Reddit reviews Rashomon and Other Stories

Lengthy word dump comment part 1:

/u/Rinarin and /u/Princess_Tutu - Hello!

I’ve been sitting on quite a bit of material with the intention to write something up for a good while. I then wrote it up and got nervous about posting it. So as soon as I hit enter, this will be me.



The literature refs of Bungou could easily be seen in a ‘turtles all the way down’ manner with symbolism and connections you could choose to read into at every layer. The references are present in everything from chapter titles, to a character’s physical design (Chuuya’s hat, Ranpo’s Sherlock outfit), to character motivations, personality, ideology, and interactions with other characters. Even minor, single episode side characters can sometimes be traced back to a real component of literature (referring mainly to some Edogawa stuff here). The characters designs often throw off an anachronistic vibe when set against the modern world. This intentionally reflects the 19th and 20th centuries dress reminiscent of the writers' times.

I’ve stuck to just the Port Mafia Akutagawa here for this comment since others have already written up some summaries on the others: parts 1, 2, and 3. I included generic Content through episode 11 and some spoiler tagged mentions for episodes 11 and 12. You can read this ep 12 discussion comment for some good insight on that one (that guy/gal is also way more eloquent than me, lol). I left out some tie-ins that I felt gave away a bit too much for the second cour.

For clarity, A!Character and R!Character refer to the anime and real life versions, respectively. Most of my reference material came from this mammoth book by Donald Keene. It weighs a lot. I carried it and other Japanese lit books across a giant parking lot in 100F+ weather. This is how much I am a nerd. /cry

Ryunosuke Akutagawa – Rashomon

Themes/Works

Akutagawa’s early works were generally rewrites of numerous multi-cultural tales placed in a historical setting. He preferred to keep his personal life out of his writing and remain detached from the subject. Stylistically, he often deliberately tricked or misled readers, blending illusion and reality, truth and fiction. A famous example is “In a Grove”, where a conflicting series of testimonies are given for the ‘same’ course of events. Akutagawa was particularly critical and doubtful of human virtues and society on the whole. A!Aku’s abilitiy is derived from his other famous short story, “Rashomon” (not to be confused with the movie which is actually based on In a Grove…go figure). Like a lot of artists, Akutagawa didn’t strike fame for his work until after his death.

His personal life was something of a hot mess. His mother went insane shortly after birth, and he long felt a sense of neglect and abandonment by her. He also came to immensely fear that the same fate would befall him. It totally did. His later years were distinguished by plummeting physical and mental health, including hallucinations, intense nervousness and anxiety, and a regular sense of impending doom. In the end, he committed suicide.

A (USA) public domain audiobook reading of “Rashomon” in Japanese is available here

There are at least two official English translations: 1 – 2

Tie-ins

A!Aku’s personality is heavily drawn from the real, who was described as something of an aloof but precocious individual with a cynical sense of humor. A!Aku’s chronic cough, preoccupation with death and fate, and his persona that flirts with the edge of sanity certainly seem to mirror the R!Aku’s life as well. I suspect his looks too given this description of a photograph, “gaunt face, hollow eyes…and an expression of despair”.

A!Akutagawa’s driving need for recognition from Dazai and his resentment of Atsushi for getting that recognition is also reflective of the real. R!Aku greatly admired the writer Soseki Natsume, and after working up some courage, adorably became a disciple of Soseki’s and regularly attended meetings. Unfortunately, R!Aku had shit friends that regularly criticized his works, outright telling him to give up writing. In one of his few autobiographical based pieces, “A Life Spent at Frivolous Writing”, one of the characters gets fed up with being compared to his publisher’s other writers and declares that ‘[he] and I are not the same kind of man’. So both real and anime Akutagawa were pretty sensitive to comparisons with their peers.

[Bungou Ep 12](/s "Real Aku's early writing was heavily influenced by Mori Ougai, so it's incredibly fitting that A!Ougai is the Mafia's and Akutagawa's boss. One critic even described Ougai as having created Akutagawa.") He was also criticized as having a ‘lack of originality’, which is pretty lol given some of the comments that A!Aku doesn’t seem all that smart in contriving plans. Real Aku didn’t much care for plot details anyway.

R!Akutagawa’s writing philosophies also opposed those of Naturalism, for which Kunikida Doppo is considered to be an inventor of (in the Japanese tradition). So yeah, no surprise their anime selves don’t like each other. R!Aku and R!Tanizaki also had an authors’ argument over the importance of plot, wherein Aku thought that how the story was written, its overall poetic structure, was more important than plot details. Their anime selves have already started bitching at each other.

Regarding “Rashomon” and A!Akutagawa’s ability, the basic story plot is that a man finds himself debating whether to starve to death or become a thief. (This should sound familiar to a different character.) In the end, the man steals the clothes off a woman to survive. She, herself, had been in the middle of stealing off some dead bodies to survive. I don’t know how clear the anime made it to other people (I can be dense), but the coat Akutagawa is wearing is the actual source of his ability. So there’s a lot to be said here for how Atsushi ended up wimping out of his thievery and choosing the path where the weak have a right to live, while Akutagawa ‘took the coat’ and sees little regard for those weaker than him in his path to survival.

Edit: I guess if you see this in your inbox you might not see that I replied to myself with the rest, so:

more Mafia, last and best