Rashomon: a servant’s choice at a ruined gate

The servant has lost his employment and has no settled plan. He considers becoming a robber but cannot commit himself. Seeking somewhere to sleep, he climbs to the upper floor and finds an old woman pulling hair from a dead woman’s head. The change of location brings his private uncertainty into a confrontation.

The old woman explains that she needs the hair for wigs to survive. She also describes the dead woman’s own deceitful trading as another response to need. The servant takes this justification for himself: he strips the old woman of her outer garment and disappears into the night. Survival becomes an argument that can excuse harm to someone else.

Akutagawa drew on Konjaku Monogatari and reshaped the material around the servant’s unemployment and hesitation. The ruined city and gate create a literary setting for the choice. The narration follows the servant’s shifts from hesitation to moral outrage and then to justifying his own robbery.

First publication and collections

Published in Teikoku Bungaku in November 1915, the story initially attracted little acclaim. Akutagawa nevertheless chose its title for his first short-story collection in 1917, dedicating the volume to the late Natsume Soseki. He revised the story for that collection and again for Hana in 1918; the commonly read text ends with the servant’s whereabouts unknown.

Film and textbooks

Akira Kurosawa’s 1950 film uses the gate as a frame but takes its central incident and conflicting testimony chiefly from In a Grove. In 1957 the short story entered Japanese high-school textbooks, beginning a further history as a widely taught literary work.