Rashōmon

work by Akutagawa Ryūnosuke

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Japanese:: “The Rashō Gate”

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Rashōmon, short story by Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, published in Japanese in 1915 in a university literary magazine.

The story, set in 12th-century Kyōto, reveals in spare and elegant language the thoughts of a man on the edge of a life of crime and the incident that pushes him over the brink. Combined with Akutagawa’s later story “Yabu no naka” (1921; “In a Grove”), “Rashōmon” was the starting point for Japanese director Kurosawa Akira’s classic film Rashōmon (1950).

This article was most recently revised and updated by Kathleen Kuiper.