ABSTRACTThis case study centers on the adaptation of metaphorical language in Akira
Kurosawa's Rashomon (1950) and examines visual metaphor in the film. In it, I identify
key metaphors from two short stories by Ryunosuke Akutagawa on which the film isbased, “Rashomon” (1915) and “In a Grove” (“Yabu no Naka”) (1922), and observe howthese metaphors subsequently appear within the works’ script and film adaptations.
I begin by establishing a framework to classify and analyze the works’ metaphors,
based in part upon the principles of Conceptual Metaphor Theory. Further, I reflect onwhat visual factors govern viewers’ literal and metaphorical interpretations of images infilm. Following the work of Charles Forceville and other researchers in visual metaphor,
I differentiate between explicitly signaled metaphors (e.g., visuals that must be interpretedmetaphorically) and implicitly signaled metaphors (e.g., visuals that allow for literalinterpretation but conceal metaphorical meaning).
The study is composed of three main sections: short story analysis, script
analysis, and film analysis. In my short story analysis, I seek out metaphorical expressions
integral to Akutagawa’s short stories. Criteria for “integral” here are based on argumentsfrom Akutagawa scholars as well as my own observations about the expressions inrelation to Akutagawa’s greater body of works. More specifically, I select metaphorswhich carry thematic weight and are used to express character interiority within the texts.
I propose that figurative language often accompanies expressions of character interiority,
since the concepts of dilemma, struggle, and suffering, all key components of characterinteriority, are abstract in nature and therefore may be effectively expressed through aprocess that essentially filters the abstract through the concrete (i.e., metaphor).
In my script analysis, I observe that adapted metaphors appearing as dialogue inthe script utilize plainer language than the original expressions, likely as the result of thescreenwriter’s efforts to make the sometimes-marked language of the original text moreeasily comprehensible to film viewers. Analyzing the context in which they appear, I go
on to argue that some of these metaphors are primed for interpretation through visual cues
before the spoken line containing the metaphor is uttered, such as when a character faces
a gust of wind before delivering a line in which he describes words as “storm-like.”
Additionally, I demonstrate how certain metaphorical expressions are present in thescript’s scene descriptions, despite not being present in dialogue (conversely, I later findexamples metaphors that are present in the final film but absent from the script). I
conclude from this that script analysis is a valuable but incomplete tool for tracking theprogression of metaphor from literature to film—valuable because it offers insight into
how a scriptwriter might handle the adaptation of challenging metaphorical expressions,1and incomplete because the final film may not adhere to its contents.
I make three main arguments in my film analysis. First, that actors’choreographed movements in the film, some of which are also detailed in the script, echo
the metaphorical language of the original short stories (as when, for instance, a character“freezes” in fear upon seeing her husband’s eyes “filled with cold light”). Seen with thecontext of the script, which stresses that a character is, for instance, specifically “frozen,”
it is evident that metaphorical expressions from Akutagawa’s original short stories may
motivate these motions. Second, I assert that the film primes viewer interpretation ofcertain metaphorical expressions by visually linking the subject of a metaphor to images
associated with that which it will be likened to, such as when a character is visually linked
to clouds, white, and bright light before being compared to a female bodhisattva. Third, I
argue that the conceptualization of wind, clouds, and other weather phenomena isessential to how interiority is expressed in the film. Informed by research from scholars
who focus on weather metaphors in Japanese, I argue that the film shows several visual
manifestations of Japanese weather metaphors.
This case study concludes by classifying the methods by which selected
metaphorical expressions are manifested in the film. I note that, of the metaphors adapted
onscreen, all are either explicitly signaled through dialogue or cued through a
combination of dialogue and visual/multimodal images. The study found no instances ofthe metaphorical expressions being signaled explicitly through visuals alone. Finally, ofthe metaphors examined, implicit visual metaphors tended to occur before their explicit
manifestations were elicited in dialogue, further suggesting that visuals serve to prime
viewer interpretation of verbal metaphors in the film.

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