Discussion Topic
Key elements in Ryūnosuke Akutagawa's "Rashōmon"
Summary:
Key elements in Ryūnosuke Akutagawa's "Rashōmon" include moral ambiguity, the struggle for survival, and the theme of human nature's darker sides. The story explores how desperate circumstances can lead individuals to compromise their morals, as seen through the servant's internal conflict and eventual decision to steal from the old woman.
What is the conflict in Ryunosuke Akutagawa's "Rashōmon"?
The story explores the internal conflict taking place in the mind of a servant who has just been rendered jobless. He is certainly an honest man, and is mulling over the alternatives available to him to earn his living from next day onward. He contemplates while he's standing under the decrepit structure of Rashmon, which “was the largest gate in Kyoto, the ancient capital of Japan.”
Soon, he is convinced that he’s left with only two options – either he continues to be an honest man, and subsequently, starves to death, or he becomes a thief. It seems that he tries to persuade himself to take to robbery, but he is unable to come up with a proper and strong justification for doing so.
“But doubts returned many times. Though determined that he had no choice, he was still unable to muster enough courage to justify the conclusion that he...
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must become a thief.”
The significance of the servant’s dilemma can’t be fully understood without considering the background of the story. Akutagawa’s story is set against the backdrop of the twelfth century Kyoto city which is in a state of utter ruin and decay. Natural calamities like earthquakes, tornadoes and fires have caused massive devastation and terrible famine in the city.
The story is about not only the physical decay but also the moral and spiritual degradation. It explores the meaning and significance of faith and moral values against the most extreme and dire circumstances. The devastation has been so severe and overwhelming that survival by any means has become the biggest priority in man’s life.
We hear about people selling the Buddhist images and objects as firewood. The old woman is plucking hair off the head of a woman’s corpse. She’ll prepare a wig and sell it and, thus, earn something to survive.
The servant’s encounter with this old woman resolves the conflict in his mind. He finds the justification for why he should become a thief. We witness the transformation in him. He's now a man with no scruples. He says to her,
“Then it's right if I rob you. I'd starve if I didn't."
With his sword he tears the old woman's “yellow clothes” and runs away with them.
What is the climax of “Rashōmon” by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa?
In a story, the climax typically occurs not long before the end. It comes right after the rising action, where most of the story's events tend to take place, and before the falling action and resolution, at which point the story ends.
The climax is that point in a story which has the greatest emotional intensity, a point to which all the previous action, the rising action, as it's called, has been building up.
In Akutagawa's “Rashōmon,” the climax of the story comes when the servant, positively enraged by the sight of an old woman stealing hair from dead bodies, jumps upon and overpowers her, forcing her to beg for her life.
The emotional intensity of this scene derives in no small measure from the fact that we don't know which way things are going to go. Is the servant going to kill the old woman? Or is he going to snap out of his anger and let her go?
As it turns out, in the falling action, the old woman is given the chance to justify her actions. She says that the dead wouldn't mind her stealing their hair. In any case, she has no choice; stealing hair from the dead and making wigs out of it is the only way she can survive.
Despite his anger, the servant doesn't kill the old woman but, as the thief that he is, steals her kimono before running off into the night. This action provides the story's resolution.