Akutagawa Ryunosuke And His Representative Rashomon

As one of the representative writers of “new thought school” in taisyou（Taisho）literary world, Akutagawa Ryunosuke is important to Japanese literature. Hedemonstrated human nature using a rational approach from several angles and sides,and “new thought school” became one of the important literary schools, injectingfresh blood into the Japanese literary world at that time.Akutagawa not only observed social reality with a sharp eye, but was good atusing historical stories to state his subjective thought and endowing historical eventswith new moral, at the same time using rational portrayals to demonstrate humanweaknesses and exploring complicated good and evil of human nature, havingprofound practical significance.Akutagawa’s representative work Rashomon was based on the Japanese classicalliterature Konjaku Monogatari and affected by the work of prototype in setting of thestructure and characters. By increasing the setting of characters and scenes,Rashomon demonstrates to a larger extent the different egocentric thinking andperformance in the extreme social environment, the distortion of human nature introubled times and unscrupulous egoism. In addition, as an adopted son, Akutagawaalways suppressed his own personality and was powerless to resist his adoptiveparents although he was aware of their selfishness. By revealing the egoism of othersto get the some kind of psychological balance in Rashomon, he was liberated fromthe constraint of feeling the egoism of him and others.The effects of failure in love, the turbulent society and the influence of religionenabled Akutagawa to profoundly realize egoism. The images of “servant” and“gammer” the writer portrayed in Rashomon demonstrates the terribleness of egoismand human weaknesses in extreme environment. The psychology of “servant”changed from “wickedness” to “kindness” and once more to “terrible wickedness”,and he finally became into a typical egoist representative who had sought benefits by hurting others. In the novel, the sophistry of “gammer” had played a decisive role inthe psychological change of “servant”. It seems that there were no option for survival,but this novel manifested her sophistic egoistical thinking that she attributed her ownmistakes to the external environment and excused herself.