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conversations.value: Provide a description for a book titled Rashomon and Other Stories about Japanese, Rashomon, Prize with the genre: Literature & Fiction, Genre Fiction.
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conversations.value: the author (1892&#8211;1927) was one of the most famous Japanese writers of the last century and was the author of Rashomon and other works. The the author Prize is named in his honor.
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conversations.value: Provide the first five paragraphs for the book.
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conversations.value: Rashomon and Other Stories
  The six stories of this collection were chosen with the aim of presenting Akutagawa's finest and most representative writings. Only one of them (Rashōmon) has appeared in an earlier translation.
  I wish to express my thanks to the following persons, for their kind assistance, and for their many valuable suggestions and criticisms: Mr. C. G. Wells, Chief Writer of the Far East Network; Mr. Walter E. Morgan, Chief of the School Administration and Finance Branch, CIE, SCAP; Mr. Harold Gosling and Mr. John Rockard, correspondents of the British Commonwealth Public Relations; Mr. Richard B. Farnsworth, formerly of CIE, SCAP; and Lieutenant D. L. Donohugh, formerly of the Press Advisory Division, SCAP.
  The stories have a dazzling and perhaps deceptive sheen. Superficial critics called Akutagawa precious, or decadent, or dismissed him as a fatiguingly clever dilettante. Unprepared for the strength of his later satires, they supposed him to care only for the superb texture of his prose. Translation protects us from the seductions of this style, yet encourages a similar error, since the nuances of Akutagawa's prose are what conveys the essence of his thought. Like Natsume Sōseki and Mori Ōgai, whom he admired, Akutagawa used his language delicately, precisely, and with a richness enhanced by a knowledge of several literatures. It is significant that his first published writings were translations of Yeats and Anatole France. He remarked once that words must yield more than the bare dictionary meanings; he had a poet's feeling for their shapes and flavors, as well as their ambiguities, and he combined them with such freshness and economy that his phrasing never lacks distinction. Like Picasso, Akutagawa often varied his style, but always, whatever the particular blend of vernacular and mandarin, he controlled it with scrupulous precision. A master of tone, he gave his stories a cool classic surface, colored but never marred by the wit and warmth underlying that perfect glaze. The composure of his style is undisturbed even by vivid accents of the sordid or the bizarre.
  Detachment was a key strategy to Akutagawa. As a narrator, he liked to be unseen, impersonal; he cultivated the oblique glance. When he did enter his stories, it was usually in the slight role of the observer or the suave self-effacing compiler. Old tales and legends, historical settings of the remote Heian Period or the feudal ages which followed—these he used not to turn his elaborate erudition to account, but to enrich and extend the implications of his themes, and to maintain aesthetic distance. The early era of Christian conversion in Japan, in the sixteenth century, was a favorite of his; in Hōkyōnin no shi (The Martyr) he exploited it to the point of hoax by supporting an archaic style with a source reference which, after an interval for learned controversy, he acknowledged to be fictitious. It suited his ironic taste to play the illusionist who leaves his audience staring blankly into a mirror.
  There are enough Swiftian touches in Akutagawa to show his hatred of stupidity, greed, hypocrisy, and the rising jingoism of the day. But Akutagawa's artistic integrity kept him from joining his contemporaries in easy social criticism or naive introspection. If, too often, his finely enameled miniatures seemed cold, over-subtilized, worn thin by an obsessive critical sense, still they are never merely decorative. What he did was to question the values of his society, dramatize the complexities of human psychology, and study, with a Zen taste for paradox, the precarious balance of illusion and reality. He developed a variety of techniques—from realism to fantasy, symbolism to surrealism—and used all of them in the search for poetic truth. Akutagawa was both intellectual and artist, and it was the quality of his artistry that enabled him to explore these difficult problems as deeply as he did, and to give his perceptions such exquisite and durable form.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Provide five more paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: When they had ridden abreast as far as Awataguchi, Goi found that this did not appear to be Toshihito's destination. In the course of time they rode past Awataguchi.
  Toshihito rode quietly with a smile, intentionally avoiding Goi's face. The houses on both sides gradually became few and far between, till nothing was visible in the broad paddy fields but crows seeking prey, and in the distance the lingering snow on the northern side of the mountain dimmed into a pale blue. The thorny tops of the unclad trees piercing sharp into the clear sky added to the chill of the air.
  As they jogged on, they rode past Yamashina and much further. They went even beyond Sekiyama, and a little after noon they found themselves in front of the Mie Temple. In this temple lived a priest who was on close terms with Toshihito. They paid a call on the priest, and he served them dinner. After dinner, they rode on hastily. The road farther on was much more lonely than the road they had already covered. In those days the whole country swarmed with robbers, and was unsafe everywhere.
  Toshihito smiled. It was the sort of smile that a child who has done mischief gives his parent when he has nearly been found out. It seemed as if the wrinkles at the tip of his nose and the slack muscles at the corners of his eyes were deciding whether or not to burst into laughter.
  He had often heard that Toshihito had lived in Tsuruga for the most part, since he married the heiress to Fujiwara Arihito, but till that moment he had not had the least idea that Toshihito was going to take him so far. First of all he wondered how, with only two servants, he could ever get safely to distant Echizen across the many mountains and rivers. And then he thought of the frequent rumors that travelers had been killed by robbers. He raised an imploring face to Toshihito.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Provide the last four paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: But the pond of Sarusawa, not a ripple rising, reflected back the spring sunlight. The sky was bright and clear with not a speck of cloud floating. Still the spectators, as closely packed as ever under sun-shades and flat tents and behind the balustrades of stands, awaited the appearance of the dragon king in the throes of expectation, as if they had been unaware of the passage of time from morning to noon and from noon to evening.
  Nearly half a day had gone by since Hanazō had arrived there. Then a streak of cloud like the smoke of a joss stick trailed in mid-air. Suddenly it grew larger and larger, and the sky which had been bright and clear became dusky. At that moment a gust of wind swept down over the pond and ruffled the glassy surface of the water into innumerable waves. Then in the twinkling of an eye, white rain came down in torrents before the spectators, prepared as they were, had time to scurry helter-skelter. Furthermore, terrific claps of thunder suddenly pealed, and flashes of lightning flew past one another like wefts of a fabric. Then hooked hands seemed to tear apart a cluster of clouds, and in the excess of their force they raised a spout of water over the pond. At that instant Hanazō's eyes caught a blurred vision of a black dragon more than one hundred feet long ascending straight into the sky, with its golden talons flashing. But this happened in a twinkling. After that, amidst a storm, cherry blossoms around the pond were seen flying up into the dusky sky. It hardly need be said that the disconcerted spectators, as they scurried away, formed waves of humanity which surged like the waves in the pond.
  So probably it was not only the eyes of Hanazō, or Kurodo Tokugyo, who saw the dragon. Yes, later it was said that most of the people of all ages and sexes who had been there on that day had seen the black dragon ascending to heaven in a dark cloud.
  Later Hanazō confessed that the notice-board had been his own mischievous idea. But I am told none of his fellow-priests, not even Emon, believed his confession. Now did his notice-board hit the mark? Or did it miss? Ask Hanazō or Kurodo Kokugyo the Big Nosed, and probably he himself will be unable to reply to this question.