By Shirley Duncon: pathlife@yta.attmil.ne.jp

    There is a book entitled, "Rashomon and other unusual stories" written by Ryunosuke Akutagawa. It is an interesting book--I hope to read all of it. Here is the author's description of "Rashomon": The "Rashomon" was the largest gate in Kyoto, the ancient capital of Japan. It was 106 feet wide and 26 feet deep, and was topped with a ridge-pole; its stone-wall rose 75 feet high. This gate was constructed in 789 when the then capital of Japan was transferred to Kyoto. With the decline of West Kyoto, the gate fell into bad repair, cracking, and crumbling in many places, and became a hide-out for thieves and robbers and a place for abandoning corpses. The description of the author is interesting. Howard HIbbett wrote the following in the book's introduction: Akutagawa Ryunosuke was brilliant, sensitive, cynical, neurotic; he lived in Tokyo, went to the University, taught briefly, and joined the literary staff of a newspaper. Even his early suicide (in 1927, at thirty-five) only heightens the portrait of a modern Japanese intellectual, the double victim of an unsympathetic society and a split culture.
 
 

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