Rashamon
"Rashomon," features a once-proud imperial gate, now in ruins, full of dead bodies and a shriveled old woman desecrating the dead in order to survive by selling wigs. The unnamed servant protagonist uses the old woman's moral relativism against her, robbing her of perhaps her only possession, her robe, as he bounds into the night into a life of crime. Setting has a profound relationship to character and plot here.
A meditation on good and evil, on desperation and hypocrisy -- tells of a servant who cannot decide whether to steal or starve until he meets an old woman who is pulling the hair out of corpses. Lacking compassion or empathy, he fails to recognize himself in her. in "Rashomon" the reader is first told that the servant is waiting for the rain to end; later the narrator qualifies this statement, stating in fact the servant is recently masterless and has no idea what to do. "Hell Screen" is peppered with the narrator's qualifications and backtrackings of various kinds; at many points phrases like "I have heard," "I am told," "The rumor is" make the reader question the veracity of the content being presented. In "Horse Legs" the story starts with the narrator apologizing for the boring mediocrity of the protagonist.
"We noted earlier that the servant was "waiting for the rain to end," but in fact the man had no idea what he was going to do once that happened. Ordinarily, of course, he would have returned to his master's house, but he had been dismissed from service some days before, and (as also noted earlier), Kyoto was in an unusual state of decline. His dismissal by a master he had served for many years was one small consequence of that decline. Rather than say that the servant was "waiting for the rain to end," it would have been more appropriate to write that "a lowly servant trapped by the rain had no place to go and no idea what to do." The weather, too, contributed to the sentimentalisme of this Heian Period menial. The rain had been falling
A meditation on good and evil, on desperation and hypocrisy -- tells of a servant who cannot decide whether to steal or starve until he meets an old woman who is pulling the hair out of corpses. Lacking compassion or empathy, he fails to recognize himself in her. in "Rashomon" the reader is first told that the servant is waiting for the rain to end; later the narrator qualifies this statement, stating in fact the servant is recently masterless and has no idea what to do. "Hell Screen" is peppered with the narrator's qualifications and backtrackings of various kinds; at many points phrases like "I have heard," "I am told," "The rumor is" make the reader question the veracity of the content being presented. In "Horse Legs" the story starts with the narrator apologizing for the boring mediocrity of the protagonist.
"We noted earlier that the servant was "waiting for the rain to end," but in fact the man had no idea what he was going to do once that happened. Ordinarily, of course, he would have returned to his master's house, but he had been dismissed from service some days before, and (as also noted earlier), Kyoto was in an unusual state of decline. His dismissal by a master he had served for many years was one small consequence of that decline. Rather than say that the servant was "waiting for the rain to end," it would have been more appropriate to write that "a lowly servant trapped by the rain had no place to go and no idea what to do." The weather, too, contributed to the sentimentalisme of this Heian Period menial. The rain had been falling