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20thC Japan: What of baby as cast later life/


Akutagawa's 'Roshamon' short story with its old Kyoto Buddhist temple gate symbolism set in late Heian period 11thC devastated Japan, is used in Roshamon the film to frame another of his stories, 'In the Grove'.

The story as employed by Akutagawa in 1920 as among other things, symbolic commentary upon the Meian transition and emergent contemporary Japan and how it engaged traditional Japanese elements.

This is all elaborate pre-amble to wonder upon the real life course of the baby abandoned at the gate, then cradled and carried to a presumed future on which the viewer cannot help but speculate in terms of some themes in the film/source material.

That real-life child would have grown up 50s - 60s Japan, at least and later...

I'd love to know the course that child's (real!) life if you wonder about the intentions of Akutagawa's original source material and future Japan which emerged rebuilt from choices on "how" to reconcile truths of Japan old and new...

Its seems my cursory web-search- nothing to be found, at least in English. Or, rather, it concerns discussion of the baby as symbol/film narrative element only.

The biographical bare bones of his later life 50s Japan ffwds would be fascinating thematic insight into evolving modernist-traditional Japan 20thC perhaps I think.

ESP too as Roshamon is commonly credited as a key text in opening up Japanese cinema (& much other Japanese cultural territory/art-form) further to continuing Western fascination later with it's cognoscenti success at the time.

Any tid-bits on that child in later life? I hope somewhere a Japanese /cinema film buff has followed that idea?...

If he is still alive, he'd be 65yo + ...

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Just watched this film and realised at the end that the little baby would be 70/71 years old today.

Damn.

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