Cold

I think my roommate gave me whatever horrible disease she has/had. My throat is sore, my nose is running, and my eyes feel really heavy, all I want is to go home and take some good cough medicine and sleep until 2 in the afternoon tomorrow :p

First Snow

It's the first snow of the year and though i'm optimistic I hate that it's so cold, I'd rather look at snow then have to be out in it, which I will have to be to go home. I wonder if the ground is cold enough for it to lay?

Intro

My Name is Adra Maner and I attend Memphis college of art. I am writing this blog for my writing 1 class.

My hometown is Seymour, Tennessee, but during breaks I will now be living in Hampton, Georgia.

I'm 18 years old and I hope to major in sculpture.

Rashomon Paper

Adra Maner

Writing 1/ Bibbs

Evaluation first draft

11/14/2011

Evaluation of Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon

                ‘In A Bamboo Grove’ a story by Ryunosuke Akutagawa is a tale meant to show the decay of the world’s morals. In ‘a Bamboo grove’ the moral of truthfulness sees a decline. It shows how in that time not even the word of the dead could be trusted.  The movie ‘Rashomon’ by Akira Kurosawa highlights the same theme and even expands upon it until the true story is twisted so that the truth is different to whoever watches the film. We are given no truths really other then who was there, and who died and the rest is different depending on who you ask. To each person it was their own doing that lead to the death of the man, so does that make them all guilty?  It makes them all guilty of lying that’s for sure. I will talk about in this evaluation how the world’s view of each subject at the time of the story, and of the movie either made them seem either guilty or innocent of the crime that was committed.

                I will start with the wife, in both the book and the movie she as seen by most of the men to be pitiful and not capable of murdering her husband, the book makes her seem really innocent but the movie put many shadows of doubt on her character. In the movie there seem to be a lot more instances where the woman orders the men to fight for her and she is portrayed in the stories told by the witnesses as being passionate or firey. In the book she confesses that she killed her husband in an attempted double suicide but was unable to kill herself.(Akutagawa 17) They don’t really follow up on that in the book and it seems that at the time they just easy chock it up to her being a pitiful woman. Her actions in  the book and in the movie during and after the story all make her seem like the perfect Japanese housewife. Pitiful, and happy to kill herself, even if she didn’t manage to succeed, in order to restore her honor. I believe that this is because the worlds view of women at the time and most people would not blame a woman when a known thief and killer was there at the seen of the crime at the time.

                Tajomaru easily becomes the scape-goat for everyone’s actions though his guilt is not assured, it is easy pinned on him. After all he is a convicted killer and he is going to be executed anyways. IN tajomaru’s story he actual portrays himself as being honorable and blamed his actions on falling in love with the wife on first sight. He describes her as being the vicious one and in the movie she is constantly asking for Tajomaru to kill her husband and run away with her. At her insistance he cuts the samurai’s ropes and give him the chance to fight fair and square and even remembers the number of times that they clashed. (Akutagawa 15) Though these words do come from someone who would be the most expected to lie his view of the wife seems pretty consistant with other accounts of her so I would say that he’s not completely innocent but innocent of the murder, possibly.

                The husband seems to be the typical samurai and they view that he looked at his wife with disgust because she had been disgraced by the thief. This makes perfect sense Samurai, and even Japanese people in general prize the virtue of honor above all else. Which is why the samurai would of course say that he committed seppeku; the ritual of killing oneself when you’ve been shamed. Even if his wife had killed him to rid them booth of shame of course any man of the time would say that he killed himself to prevent being seen as weak enough to be killed by a woman or by a lowly thief, even though the latter would have been in better option in a samurai’s book.

                In the time the story was written most of the people at the time would probably not be able to figure out who killed the man, but due to the views of the time in both the book and the movie it’s totally possible that the woman was the one who committed the crime in some form or another weather through manipulation or by her own hand.