Rashomon, The Japanese Neorealist Writer

Rashomon, the Japanese Neorealist writer

Ryūnosuke Akutagawa was a Japanese writer, belonging to the Neorealist generation that emerged at the end of World War I. His works, mostly short stories, reflect their interest in the life of feudal Japan. His mother’s madness conditioned him psychologically for a lifetime;being a sick and nervous child who read books incessantly in public libraries. Considered as the ‘Father of Japanese stories’, the Akutagawa Award, one of Japan’s most prestigious, was appointed in his honor. Akutagawa committed suicide at the age of 35 by Barbital overdose. In 1915, Akutagawa published Rashōmon and the forest in 1919 under the influence and Japanese neo -Realistic styles, which was popularized by Ryūnosuke and his generation. After reading Rashomon’s stories and the forest, I decided to choose “Identify one or more symbols, characteristic ragos and images in Akutagawa’s work. What resources are evidenced?”, This stimulation question will be answered with the following arguments.

Rashomon was the main access door to Kyoto along the Heian era;Located at one end of Sujaku Street, from the 12th century the place began to experience progressive deterioration, until it became one of the testimonies of Heian’s very decay. All kinds of criminals and beggars were gradually populating their facilities, while allocated as a site to throw the bodies of strangers who were infesting the city. The scenario of the story, in this way, is not only constituted by a material dimension, which would have to do with all the cultural and social transformations that, at the end of the Heian era, had turned Kyoto into a city into minced, but also thatIt also supports a symbolic interpretation that comes from the hand of its nature: being a place forgotten by the living, but not for that reason, as well as being populated by dead, without establishing himself at all as a reality regardless of life.

The argument of the story is, apparently, simple: the servant of a samurai, given the difficult economic situation of his master, has been fired from his position, and after spending the whole afternoon touring Kyoto in search of a new job,It is being guided under the porches of Rashomon. While seeing how water is invading everything thinks about its new condition: “To escape this damn luck, I cannot wait to choose a medium, good or bad, because if I started thinking, I would certainly starve in hunger in the middle of theWay or in some ditch, then they would bring me here, to this tower, leaving me lying like a dog ”. And, certainly, the situation that the character is going through has led him to face an ethical dilemma: “Should he starcoast of its victims?". The decision is not easy given the moral personality of the protagonist;bowing on one way or another would take him for a long time, maybe more than he could survive without eating again. But behold, self-absorbed in his thoughts, the gen-nin (as the Samurai servants were called) begins to enter the rashomon stairs discovering something that moves. If there is a moral that works in an inalienable foundation, then we may have to die without more or more when reality does not leave us another alternative;On the other hand, if morality is relative, and its meaning is defined from my needs and interests, we will have to recognize that at any time it can be reversed against us and, more of the time, to have as a consequence, our dehumanization. From there, in my opinion, the irony of that end- which suggests the outcome of a Baudelaire story- where who declares the principle of his behavior, is his first victim.

But the same, or even more ironic than the end of Rashomon, is the argument of in a forest, a story in which the narrator’s voice has disappeared completely to replace himself with a set of voices that are building the portrait of what happened. This is the murder of a man- also in Heian’s era, called Kanazawa-Takehiro- who was traveling in the company of his wife through the field. The ironic of the text is that Akutagawa, after introducing us the stories of the woodcutter who found the body, of the monk that saw the couple in the country, after this, I say, he presents the stories of the possible culprits, where none of them tries to show himself as innocent, but rather the opposite, to manifest publicly as the murderer.

Thus, the story gives the feeling of resembling a court in which readers officiate as judges and, therefore, the work of unmasking the murderer depends on us. In the first place, Tajomaru, the famous thief who has been blamed for the blow as responsible for the crime. His first words are overwhelming: "I was the one who killed that man";And so it seems to prove it every fact of his narration. The man tells us that, while he roamed the field, he had discovered the couple E, impressed by Takehiro’s beautiful wife, he had decided to kidnap her. At this point in the story, the decision about who was Takehiro’s true murderer is already quite difficult;However-and this giving a new sample of the irony of Akutagawa-, the third story that comes to us is that of Takehiro’s very spirit, which speaks to us through a priestess. His story differs from the precedents because, as he tells us, he perceived from the beginning a certain complicity of his wife against the traps and violence of Tajomaru: the woman, trapped between the words and bravery of her raptor, had openly asked him toHe killed her husband: "Mátalo, máal her," she said, but the thief, that at that point felt alive disgust for the behavior of the woman, gave her a very strong kick and asked Takehiro if she wanted her to kill her;He agreed, but as the woman fleeing, both, woman and thief lost themselves from the reach of Takehiro, who, alone and disappointed, decided to commit suicide.

Be that as it may, and this is the impressive of Akutagawa, as well as in Rashomon we must choose to legitimize or not the protagonist’s actions and, with it, our own behavior as humans, the forest, to decide something about the story, necessarilyIt escapes the limits of its history, to extend to our own configuration as moral subjects. In this sense, Ryunosuké Akutagawa’s stories can be considered as moral links between fiction and reality and, above all, problematizing speeches of people’s moral behavior.