Rashomon Quotes

“Today’s youngsters will unfortunately never know the thrills we experienced dubbing movies in the era of Rashomon.”
― Teruyo Nogami, Waiting on the Weather: Making Movies with Akira Kurosawa

“The Heian Period (794–1185) was Japan’s classical era, a time of peace and opulence, when the imperial court in Heian-kyō (“Capital of Peace and Tranquility”: later Kyoto) was the fountainhead of culture, and the arts flourished. Toward the end, however, political power slipped from the aristocracy to the warrior class, the decline of the imperial court led to the decay of the capital, and peace gave way to unrest. This was the part of the Heian Period that interested Akutagawa, who identified it with fin-de-siècle Europe, and he symbolized the decay with the image of the crumbling Rashōmon gate that dominates his story. Director Kurosawa Akira borrowed Akutagawa’s gate and went him one better, picturing it as a truly disintegrating structure, entirely bereft of its Heian lacquer finish, and suggestive of the moral decay against which his characters struggle. His film Rashōmon (1950) was based on two of Akutagawa’s stories, “Rashōmon” and “In a Bamboo Grove.” Both—themselves based on tales from the twelfth century—reach far more skeptical conclusions than the film regarding the dependability of human nature and its potential for good.

(Jay Rubin)”
― Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, Rashomon and Other Stories

“But he knew what was wrong with him; he was ashamed of himself and afraid of them- afraid of the society whe so despised.”
― Ryünosuke Akutagawa

“Who found the material, who pursued the material and how, who bought the material, whose account is true or accurate: these might not seem consequential questions now. But they have definite implications on the other side of the film’s making and marketing, and in the wake of relationships that sustained, and relationships that broke, in the years after.”
― Glenn Kenny, Made Men: The Story of Goodfellas

“He did not why she pulled out the hair of the dead. Accordingly, he did not know whether her case was to be put down as good or bad. But in his eyes, pulling out the hair of the dead in the Rashomon on this stormy night was an unpardonable crime. Of course it never entered his mind that a little while ago he had though of becoming a thief”
― Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, Rashōmon and Seventeen Other Stories