Rashomon
Author(s): Ryunosuke Akutagawa
The stories included in this classic collection include: "In a Grove", a psychologically sophisticated tale about murder, rape, and suicide; "Rashomon", the story of a thief scared into honesty by an encounter with a ghoul; "The Martyr" tells the story of silent suffering in Christian Nagasaki; and "Kesa and Morito" is the story of man driven to kill someone he doesn't hate by a lover whom he doesn't love. "There are enough Swiftian touches in Akutagawa to show his hatred of stupidity, greed, hypocrisy, and the rising jingoism of the day. But Akutagawa's artistic integrity kept him from joining his contemporaries in the easy social criticism or naive introspection...What he did was question the values of his society, dramatize the complexities of human psychology, and study, with a Zen taste for paradox, the balance of illusion and reality." - Howard Hibbett.
General Information
- :
- : Tuttle Shokai Inc
- : Tuttle Shokai Inc
- : 0.141
- : 01 November 2007
- : Japan
- : books
Other Specifications
- : Ryunosuke Akutagawa
- : Paperback
- : en
- : 895.6344
- : 112
More About The Product
"Clear-eyed glimpses of human behavior in the extremities of poverty, stupidity, greed, vanity Story-telling of an unconventional sort, with most of the substance beneath the shining, enameled surface." The New York Times Book Review"
Ryunosuke Akutagawa was the author of over 100 short stories. Described as one of the best-read men of his generation, he received a degree in English Literature at Tokyo Imperial University and published translations of Anatole France and W.B. Yeats. In 1927, Ryunosuke Akutagawa committed suicide at the age of thirty-five.
