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Parrish

Parrish Lantern's Casebook

Malt Whisky Drinking, Single Speed Bike Racing, Poetry Loving, Book-Fiend, & If This Makes Me Seem Cool, It's All In The Edit.

 

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The Ideal Library Symbolizes Everything a Society stands for. A Society Depends On Its Libraries To Know Who it Is, Because Libraries Are Societies Memory (A. Manguel). This Is My Attempt To Construct My Ideal library.

Rashomon and Seventeen Other Stories (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)

Rashomon and Seventeen Other Stories - Yoshihiro Tatsumi, Ryƫnosuke Akutagawa, Jay Rubin, Haruki Murakami Rashomon & 17 other stories Ryunosuke Akutugawa is generally regarded as the "father of the Japanese short story" of which he wrote approximately a hundred, before taking his own life at the age of 35, he also has Japan's most famous Literary prize named after him (Akutagawa Prize) . Born in Tokyo in 1892 & raised by a family steeped in traditional Japanese culture, by a young age had mastered English, before going on to excel as a student in his country's top educational establishments. By the age of ten he was writing and publishing in student magazines, he graduated from Tokyo Imperial University ( University of Tokyo ) in 1916 with a degree in English Literature. He worked as a teacher of English until the demand for his writing enabled him to work full time in that role. In this collection of short stories, translated by Jay Rubin, we see a range of work from throughout the authors short life, some which have not been published for decades. We start this book with Rashomon, (not the film of the same name) a tale of a servant sacked by his Samurai master who seeks shelter under the Rashomon, which was the largest gate in Kyoto, the ancient capital of Japan.http://parrishlantern.blogspot.com/2010/10/ryunosuke-akutagawa_22.html HellscreenThis is the 6th story in the collection of short stories (Rashomon & 17 other stories), by Ryunosuke Akutagawa (western style) which I hope to review as a complete book soon. In this tale Japan's greatest artist (Yoshilde) is given the task, by His Imperial Majesty, of creating a screen depicting visions of Buddhist hell. As an artist Yoshilde is obsessed to the point where he is quite happy taking sketches of rotten corpses found by the roadside or chaining up his assistants into tortuous positions just to get the right image. In fact the artist is so consumed by his art, nothing else matters. Well almost, he has a daughter, a fair beauty, courteous & devoted to him, she is also the only constant outside art in his life. So Yoshilde works on the screen drawing & painting images."Oh that screen! I can almost see its terrifying images of hell before me now!Other artists painted what they called images of hell, but their compositions were nothing like Yoshilde's. He had the ten kings of hell and their minions over in one corner, and everything else - the entire screen - was enveloped in a fire storm so terrible you thought the swirling flames were going to melt the mountain of sabres and the forest of swords....... These alone were enough to shock and amaze any viewer, but the sinners writhing in the hellfire of Yoshilde's powerful brush had nothing in common with those to be seen in ordinary picture of hell".http://parrishlantern.blogspot.com/2010/10/ryunosuke-akutagawa.html