Betcha didn't know ... The real Rashōmon Effect

"Movies are the new opiate of the people. They’ll believe anything we can get on the screen.”

— James Ellroy, The Big Nowhere

As is often the case when I want to read something but I don't know what, when I'm itchy and anxious and grabbing books off the TBR pile, then flinging them aside, I have turned to Ryūnosuke Akutagawa's short stories. You might call Akutagawa my ideal discomfort reading.

You may not have read Akutagawa, but you have likely seen a movie that takes its title, but not its plot, from one of his stories: "Rashōmon." Another thing that Rashōmon, the movie, does not take from "Rashōmon," the story, is "the Rashōmon effect," the phenomenon of different witnesses' offering mutually contradictory versions of the truth. That, and the multiple-witness murder-rape plot, come instead from another Akutagawa story, "In a Bamboo Grove." (The only element of  "Rashōmon" that Akira Kurosawa appropriated for Rashōmon appears to be the picturesque setting of the decrepit Rashōmon, or "Rashō Gate.")

In Kurosawa's movie, the gate is merely the setting where the characters offer their testimony about a rape and killing. Akutagawa's story, on the other hand, makes of the gate a dumping ground for dead bodies, where an unemployed servant on the verge of becoming a thief encounters an ancient scavenger, and each offers justification of his or her ghastly acts.  If not itself a noir story, it's at least a wry commentary and questioning of the nature and roots of criminal behavior, and it appeared a decade and a half before the Flitcraft Parable in The Maltese Falcon. As such, it ought to interest any reader of noir and hard-boiled crime writing.

As for that stuff about contradictory versions of the truth, it should really be called "The Bamboo Grove Effect," but I won't hold my breath.

© Peter Rozovsky 2015

Shane MacGowan meets Ryūnosuke Akutagawa

One of the bounciest, most cheerful songs I've heard recently also makes the Detectives Beyond Borders list of great noir and crime songs (click the link, then scroll down for some good reading and listening.)

The song is "Rain Street," from the Pogues' 1990 album Hell's Ditch, and it includes lines such as:

"Down the alley the ice wagon flew
Picked up a stiff that was turning blue
The local kids were sniffin' glue
Not much else for a kid to do
Down rain street."

Lyrically, the song is a bit like Lou Reed and, in its stream of images, something like Bob Dylan's long, near-surrealistic songs from the mid-1960s. But Shane MacGowan had a livelier sense of fun than both those guys, and the Pogues were better and tighter musically, so the song is just plain fun to listen to even if you ignore the words.

But those words ... they're a little like David Goodis or maybe, I don't know, Nelson Algren. Click on the song's title above to hear Shane and the boys perform it.

***

Rashomon is one of the greatest and most celebrated of all movies, and probably the best-known Japanese movie in the Western world. (How many movies have lent their titles to a psychological effect?)

But thirty-six years before Akira Kurosawa's film, "Rashomon" was a story by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, one of two by the author that formed the basis of the movie. (The story "Rashomon" is the source of the ramshackle gate and the unforgettable rain in the movie; the "Rashomon effect" is depicted in a story called "In a Grove.")

Late on a rainless night in a deserted office is no time or place to start a consideration of twentieth-century Japanese literature, so I'll begin and end by saying that "In a Grove" is one of the wittiest and most carefully and deliberately constructed stories this writer has had the pleasure to read. As of now, I am, albeit tentatively, a Ryūnosuke Akutagawa and you should be, too. Read him to have your eyes opened to new, little-explored possibilities for crime stories.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Calling all sociologists …

… especially if your area is East Asian studies. After a long, drama-packed, psychologically compelling buildup, a murder has finally been committed in Akimitsu Takagi’s The Informer. The first named police officer on the scene is a chief detective, followed only afterward by the homicide inspector who takes charge of the investigation.

Here is where the sociology comes in. The motif of a superior officer given unexpected priority repeats a pattern I’ve noticed in my admittedly limited experience of Japanese crime stories. In Akira Kurosawa’s movie Stray Dog, the senior officer, played by Takashi Shimura, guides the junior, played by Toshiro Mifune, investigating with him, interrogating with him, and keeping him in line. If my memory serves me well, a senior officer also plays an especially prominent role in at least one of Seicho Matsumoto’s novels as well.

These instances all seemed a contrast to what I'm accustomed to, in which a police novel has one lead investigator. In the case of The Informer, the contrast with American and British police procedurals seemed especially marked. In murder mysteries from the U.K. or America, if any police are named as appearing on the scene before the lead homicide investigator, they are likelier to be of lower rank, a patrolman or a constable, rather than higher.

Your job, readers, is to help me figure out if this means anything and, if so, what? Does it reflect differences between Japanese and Western police procedures? Differences in the way Japanese storytellers think about authority? Is it even typical of Japanese stories at all, or is it just a quirk of the few that I know?

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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