40 Fun Facts About Ryunosuke Akutagawa

Which director's 1950 film Rashomon retold Akutagawa's In a Grove under the title of another of his stories?

Akira Kurosawa borrowed only the title and the ruined-gate framing scenes from Akutagawa's Rashōmon. The murder told several contradictory ways comes from the other story.

The 1950 film Rashomon, built from two Akutagawa stories, won the Golden Lion at which city's film festival?

Venice gave the film its top prize, and the win made it the first Japanese film to find a wide international audience.

Akutagawa's given name, Ryūnosuke, commemorates his birth in the year of which animal of the East Asian zodiac?

Dragon is what the first character of Ryūnosuke means, and the name was chosen because 1892, the year he arrived, belonged to that zodiac sign.

Which manga and anime series features a Port Mafia fighter named after Akutagawa, with powers drawn from Rashōmon?

Bungo Stray Dogs names its main characters after real authors and bases each power on that writer's books, which is why its Akutagawa is tied to Rashōmon.

The Rashomon effect, a term born from the film of Akutagawa's stories, names the unreliability of which group?

Eyewitnesses to one event can honestly describe it in ways that cannot all be true, the trap at the heart of the film. The term is now used in law and psychology as well as cinema.

The river creatures of Japanese folklore that give Akutagawa's novella Kappa its title are said to love which vegetable?

Cucumber is the kappa's favourite food in folk belief, and townspeople once sent the vegetables down the river to keep the creatures from drowning anyone.

The crumbling Rashōmon of Akutagawa's story was once the grand southern gate of which ancient Japanese capital?

Kyoto lies in ruins when the tale is set, and its great gate has become a place where unclaimed corpses are dumped.

Who lowers a silver thread into Hell to rescue one sinner in Akutagawa's The Spider's Thread?

The Buddha spots the robber Kandata from a lotus pond in Paradise and recalls his one kind act: he once chose not to crush a spider.

Akutagawa spent four months as a newspaper correspondent in which country, a trip from which his health never recovered?

China had fascinated him since boyhood through its classic novels, but the 1921 assignment for the Osaka Mainichi left him with illnesses he never shook off.

Which bestselling novelist introduced the Penguin Classics edition of Akutagawa's Rashōmon and Seventeen Other Stories?

Haruki Murakami wrote the introduction, and the translator was Jay Rubin, the scholar who also translated several of the novelist's own books, including Norwegian Wood.

Which novelist, the author of I Am a Cat, launched Akutagawa's fame by praising The Nose in a letter?

Natsume Sōseki was Akutagawa's idol and hosted a weekly literary circle, the Thursday Salon, which the young student had only just found the nerve to attend.

In Akutagawa's Rashōmon, what is the old woman taking from the corpses left in the ruined gate?

Hair is her harvest: she pulls it out strand by strand to make wigs she can sell, and argues that robbing the dead is no crime when the alternative is starving.

Which actor, later the star of Seven Samurai, played the bandit in the 1950 film of Akutagawa's Rashomon stories?

Toshiro Mifune was a regular collaborator the director wanted from the start, though one Japanese critic complained that his bandit had far too much to say.

Akutagawa studied which language's literature at university, then briefly taught the language at a naval school?

English was his field, and as a student he was already publishing translations of the Irish poet W. B. Yeats in a magazine he ran with friends.

At the end of Akutagawa's Rashōmon, what does the dismissed servant steal from the old woman before fleeing?

Her robe is torn from her back as he turns her own excuse against her: if stealing to survive is no sin, she cannot blame him for doing the same.

Akutagawa's satirical novella Kappa is narrated by a man known only as Number 23, who is what?

A psychiatric patient tells the whole tale, claiming he lost his way in the mountains and lived among the creatures, and he ends up thinking them better than humans.

Born Ryūnosuke Niihara, the future author took the surname Akutagawa from which relative who adopted and raised him?

His maternal uncle took him in after his mother fell mentally ill soon after he arrived, and in his last years the writer feared he had inherited her illness.

Who finds the samurai's body and gives the first testimony in Akutagawa's In a Grove?

A woodcutter reports the corpse, and all he noticed beside it was a comb and a piece of rope: no sword and no horse.

What makes the last three accounts so puzzling in Akutagawa's In a Grove?

Each claims to be the killer: the bandit describes a duel, the wife a stabbing, and the dead man, speaking from beyond the grave, says he took his own life.

In Akutagawa's satire The Nose, what is the occupation of Zenchi Naigu, whose nose dangles past his chin?

Priest Naigu ought to be absorbed in the sutras, yet he frets about his looks instead, and Akutagawa took the plot from a centuries-old collection of tales.

Which publisher and lifelong friend of Akutagawa founded the Akutagawa Prize in the dead author's memory?

Kan Kikuchi met Akutagawa at school, built the publishing house Bungeishunjū, and also headed Daiei, the film studio that went on to make Rashomon.

Which author of No Longer Human idolised Akutagawa and was shaken as a teenager by his death?

Osamu Dazai was a schoolboy enjoying early success with his writing when the news came in 1927, and losing his idol brought that progress to a halt.

Akutagawa publicly argued over whether plot matters in fiction with which novelist, the author of The Makioka Sisters?

Jun'ichirō Tanizaki defended the well-built plot, while Akutagawa argued that the way a story is told matters more than what happens in it.

Which novelist, the author of The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, adapted Akutagawa's Hell Screen as a kabuki play?

Yukio Mishima dramatised the tale for the kabuki stage in 1953, and it has since been filmed, televised and turned into a ballet.

In Akutagawa's Hell Screen, what does the painter Yoshihide ask his lord to set on fire so he can paint it?

A carriage with a noblewoman inside is what he asks for, and the lord obliges with a cruel twist: the woman placed in the flames is the painter's own daughter.

In Akutagawa's Hell Screen, which pet animal rushes into the fire to die beside the painter's daughter?

A monkey is her devoted companion, and earlier in the tale it drags the narrator to the room where she has just fought off an attacker.

In the upside-down society of Akutagawa's Kappa, who is asked for consent before a birth goes ahead?

The unborn baby is asked by its father whether it wants to enter the world, and one in the novella refuses, saying it dreads what it would inherit.

Akutagawa's The Spider's Thread is often traced to a fable about an onion in which Dostoevsky novel?

The Brothers Karamazov tells of a wicked woman hauled out of the fire by the one onion she ever gave away, until she kicks at the others clinging on.

Akutagawa's youngest son Yasushi, a toddler when his father died, grew up to be famous in which profession?

Composer Yasushi Akutagawa wrote film scores and orchestral works, and in 1954 he slipped into the Soviet Union without permission and befriended Shostakovich.

Almost all of Akutagawa's career fell within which Japanese era, which ended months before his death?

Taishō lasted only from 1912 to 1926, a short reign remembered for a liberal movement in politics, and Akutagawa is counted among its defining authors.

Which Hollywood star played the bandit Juan Carrasco in The Outrage, a Western remake of the film Rashomon?

Paul Newman led a cast that included Edward G. Robinson and a young William Shatner, with the action moved to the American Southwest of the 1870s.

Which actor plays the hitman who lends out a copy of Rashōmon in Jim Jarmusch's film Ghost Dog?

Forest Whitaker's character lives by the samurai code, and Akutagawa's book passes from hand to hand through the film until he gives it away as his last act.

In Akutagawa's In a Grove, what is the name of the notorious bandit caught after being thrown from a stolen horse?

Tajōmaru still carried the dead man's bow and quiver when he was caught, and he was already suspected of murdering two women the year before.

In Akutagawa's In a Grove, the murdered samurai gives his own version of events through what kind of go-between?

A medium speaks for the dead man, an idea Akutagawa may have taken from an American tale in which a murdered wife tells her side the same way.

In Akutagawa's Rashōmon, the dead woman being robbed had once cheated buyers by passing off which meat as fish?

Snake, sold as fish, is the old woman's proof that the corpse deserves no pity, and the same reasoning is turned on her moments later.

In Akutagawa's The Nose, which treatment finally shrinks the long nose that has embarrassed its owner for years?

Boiled and stomped on by a disciple, the nose shrinks to an ordinary size, but people laugh at its owner more than ever and he is relieved when it grows back.

Besides a cash award, which keepsake is presented to each winner of Japan's Akutagawa Prize?

A pocket watch goes to every winner along with the money, and the award is made in both January and July for the best serious story by a rising author.

Which prize for popular fiction was created alongside the Akutagawa Prize by the same founder?

Naoki is the name it carries, after Sanjugo Naoki, a popular novelist who had died the year before, and it rewards entertainment fiction rather than literary work.

Which future Nobel laureate won the Akutagawa Prize early in his career for a story known as Prize Stock?

Kenzaburō Ōe had begun publishing only the year before, while still a student, and went on to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1994.

Akutagawa's birth father, Toshizō Niihara, built a successful Tokyo business selling which product?

Milk from his dairy farms was sold to the foreign residents of Tokyo's Tsukiji district, where the future author was born.