Citation

Brown KH. Studies in the History of Gardens and Designed Landscapes 1998; 18(2): 93-119.

Copyright

(Copyright © 1998)

DOI

10.1080/14601176.1998.10435536

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

The famous Japanese Tea Garden in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park has four gates: the shôrônomon (or bell tower gate) of 1894, the south gate of 1915, the so-called temple gate of the same year, and the small west gate. It would be fitting if one gate was called the Rashômon (Rashô gate). In Akira Kurosawa's 1950 film Rashômon>, as in Ryûnosuke Akutagawa's 1922 story 'In a Grove' on which it is based, each of several characters gives a markedly different account of a murder to exonerate his own action. The point seems to be the difficulty of discovering the truth and the relativity of 'truth'. Stories about the Japanese Tea Garden similarly constitute such dense and tangled historical fictions that one despairs of recovering a single accurate history and one questions the notion of absolute or objective history. Although the Golden Gate Park garden has been the site of a murder-suicide, its historical mystery revolves around who is responsible for its creation.1 © 1998 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.

Language: en