february 2026 reading log
Mar. 4th, 2026 01:50 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dreadfulbeautieshello, 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?
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.
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).
tajōmaru was also interesting. while still clearly a piece of shit trying to frame himself as the center of some samurai epic... he comes off as less manic than he did in the movie adaptation? his recounting of the event seems smug, yes, but there's a sort of composure to how he talks about what happened.
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.
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!
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 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
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).
tajōmaru was also interesting. while still clearly a piece of shit trying to frame himself as the center of some samurai epic... he comes off as less manic than he did in the movie adaptation? his recounting of the event seems smug, yes, but there's a sort of composure to how he talks about what happened.
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
- the spider's thread
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!
