Introduction

Beneath the Rashōmon gate in a downpour, a servant dismissed by his master hesitates between starving and turning thief, until he sees an old woman upstairs pulling the hair from corpses: 'Rashōmon' lays bare the borderline between survival and morality. In 'In a Grove' a samurai lies dead in a bamboo grove, and a woodcutter, a priest, a constable, a bandit, the samurai's wife and the samurai's own ghost, speaking through a medium, each give an account; the accounts contradict one another, and the truth can never be known. Kurosawa Akira combined the two stories in his film Rashōmon, and 'Rashōmon' has become a byword for irreconcilable testimony. This volume also contains 'The Nose', 'Hell Screen', 'The Spider's Thread', 'Tangerines' and 'Kappa', among others.