Rashomon

Chapter-by-chapter summary

Spoiler warning: this section covers the whole plot, including the ending. The story has no chapters, so it is split here into six natural parts.

Part 1: A servant under the gate

The story opens one evening beneath the Rashomon, the great southern gate of Kyoto, then the capital. A servant sits on the stone steps waiting for the rain to stop. A few days earlier his master let him go, and the city, worn down by earthquakes, whirlwinds, fires and famine, has no work for him. The gate itself has been left to rot: foxes and thieves have moved in, and people even dump unclaimed bodies there. The servant's choice is plain: starve, or become a thief. He cannot yet bring himself to choose the second. Why it matters: Akutagawa turns a huge question about right and wrong into one hungry young man sheltering from the rain.

Part 2: Up the ladder

The servant, desperate for somewhere to sleep, climbs the ladder to the tower above the gate. A faint firelight shows him a room of abandoned corpses, and among them a living person: a tiny, grey-haired old woman holding a pine torch, pulling hair out of a dead woman's head, strand by strand. Why it matters: the scene gives the story its horror, but also its question. This is the first time the servant sees what people do to stay alive, and it turns the abstract idea of a hard choice into something he must look at.

Part 3: A sudden hatred

Fear soon turns into something else: a clean, burning hatred of every kind of evil. A moment earlier he was himself weighing whether to become a thief, yet now he feels that the old woman's act is wrong without question. He steps in, seizes her arm, with his hand on his sword, and demands to know what she is doing. The frightened old woman, shaking, answers that she is making wigs from the hair. Why it matters: his anger is real, but one reading is that it comes cheaply, since he is not yet the one being tested.

Part 4: The old woman's excuse

The old woman admits that pulling hair from the dead is a bad thing, but says that everyone lying here deserves no better. The woman whose hair she is taking sold dried snake meat as dried fish in life, she says. She does not think it was wrong, because the woman had to do it to avoid starving, so she would surely forgive an old woman for doing the same. As the servant listens, an opposite feeling gathers in him. Why it matters: each wrong is excused by an earlier wrong, and the servant is quietly offered the same chain of excuses.

Part 5: The robe

When she finishes, the servant asks in a mocking voice whether she is sure, then grabs her by the collar. “Then you won't blame me for robbing you,” he says. “I'll starve if I don't.” Here he finds the courage he lacked beneath the gate. He tears off her robe, kicks her onto the corpses and flees down the ladder. Why it matters: he does not invent a new argument; he borrows the old woman's own, and the hesitation that held him back is gone.

Part 6: Nobody knows

The old woman, left behind, drags her bare body to the top of the ladder and peers down, her grey hair hanging. Outside there is only black night. The last line says that no one knows where the servant went. Why it matters: Akutagawa withholds the answer on purpose. We never learn whether the servant became a thief, and the question about survival and conscience is passed on to the reader. The ending also echoes the opening, where he was a nameless man waiting for the rain; now he is a nameless man vanishing into the dark.

Characters in Rashomon

The servant

A young man dismissed by his master a few days earlier, with a large pimple on his right cheek. He is not wicked, only hungry and undecided, and the story is the record of how that indecision ends.

The old woman

A thin, grey, monkey-like woman living on the gate's upper floor, pulling hair from corpses to make wigs. She is both repulsive and pitiful, and her speech supplies the argument that tips the servant.

The woman whose hair is pulled

She is dead before the story begins and appears only in the old woman's account: a seller of dried snake meat passed off as fish. Though silent, she turns the old woman's act into one link in a chain of excuses.

The servant's former master

Never seen. His decision to let the servant go, in the middle of the city's collapse, is what sends the young man to the gate. He stands for a world where people are cut loose without a second thought.

The Rashomon gate

More than a setting. Once the grand southern entrance to the capital, it is now falling apart and used as a dumping ground for the dead, a picture of a society that can no longer hold itself up.

Background

Rashomon retells a tale from the Konjaku Monogatari-shu, a collection of stories compiled in the late Heian period. In that tale, a thief climbs the gate tower and finds an old woman pulling hair from a corpse. Akutagawa added the servant's hesitation, which turns a short anecdote into a study of choice. He published the story in 1915, at 23, while a student at Tokyo Imperial University. It later gave its title to his first collection (1917) and is widely read in Japanese schools. Because the text is out of copyright, the Japanese original is free to read on Aozora Bunko.

Writing about this book

Do not try to judge the servant; ask what you would do in his place. These questions help:

• What changes in the servant between Part 3 and Part 5?
• How far do you accept the old woman's excuses, and where do they fail?
• Does “to survive” justify every act? Link it to a news story or a moment in history.
• Why does the story end with “no one knows”?

For structure, pick one scene that stayed with you, write honestly what you felt, then connect the story's question to your own experience or to events in the world. Close by saying how your view changed from before reading to after. Keep the plot summary to about a fifth of the piece and spend the rest on your own thinking. If you quote, use one short line and say where it comes from.