticed that many animals.” So we went back through the story again and made a list.
Animals mentioned:
- Cricket sitting on a column
- Foxes and other wild animals made their dens in the ruins of the gate
- Flocks of crows flew in from somewhere
- thrown away like a stray dog
- huddling cat-like
- cobwebs (spiders)
- quiet as a lizard
- as a monkey kills the lice of her young
- shanks of a chicken
- red eyes of a bird of prey
- like the cawing of a crow
- selling snake flesh at the guard barracks saying it was dried fish
It shocked us there were so many animal references. It’s like a zoo in there! How did he reference so many animals in such a short story? “I noticed a lot of colors. Let’s do those next!” So we made a list of colors.
Colors:
- crimson lacquer
- gold and silver leaf
- white crow droppings
- red sunset
- blue kimono
- fat black cloud
- red festering pimple
- dull yellow fire light
- gray-hair
- long black hair
- silver white sword blade
- yellow clothes
- darkness and the abyss
There were as many colors as animals! We debated adding grass to the list but decided it was not technically a color, even if we all knew it was green. Are there any colors Akutagowa did not put in the story? “What should we list next?” “How about the words that happen most often?” We popped the text into an online word counter.
Word counts:
- Hair – 15 times
- Gate – 12 times
- Rain – 11 times
- Stairs – 11 times
- Old – 9 times
- Floor – 7 times
- Woman – 7 times
He mentions hair 15 times!? Is that what this story is really about? Should we next list weather, objects, calamities, sounds, smells, times, or physical sensations? We had a list of lists we could make! But to our surprise, we had reached our time, and our discussion was over.
I left in disbelief. How had we discovered so much to analyze in the shortest text we had read? Especially when we started with nothing to talk about! I could see the colors in my mind and visualize animals and animal-like behaviors. The imagery was so vivid in that brief piece!
What else might hide under the surface of a narrative? Was this a one-time thing? I wasn’t sure, but I thought making lists might be a powerful tool to find out. And I still do.
Daniel N. Blair 