Rashomon

Rain falls on the great gate of Kyoto, which has gone to ruin: foxes and thieves live in it now, and the city has taken to leaving its unclaimed dead in the tower above. Beneath it a dismissed servant sits fingering the pimple on his cheek, trying to choose between starving honestly and living as a thief, and finding he has the nerve for neither. Then a light flickers upstairs. Among the corpses an old woman is pulling the long hair, strand by strand, from a dead woman's head to sell for wigs, and her defence is worse than the deed: the dead woman, she says, sold chopped snake to the palace guards as dried fish, so she would surely understand. Akutagawa was a student of twenty-three when he wrote it, and in a handful of pages he lets a whole moral order crumble like the gate. Watch the servant's righteous fury curdle as he listens, because the most frightening thing in the story is how reasonable she sounds, and how quickly a conscience can change with the weather.