Hate mediocrity and perfunctory. This introduction is my first impression of Akutagawa from Lin's Preface to Rashomon. Even if I haven't heard of this name, this short eight-character makes me feel interesting in vain, and the picture of a teenager changing words repeatedly with a pen and biting his lip emerges in my mind.
After reading it attentively, I found that Rashomon is only ten pages, and the psychological contradiction between the novel and the servant is a line of its own. Servants waiting for rain at Rashomon Gate managed to make a living, struggling between hunger and bandits. In desperation, he leaned up to the top floor of Rashomon, which was full of bodies, and was horrified to find the old woman who was fiddling with the woman's hair. The servant was angry, disgusted with this vicious idea, and gave up his plan to do evil under the pressure of livelihood. The old woman thinks that the dead woman made dried fish out of snake meat before she died, so now she can pull out the dead woman's hair out of desperation and make it into a bun to sell. These words actually led to the servant's attack, stripped the old woman of her clothes and ran away.
Although I don't understand whether the servant's last "satire" and "gnashing his teeth" are a punishment for the old woman or really seduced by the old woman's egoism, I finally read a trace of Akutagawa's vicious attack and disgust on human nature. If the servant is really tempted, that person's potential egoism is completely exposed. We can be honest in a peaceful and stable environment and confuse others and even ourselves with justice and hypocrisy. However, once provoked by others, "evil" has a Satan-like charming smile in front of the easy-to-get "profit", which makes people overthrow all masks that they don't know.
Yes, I didn't feel it. Like "cautious independence", we flaunt ourselves with justice, which has nothing to do with vanity. We just nest with the shadow recognized by the world, so that we can do nothing wrong and not be abrupt, just like quietly accepting the task, studying hard unintentionally, and doing what we should do in a certain identity silently. Stripping this layer of bondage, my thoughts fly in the dead of night, but they are really what I think. At this time, I may be able to turn over and criticize evil deeds and stand on the commanding heights of human nature. But if you are in trouble, how many people can restrain the irrationality that threatens survival, and how many people finally prove the lies they once told themselves with actions.
After reading the novel and consulting the historical background, I realized that Rashomon was made into a movie with a different plot. But when I scanned this stills, my lines deeply poked a little feeling that I repeatedly organized words.
Most of the time we can't even be honest with ourselves.
In addition, the highlights in Rashomon are all available, depicting the servant's psychology in detail, fully expressing the complex hesitation and struggle with a "if", and the sentence is long and powerful.
This is the first time I read Akutagawa's little feeling.