Rashōmon and Seventeen Other Stories

  1926 Close reading of Bible, but unable to believe in divine miracles. To Kugenuma seashore, south of Tokyo, with Fumi and infant Yasushi, leaving older boys with his family. Marriage “renewed,” but physical and mental ills worsen as use of barbiturates increases. October: “Death Register” published, containing his first public revelation of his mother’s insanity; negative review by novelist Tokuda Shūsei (1871–1943) is a shock. Taishō emperor dies; Shōwa Period begins.

  1927 4 January: Sister’s house partially burns; two days later, her husband, who is suspected of arson, throws himself under a train. Despite illness, Akutagawa forces himself to deal with the complications.

  January–April: Several extended writing sessions in Imperial Hotel; writes “Kappa.”

  April–August: Essay series “Literary, All Too Literary” published, containing his side of famous debate with Tanizaki Jun’ichirō (1886–1965) on the importance of plot in fiction, and repudiating the artificiality of own earlier work.

  7 April: Proposes “Platonic double suicide” to Hiramatsu Masuko (1898–1953), the unmarried, lifelong friend of wife Fumi (“Life,” Sections 47–8). She informs Fumi and artist friend Oana Ryūichi (1894–1966), who force him to give up the idea.

  16 April: Writes first of several “last testaments,” and begins meeting with friends, though only he knows these are final farewells.

  June: Worried about mental illness of writer-friend Uno Kōji (1891–1961), arranges for his involuntary hospitalization through Saitō (“Life,” Section 50).

  23 July: Cheerful lunch with Fumi and three sons, and socializes with visitors. At night, finishes aphoristic manuscript on Christ as a poet who had profound insight into all human beings but himself.

  24 July: At 1:00 a.m. gives aunt Fuki a poem for Dr. Shimojima entitled “Self-Mockery” with reference to “The Nose”: “Oh dripping snot! / The nose-tip all that’s still in view / As darkness falls.”

  2:00 a.m. Comes down from study, crawls into futon in room where Fumi and three sons are sleeping; has probably already taken his fatal dose of Veronal. Falls asleep reading the Bible; leaves testaments addressed to wife and old friends by pillow.

  6:00 a.m. Fumi realizes something is wrong, and notifies Oana and Dr. Shimojima; Akutagawa is pronounced dead shortly after 7:00 a.m. Poet and old friend Kume Masao (1891–1952) releases Akutagawa’s most famous last testament, “A Note to a Certain Old Friend,” to the press that day. The suicide becomes a sensation in the news, seen as a symbol of the defeat of bourgeois modernism at the hands of both socialism and rising state power.

  “Spinning Gears” and “The Life of a Stupid Man” published posthumously.

  Akutagawa’s cremated remains are interred at Tokyo’s Jigenji Temple. The plot later receives ashes of adoptive parents, aunt Fuki, son Takashi (d. 1945, student draftee killed in Burma), wife, and actor and director son Hiroshi (d. 1981). Composer son Yasushi (d. 1989) in his own separate family plot in the cemetery.

  Literary friend and publisher Kikuchi Kan (1888–1948) establishes biannual Akutagawa Prize in 1935 to memorialize Akutagawa and promote Kikuchi’s magazine Bungei Shunjū. The prize remains the most sought-after seal of approval for upcoming writers in Japan.

  NOTES

  1. On Japanese era names, see the article “nengō” in Japan: An Illustrated Encyclopedia, 2 vols. (Tokyo: Kodansha Ltd., 1993), 2:1073.

  2. Like the haiku poet Bashō, Natsume Sōseki is known by his literary sobriquet “Sōseki,” rather than his family name.

  Introduction

  Akutagawa Ryūnosuke: Downfall of the Chosen

  In Japan, Akutagawa Ryūnosuke is a writer of genuinely national stature. If a poll were taken to choose the ten most important “Japanese national writers” since the advent of the modern period in 1868, Akutagawa would undoubtedly be one of them. He might even squeeze in among the top five.1

  But what, in the most concrete terms, is a “writer of national stature” in Japan?

  Such a writer would necessarily have left us works of the first rank that vividly reflect the mentality of the Japanese people of his or her age. This is the most essential point. Of course the works themselves—or at least the writer’s most representative works—must not only be exceptional, they must have the depth and power to survive at least a quarter century after the writer’s death.

  The second important point would be that the writer’s character or life should have inspired widespread respect or strong sympathy. Not that the author would have to be a person of high moral character; some exceptional writers (I will not name them here) have had questions raised about aspects of their private lives. But to be of national stature, they would have garnered the approval and sense of identification of many people with regard to their principled devotion to literature and general world view. The important thing is whether each of them as an individual human being embraced an awareness of the great questions of the age, accepted his or her social responsibility as an artist on the front line, and made an honest effort to shape his or her life accordingly.

  One more point—and this should be the last—is that a writer of national stature should have given us not only solid classics but popular works that appeal to a broad audience—and to young people in particular: works easy enough to read that they appear in the nation’s primary and middle-school textbooks and can be memorized whole by most children. Nat sume Sōseki’s Botchan (1906),2 for example, is read by virtually everyone in Japan who receives a middle-school education. Botchan is hardly Sōseki’s most representative work, but it is a uniquely enjoyable, easy-to-read short novel. Much the same can be said for Shiga Naoya’s innocent allegorical story, “The Shopboy’s God” (1920) and Kawabata Yasunari’s refreshing novella of youth, “The Dancing Girl of Izu” (1926).3 Shimazaki Tōson produced not only ponderous long novels but also spontaneous and moving lyrical poems in the traditional tanka form.4 Moriōgai is most respected for his scholarly historical novels, but he also wrote the love story “The Dancing Girl” (1890) in remarkably beautiful language, and “Sanshō the Steward” (1915)5 is his rewrite of a medieval tale for a modern young audience. The number of readers who have made it all the way through Tanizaki Jun’ichirō’s long novel The Makioka Sisters (1946–8)6 may not be very large, but the work has been filmed several times with some of the most beautiful actresses of their generations in the roles of the four lovely sisters, leaving vivid images in the memories of thousands of viewers. In other words, like spring rain, these works in easily accessible forms have seeped silently into the fertile soil of people’s minds to form something like the foundation of the culture or sensibility of the Japanese.

  Surely in all nations, in all cultures, there exists this kind of basic cultural realm that functions almost subliminally. England has Dickens and Shakespeare, and the United States Melville and Fitzgerald among others. The French have Balzac and Flaubert. The works of these “national writers” are imprinted in the hearts and minds of each individual citizen during youth in forms that take on a nearly absolute authority, and, before anyone is aware of it, they go on to comprise a common perception of literature and culture in the region—i.e. a common identity.

  These works are handed down from teacher to pupil, from parent to child, almost without question, like DNA. They are memorized, recited, discussed in book reports, included in university entrance exams, and once the student is grown up, they become a source for quotation. They are made into movies again and again, they are parodied, and inevitably they become the object of ambitious young writers” revolt and contempt. Finally, each becomes an autonomous sign or symbol or metaphor that functions much like the national flag or the national anthem or one of the country’s primary landscapes (say, in the case of Japan, Mt. Fuji or cherry blossoms). And of course, for better or worse, each becomes an indispensable part of our culture. For without the creation of such archetypes—without such subliminal imprinting—it is almost impossible for us to possess a common cultural awaren
ess.

  For reasons like these, I, like most other Japanese people, came to read several stories by Akutagawa Ryūnosuke when I was in elementary school. Some I read in textbooks, and some as summer homework assignments requiring book reports. I have no idea how much of Akutagawa today’s school children read (or are required to read), but I imagine the situation is not much different from my own time. What I mainly read then were several of the excellent stories that he wrote especially for children—“The Spider Thread,” “Tu Tze-chun,” “The Art of the Occult”—and several more that children can read with pleasure—“The Nose,” “Yam Gruel,”7 etc. When I got a little older, probably when I was in middle school, I read some of his stories containing more violent or burlesque elements such as “Rashōmon,” “In a Bamboo Grove,” “Hell Screen,” and “Kappa,”8 and then in high school I recall advancing to more difficult, introspective, seemingly autobiographical works of “pure literature” as such writing is known in Japan—“Spinning Gears,” “The Life of a Stupid Man,” “Death Register.” I suspect I followed the usual course through Akutagawa’s fiction that any Japanese in the habit of reading would take, advancing from the assigned youth works to where one seeks out the more difficult works on one’s own. One arrives at a general grasp of Akutagawa’s unique fictional world, absorbs it as part of one’s cultural foundation, and then—if one is so inclined—one goes on to range through a broader literary world.

  My own personal favorites among the “Japanese national writers” are Sōseki and Tanizaki, followed—at some distance, perhaps—by Akutagawa.9

  What, then, makes Akutagawa Ryūnosuke special as a Japanese writer?

  What I see as the foremost virtue of his literature is the excellence of his style: the sheer quality of his use of the Japanese language. One never tires of reading and re-reading his best works. Akutagawa was a born short-story writer who produced a great many works, some more successful than others. In fact, there are a good number that would seem to be of no particular interest to the modern reader—or at least to the modern general reader. This may be owing in part to Akutagawa’s own mental instability and to a loss of directional focus in his literature, but when his focus is steady, the sharpness of his style is uniquely and inimitably his own.

  The flow of his language is the best feature of Akutagawa’s style. Never stagnant, it moves along like a living thing. His choice of words is intuitive, natural—and beautiful. Thoroughly schooled in his youth in both foreign languages and Chinese literature, he was able to summon up words of classic elegance seemingly out of thin air—expressions that modern-day writers can no longer use—manipulating them at will into arrangements of remarkable grace. This can be seen with special clarity in his early works, particularly the modern-language rewrites of stories he took from Japan’s two large and varied collections of medieval folk tales, the twelfth-century Tales of Times Now Past and the thirteenth-century A Collection of Tales from Uji: “The Nose,” “In a Bamboo Grove,” “Rashōmon,” “Hell Screen,” “Yam Gruel,” “The Lady, Rokuno-Miya.”10 The ease with which he is able, through sheer force of style, to bring the classic, fantastic world of the medieval tale vividly into the sphere of modern life is truly breathtaking. Akutagawa published his maiden works, “Rashōmon” (1915) and “The Nose” (1916), in university magazines when he was still a 23-year-old student, but in them we can already see his finished, fluent, elegant, and spontaneous style. They read like the work of a seasoned writer, not an unformed student.

  Natsume Sōseki, Akutagawa’s senior as “national writer,” was amazed when he read “The Nose,” and he made a point of writing the youthful new author a letter of encouragement: “Put together another 20 or 30stories like this,” he said, “and there will be nobody to match you in the literary world.”11 As kind as he is known to have been to young writers in general, Sōseki never lavished such unstinting praise on anyone else. Surely, with his deep understanding of literature, Sōseki must have discovered the diamond glowing at its core. Akutagawa debuted, thus, as a fully-formed writer—at least where style and literary sense were concerned.

  Style and literary sense: these were, to be sure, the keenest weapons in Akutagawa’s authorial arsenal, but they also became his authorial Achilles” heel. Precisely because these weapons of his were so sharp and effective, they hindered him somewhat when it came to establishing a long-term scope and direction for his literature. This may resemble the situation of a pianist who has been born with a natural gift for superb technique. Because his fingers move so swiftly and with such clarity, the task of pausing occasionally to look long and hard at something—at the inner depths of the music—can be inhibited before he is even aware of it. His fingers move with natural speed and grace and his mind hurries to keep up. Or perhaps his mind forges ahead and the fingers hurry to keep up. In either case an unbridgeable gap begins to form between him and the movement of time in the world around him. Just such a gap almost certainly added to Akutagawa’s psychological burdens and impelled him toward suicide.

  Still, there is an undeniably breathtaking ferocity to the uninhibited, slashing style of the stories that he wrote in his first five or six years. To take an example from abroad, Akutagawa might well be said to resemble F. Scott Fitzgerald. Fitzgerald, too, was a born writer for whom the short story became the primary battlefield of his career. He made his professional debut at the tender age of twenty at the time of the First World War, and he instantly took the world by storm with his keen, flowing style and his brilliance. He left a good number of excellent works for later generations, but writing at the popular author’s hectic pace, he left fully twice as many works that were not particularly wonderful. Not that this was any great discredit to him. The short-story form itself is marked by just such a history. If ten stories out of a hundred survive to be read by later generations, this has to be counted as a great success. No writer can make every work a masterpiece, nor should a writer be faulted for leaving behind failed or less than fully realized works. In life, it’s the long haul that counts. Sometimes things work out well, and sometimes they don’t. Sometimes you have to write things you’re not too crazy about to make a living. What matters is just how great those ten surviving masterpieces are, which is why both Akutagawa and Fitzgerald still rate highly as authors and their works continue to be read.

  More important than the proportion of first-to second-rate works is the form in which the author brings his youthful brilliance to maturity and transforms it into a literary world of greater depth and breadth. Fitzgerald was by nature incapable of learning from anything but his own personal experience, and that experience was mainly domestic tragedy. His wife Zelda succumbed to mental illness, their marriage fell a part, the Great Depression occurred, and all the while he was drowning in alcohol, as a result of which his popularity plummeted. These things contributed to the deepening of his literature. In his last years, he succeeded in creating works of great poignance that were distinctly different in tone from the acute and lyrical style of his youth (though they never achieved the same commercial success).

  What about Akutagawa? When he ended his life at thirty-five, he had been active as a writer for a mere twelve years, but during that period he attempted a number of literary transformations.

  At the beginning of his career, he wrote a large number of stories modeled after historical events or classical fiction, the stylistic genius of which won him high praise. These are the ones that continue to be read today as classics. Akutagawa was unrivaled for his fine-grained depiction of psychology and for his aphoristic wit. For a time he even became the darling of his age. Then, beginning around 1922, came his middle period, in which we see a degree of stagnation and confusion. Doubts began to plague him: was it all right for him to go on writing transcriptions of historical pieces, supernatural tales divorced from reality, and witty anecdotes one after another? And in fact such critiques began to arise in literary circles. An image began to take shape of Akutagawa’s works as defined by o
ne fellow author: they “seemed to be toying with life with a pair of silver tweezers.” Another called him “a writer who can’t write without props.”12 Nor were these views entirely unwarranted. A certain lofty detachment clung to Akutagawa’s writings as though they were looking at the world from a set distance through a pane of glass, and such a posture naturally invited negative criticisms from the literary world. Akutagawa’s early works had nothing whatever to do with the task we see being performed in Sōseki’s novels, which do remain loftily detached even as they descend to earth and, with great acumen, depict the hearts of the human beings who live there.

  Of course, Akutagawa might conceivably have reacted to such self-doubt and external criticism with defiance, insisting that these were the unique qualities of his writing, whether we like them or not (indeed, no one before him or after him has been able to write as he did). But where this might have been the reaction of a mediocre talent, it was not an available option for Akutagawa, who had been recognized as—and paid the respect due—an author of the first rank. As a writer on the very front line of literature, he was fully awake to the problems of his age and reacted to them with a sense of responsibility and of mission. For better or worse, then, he was a star, one of the chosen. A gallant admission of defeat, a silent withdrawal, a relinquishment of the place he had won: these were not among the life choices he could make. He had to remain where he was: on the front line. And to do so, he would have to clear a new, more ambitious path. This was no easy task for him, however: he never seemed to find that single thing that he absolutely had to write about.