My friend Mike Hanne asked me to give a talk on the topic of "retelling a story." It's a very comparatist topic that no comparatist can avoid tackling from time to time. With available resources so limited, I have decided to follow Mike's suggestion to discuss Kurosawa's film Rashomon. This is just a very rough draft.
Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon (1950) is even today one of the most famous Japanese films ever made. It is well known that the film is a cinematic adaptation of a short story called “In the Grove” by Ryunosuke Akutagawa. Kurosawa’s film is a retelling in other medium of Akutagawa’s story. But then, Akutagawa’s short story was already a retelling of at least two distinct and direct textual predecessors. One is a very short tale compiled in a vast twelfth-century Japanese collection of strange tales: Konjaku monogatari shu (Tales from Yesteryears). The other is a short story called The Moonlit Road by nineteen-century American short story writer Ambrose Bierce, of whom Akutagawa was a devout admirer. Akutagawa takes at least these two sources as a basis for his story in question, which of course has been thoroughly reworked and has every right to assert itself as an original, nodal story. Then Kurosawa takes Akutagawa’s as his starting point to create an ever fiercer version mainly by adding a fourth character to Akutagawa’s original triad of characters. What I will attempt to do is to compare the diegesis and narrative deployments of both Akutagawa’s scriptural and Kurosawa’s filmic tellings to better understand possible general problems of filmic adaptation and no less interesting extra-generic continuity of stories.
