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Landmark: Rashōmon

The writing of Akutagawa, which led to the film by Kurosawa, explored by novelists David Peace & Natasha Pulley and film experts Jasper Sharp and Yuna Tasaka. Rana Mitter chairs.

David Peace, Natasha Pulley, Yuna Tasaka and Jasper Sharp join Rana Mitter.

Ryūnosuke Akutagawa's short story 'In a Grove', published in 1922, became the basis for the 1950 film from Akira Kurosawa 'Rashōmon', one of the first Japanese films to gain worldwide critical acclaim. 'The Rashōmon Effect' has become a byword for the literary technique where the same event is presented via the different and incompatible testimonies from the characters involved. David Peace's new book 'Patient X' is a novelised response to Ryūnosuke Akutagawa's last years and his death by suicide at the age of 35. Natasha Pulley is a novelist and Japanophile with a particular interest in Japanese literature of the 1920s, and in the unreliable narrator implied by use of the Rashōmon Effect. And Jasper Sharp is a writer and curator, author of the Historical Dictionary of Japanese Cinema.

Producer: Luke Mulhall

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44 minutes

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