Word: akutagawa
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Rashomon (by Fay and Michael Kanin) is essentially a stage remake of the eight-year-old Japanese film classic, and some of the charm and power of the film has spilled away in transit. Culled originally from two short stories by Japan's late mordant satirist, Akutagawa, Rashomon poses a philosophic question that means all things to all men: What is truth...
...moment of truth for these characters sadly shatters the mythic mood of the play. When the bandit is revealed as a braggart, the samurai as a snuffling coward and his wife as a trollop, the Kanins' script, unlike the film, fumbles away the Swiftian savagery of Akutagawa for something close to farce. What Akutagawa intended as the subtle shadow play of appearance and reality becomes, in the wigmaker's summing up, little more than an optical illusion: "Truth is a firefly...
...kindliest tale, Yam Gruel, Akutagawa turns philosopher. A middle-aged samurai lives only for his annual sip of yam gruel, his favorite delicacy. When he finally gets a chance to gorge himself, the mere idea satiates him. ("Aman sometimes devotes his life to a desire which he is not sure will ever be fulfilled. Those who laugh at this folly are, after all, no more than mere spectators of life...
Cool as Fuji. In another, more typical Akutagawa story, an unemployed servant is horrified to find an old hag yanking the hair from a dead fishwife to make a wig. "If she knew I had to do this in order to live, she probably wouldn't care." the hag explains. "Are you sure?" asks the servant mockingly. "Then it's right if I rob you. I'd starve if I didn't." And he strips off her clothes and kicks her roughly down among the decaying corpses...
...light of mercy never shines on Akutagawa's parade of adulterers, murderers and bigots, he sometimes seems as cool and distant to human frailty as the grey shale that lines the heights of Fujiyama. But the sources of his own nihilism are made poignantly clear in a poem he penned a few months before his suicide...