Ryūnosuke Akutagawa Essays

  • Chronicle of a Death Foretold (Gabriel García Márquez) and The House of Bernarda Alba (Frederico García Lorca)

    1276 Words  | 3 Pages

    building and maintaining good reputations. Bernarda’s life totally revolved around her reputation. The Vicario brothers got so caught up in trying to regain the family’s honor they were even willing to kill a man. Finally, In “In a Grove”, by Ryunosuke Akutagawa, Tajomaru, Takehiko, and his wife all took credit for Takehiko’s death. They did this to receive some honor and try to better their reputations in a tough situation. Bernarda dedicates her life to insure that her family has a good reputation

  • Rashomon

    974 Words  | 2 Pages

    In Ryunosuke Akutagawa’s short story “Rashomon”, Akutagawa uses many symbols in order to add deeper meaning into his work. One of the prominent symbols in “Rashomon” is the crow, which a dark obnoxious bird, and it is used in order to provide a commentary on the period of rapid Westernization occurring in Japan during the time that the piece was written. It adds another gruesome and ugly element to the story. The crows are first mentioned at the beginning of Akutagawa’s story, when he is describing

  • Rashomon

    1031 Words  | 3 Pages

    Rashomon is a short-story written by one of the most celebrated Japanese authors of all time, Ryunosuke Akutagawa. The setting takes place during the Heian period at the Rashomon city gate of Kyoto, Japan. The story tells of a recently fired servant who sits by Rashomon and contemplates his fate; to starve or steal for survival. The servant struggles with this moral dilemma until encountering an old woman who he observes stealing strands of hair from a female corpse. Disgusted by what he sees, the

  • Mystery and Detective Genre Elements

    1431 Words  | 3 Pages

    The various elements in the stories “Man of the crowd” by Edgar Allan Poe and “In a Gove” by Akutagawa Ryunosuke place them within the mystery and/or detective fiction genres. The usual mystery or detective stories use suspense and tension to build up to the resolution of the puzzle that is present within the plot (Turco 58). Detective stories typically involves “following a detective through the solution of a crime” (Baker, Frye and Perkins, 140). The “Man of the crowd” and “In a Grove” does not

  • The Motif of Blades

    1174 Words  | 3 Pages

    Grove” and Chronicle of a Death Foretold the authors use the motif of the blade to convey similar messages about the societies in which they take place. Both authors Akutagawa and Marquez use the motif to give an insight into views of honor and masculinity in the societies of Japan and Latin-American countries, respectively. Akutagawa is famous for his use of symbolism and aspects of modernism in order to convey a hidden truth about human nature in society. To put it simply, his story, “In a Grove

  • Comparison: The Martyr and Crime and Punishment

    887 Words  | 2 Pages

    that is, they are depicted as people who are put to death or endure great suffering of any belief, principle or cause. Such personages undergo personal suffering before finding redemption from sin. With Lorenzo in the short story The Martyr by Ryunosuke Akutagawa and Sofia (Sonya) Marmeladova in Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, the idea of undeserved suffering is clearly epitomized. Both characters are described as innocent and pure, perhaps even commiserated by other characters in their respective

  • In A Grove Literary Analysis

    624 Words  | 2 Pages

    Ryūnosuke Akutagawa “In a Grove” demonstrates the idea of one person literally speaking out of the mouth of another person. The Husbands story being told through a medium which displays a theme of being lost in your subconscious. This shares the idea of sin and falling into darkness. Compared to all of the other sides of this story, the Husband is the only one that illustrations a spiritual connection/reaction to the event, as the reaction to his life being shattered. The Medium allows the husband

  • In A Bamboo Grove And Rod Of Justice

    1359 Words  | 3 Pages

    In both Akutagawa Ryunosuke’s “In a Bamboo Grove” and Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis’ “The Rod of Justice” it is the reader’s job to interpret the truth. To become a believer in what is happening in these stories and the motives of the characters. Ryunosuke’s story is about a man running from being a priest and Assis’s story is about connecting the dots of murder from different perspectives. Each story is complex in portraying content in what is happening with each character and how they affect the

  • Chee's Witch By Tony Hillerman

    1192 Words  | 3 Pages

    Humans are curious people, knowing how things work and knowing how things fit together has always interested our minds. When we are presented with an idea that we don’t know we want to solve it. That is exactly the purpose of mystery and detective stories. Mystery stories capture our attention and makes us strive to find out and understand the story and this is why we keep coming back to them. Like many other genre of books mystery books has their own way of getting the reader’s attention and get

  • Most Believable Testimony In The Bamboo Grove

    652 Words  | 2 Pages

    The Most Believable Testimony in "The Bamboo Grove" in Rashōmon "The Bamboo Grove" is a short story written in December of 1921 by the Japanese writer, Ryūnosuke Akutagawa. The short fiction piece is included in the book, Rashōmon and Seventeen Other Stories. The story reveals the testimonies of many people of varying social classes, describing what they remember from a crime scene, or what they have witnessed in relation to the crime that had just taken place. Some of the testimonies have overlapping

  • Yasunari Kawabata

    912 Words  | 2 Pages

    Yasunari Kawabata was the first Japanese person to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. His style combined elements of classic Japanese prose with modern psychological narrative and exploration of human sexuality. Deeply influenced by the culture of his homeland, his writings capture the vivid and melancholy beauty and spirituality of Japan, while his own experiences and studies contributed to his assay into emotion. Kawabata was born on June 11, 1899 in Osaka, Japan into a prosperous family; his

  • Rashomon

    917 Words  | 2 Pages

    movies as well as television shows. This particular paper is going to analyze three films and explore the aforesaid issues. Rashomon (1950) Director: Akira Kurosawa; Written by Akira Kurosawa and Hashimoto Shinobu; based on short stories by Ryunosuke Akutagawa This particular film is actually based on the 11th Century feudalistic Japan whereby the sword was still regarded as being omnipotent, and the person who wields it, the “samurai warrior”, is also

  • Akira Kurosawa and Robert Zemeckis

    2128 Words  | 5 Pages

    Akira Kurosawa and Robert Zemeckis “As the term suggests, an auteur is an author, someone whose aesthetic sensibilities and impact are most important in the creation of a text. With literary texts, discerning authorship is usually no problem. But with collaborative art forms, such as film, deciding on authorship is much more complicated. Generally speaking, film theorists have concluded that it is the director of a film who is the auteur, the most important creative figure. But auteur theory is