羅生門

About this story

作品について

Ryūnosuke Akutagawa was only 23 when he published this story, retelling a tale from a 12th-century collection of Japanese legends. It became one of the most-read works in Japan: almost every Japanese high school student studies it in class. In 1950, director Akira Kurosawa borrowed its title and gloomy gate for his film Rashomon, which won the Golden Lion at Venice and introduced Japanese cinema to the world. Today, "the Rashomon effect" is used in English to describe how people remember the same event in completely different ways. Japan's most famous literary award, the Akutagawa Prize, is named after him. The story is short, but every sentence is carefully built, and the narrator's cool, detached voice makes the moral question at its center hit even harder.