dreadfulbeauties

hello, everyone! since i promised this would be a place where i post about the stuff i'm reading, i decided to deliver. with it being quite late (nearly 2 in the morning in my timezone) maybe i should wait till tomorrow to do this, but... meh. i'm in a bad mood and maybe discussing the stuff i've read will bring me comfort.
rashōmon and 17 other stories by ryunosuke akutagawa: 4/5. i really, really enjoyed this collection! akutagawa's prose flows as smoothly as i remember it, and there were some in this collection i hadn't properly read before—so that was quite a treat! all that aside, while i think a lot of the first handful of stories were really good, the last few sort of petered out for me and lost their steam. the writing was good, but the stories didn't grip me.

(i'm a little peeved because i dropped my copy of the book on a wet sidewalk right after a rainstorm and got it all dirty on the way to an event... wehhh. it's still salvageable, but i would prefer those pages to be clean!)

let's break down a few of those stories i found the most memorable, shall we?

• hell screen

i'm biased, and this is my favorite akutagawa story of all time (this, of course, is hardly a shock - seeing as i'm a ryōshū lover with limbus company!). i love yoshihide, he's such a deliciously complicated character, and his bond with his daughter is perhaps one of my favorite platonic pairs in all of fiction.

i think, though, upon revisiting it, that one of the things i didn't really pick up on is the fact that the story explicitly highlights how miserable the daughter is in the lord's service - at least during the duration of her father painting the hell screen? either she's really homesick and misses yoshihide, she's genuinely scared and conflicted to the point of tears regarding the lord's unnamed advances on her... or both. i pick both, but the narrator won't go into that!

honestly, i sort of ended up despising the narrator during this reread. to be perfectly clear, the lord's actions are much more overtly awful—i won't deny that. but i think that with the narrator, why i hate him is because we tend to know people like him. we know people who play kiss-ass to their shitty superiors or one of our "mutual" friends, trying so hard to portray them in the best possible light.

• in a grove

this was... really interesting. i imagine that the hardcore akutagawa stans, if they're out there, are probably booing me for having seen kurosawa's rashōmon before reading this story. listen. i am a simple person. if it has toshiro mifune's bare thighs, i will watch it. i am not immune, unfortunately.

what i found really interesting is how we covered a lot more ground with the testimonies—while we do have the core three who were directly involved (tajōmaru, masago, and takehiro) we also have several more. the priest and woodcutter are not directly involved but we see their testimonies, as well as that of masago's mother (among others). 

( Read more... )

it's also interesting to me how the samurai's testimony felt the most plausible? this isn't me trying to claim he was being wholly honest, rather it read like he wouldn't have had a good reason to lie—he's dead. overall, i like the ambiguousness and unsettling lack of closure we're left with by the end.

• the nose

i was honestly surprised that this one ended as optimistically as it did? with the themes of loving your physical features simply as they are, and that to change them can hurt you both literally and figuratively. didn't know you had that in you, akutagawa.

• the spider's thread

...yes, i had akatsuki records' HELLOHELL playing in my head as i read this. it's good. i'm getting tired. i'll write a more detailed analysis of this later, maybe. 

bleehhh, i still feel off. i think i might just pick up my copy of "the haunting of hill house" and read that till i fall asleep. lucia out!

title: empty
pairing: ludwig the holy blade/laurence the first vicar
prompt: "empty" (from a list of various otp prompts)
rating: t
warnings: n/a
word count: 100

There is no wine in left in my cup.

We eroded away our immunity and you quietly watched—there were more obvious beasts for you to flay under steel, after all. I walked into your trap as your captivated heart. But the poison of the Old Blood has made my skin crumble away.

I will become that which you hunt, Sir Ludwig. There is an emptiness when you kiss me or pin me down—a hollowness waiting to be made whole again, a taxidermy deer scooped of its guts.

Tear me open, I beg. Cleave this half moon in two.