Rashomon and Seventeen Other Stories by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa
Published 1915 · 65,000 words · about 4 hours at an average pace · Fiction, Short Stories, Literary Fiction, Historical Fiction
How hard is Rashomon and Seventeen Other Stories to read?
Rashomon and Seventeen Other Stories scores 46 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it moderately challenging. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 40 out of 100
- Historical and literary vocabulary drawn from medieval Japanese and Chinese sources. Jay Rubin's translations are clear and accessible, with helpful context.
- Sentence structure: 35 out of 100
- Concise, carefully shaped sentences befitting the short story form. Akutagawa's syntax is economical and precise.
- Abstraction: 40 out of 100
- The stories work as parables with moral and philosophical dimensions, but the abstractions are always embodied in vivid, concrete narratives.
- Information density: 45 out of 100
- Short stories are by nature dense. Akutagawa compresses entire worldviews into a few pages, and every detail carries weight.
- Narrative indirection: 50 out of 100
- 'In a Bamboo Grove' is a landmark of narrative indirection — contradictory accounts with no resolution. Other stories use frame narratives, unreliable narrators, and withholding to similar effect.
- Symbolic density: 50 out of 100
- The Rashomon gate as moral threshold, fire as artistic and destructive force, the nose as social disfigurement — Akutagawa builds potent symbols from his classical source material.
- Ironic distance: 55 out of 100
- Akutagawa's irony is sharp and pervasive. He observes human self-deception with detached precision, and his narrators are often complicit in the ironies they describe.
- Resolution withholding: 50 out of 100
- Several stories deliberately withhold resolution — most famously 'In a Bamboo Grove,' where the truth about the murder is never established. Ambiguity is a structural principle.
- Structural complexity: 40 out of 100
- Individual stories employ varied structures — testimonial, frame narrative, parable, confession. As a collection, the range of forms demonstrates Akutagawa's versatility.
How Rashomon and Seventeen Other Stories is regarded
Rashomon and Seventeen Other Stories holds a literary regard score of 84 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.