3. house in the suburbs: Akutagawa was eighteen years old in 1910 when he, his adoptive parents, and Aunt Fuki moved into a house owned by his biological father near the latter’s pastureland.
4. Mukōjima… since the Edo Period: Before the Meiji Restoration and the renaming of the city of Edo as Tokyo in 1868, Edo had been the capital of the Tokugawa Shōguns. The eastern bank of the Sumida River, known as Mukōjima, was one of Edo’s prime spots for viewing cherry blossoms.
5. elder colleague: The writer Tanizaki Jun’ichirō (1886–1965), best known in the West for such novels as The Key (1956) and The Makioka Sisters (1943–8), attended Tokyo Imperial University from 1908 until he was expelled in 1911 following his widely heralded debut on the literary scene. In 1914 Akutagawa and some friends revived the short-lived literary magazine (see Section 8) that Tanizaki had used to attract critical attention to his own work.
6. a world of which he knew nothing: Automobiles were still in development and far beyond the reach of ordinary people during Akutagawa’s lifetime. Having left home, Tanizaki was a far more free-spirited individual than Akutagawa, especially after the successful launching of his writing career in 1910, some three or four years before the presumed setting of this episode, and Akutagawa is inordinately impressed at his elder’s ability to fritter away several hours in such a luxurious way.
7. phlegm: In May 1915 Akutagawa seems to have been coughing up phlegm, perhaps mixed with blood, and feared he might have tuberculosis, but tests proved otherwise.
8. a piece set against a Heian Period background: This probably refers to “Rashōmon” (see its headnote).
9. The Master: Natsume Sōseki: see “The Writer’s Craft,” “The Baby’s Sickness,” and “Spinning Gears.”
10. he first met the Master: Akutagawa was probably first honored by an invitation to attend a “Thursday Evening” literary gathering in Sōseki’s home on 18 November 1915 with his friend and fellow Sōseki “disciple” Kume (see ARSJ, p. 163).
11. the Kongō: The name of an actual cruiser in the Japanese navy. Akutagawa was treated to a cruise on it in 1917.
12. The Master’s Death: When Sōseki died on 9 December 1916, Akutagawa was in Kamakura, and finally got back to Tokyo on the 11th and manned the reception table at the Aoyama Funeral Hall service (see IARZ 24:94–5; ARSJ, pp. 224–5).
13. his aunt, who had ordered him to deliver it: Akutagawa married Tsukamoto Fumi on 2February 1918, and Aunt Fuki lived with them at first and took the traditional role of overbearing mother-in-law. She returned to Tokyo in mid-April, which undoubtedly accounts for the serenity of Section 15.
14. bashō leaves: Akutagawa wrote to a friend that their house was “a little too big for us” but that “the surroundings, with a lotus pond and bashō plants, are rather elegant” (NKBT 38:248 n. 5). On the poetic bashō plant, see “Spinning Gears” (and note 20).
15. Butterfly: Besides his wife, four women of interest appear in this story: (1) the woman in this section, who is thought to be the same as the “crazy girl” in Sections 21, 26 and 38, with an indirect reference via her husband in 28; (2) the unidentified woman whose face seems to be bathed in moonlight in sections 18, 23, 27, and 30; (3) the “Woman of Hokuriku” in Section 37; and (4) the “Platonic suicide” woman in Sections 47 and 48.
16. went to work for a newspaper: Akutagawa offered to join the Tokyo branch of the Osaka Mainichi Shinbun newspaper in March 1919 and moved to Tokyo the following month; in return for writing “several” stories a year for the paper, this contract gave him a regular income of 130 yen per month but no manu script fees. He had been an “associate” of the paper since 1918, an arrangement that left him free to publish stories in any magazines he liked but prohibited him from writing for any other newspaper (see NKBT 38:250 nn. 5, 6).
17. Crazy Girl… failed to capture her heart: In a last letter to his artist friend Oana Ryūichi (see next note), Akutagawa mentioned his affair with the poet Hide Shigeko (1890–1973; early pen name Tomone Shigeko), when he was twenty-nine, as one source of the suffering that was impelling him to suicide: it was not a matter of conscience, he said, but regret at what his involvement with such a headstrong, lustful woman had done to his life. He had spotted her at a literary gathering in June 1919 and pursued her aggressively, only to be repelled by her greater aggressiveness. (At the time, Fumi was pregnant with their first child: see Section 24.) The “crazy girl” (he calls her a “girl” despite her being two years his senior and married, with a five-year-old son) also appears in Sections 26and 38, and in “Spinning Gears” as “my Fury… my goddess of vengeance” (p. 222). Her husband (thought also to be the man in Section 28) was an electrical engineer who had studied modern theatrical lighting abroad before they married in 1912. She would have a second son with him in January 1921and tell Akutagawa the child was his. See IARZ 23:84–5; Kikuchi Hiroshi et al. (eds.), Akutagawa Ryū nosuke jiten (Meiji shoin, 1985), p. 419; ARSJ, pp. 344–50; Sekiguchi Yasuyoshi (ed.), Akutagawa Ryū nosuke shin-jiten (Kanrin shobō, 2003), pp. 397, 505–6.
18. the painter: Thus, in 1919, began Akutagawa’s close friendship with the Western painter Oana Ryūichi (1894–1966), who did the cover art for most of Akutagawa’s books after 1921. Akutagawa dedicated “The Baby’s Sickness” to him.
19. The Great Earthquake: The writer Kawabata Yasunari (1899–1972) has recorded his impressions of his trek with Akutagawa and another friend through the devastation of the Great Kantō Earthquake. The pond was located in the Yoshiwara pleasure district.
20. “Those whom the gods love die young”: In Greek mythology, after the brothers Trophonius and Agamedes had built the temple of Apollo at Delphi, they were rewarded by the gods with death as the fulfillment of their greatest wish (Micha F. Lindemans, Encyclopedia Mythica (online)).
21. His sister’s husband… perjury: Akutagawa’s brother-in-law, lawyer Nishikawa Yutaka (1885–1927), the second husband of his sister Hisa, had been disbarred and jailed in 1923 for inciting a client to commit perjury. He was under suspicion of arson when he killed himself in January 1927 after his over-insured house burned down (hence the reference to Akutagawa’s sister having lost her house to fire). Hisa had two children with each husband and remarried the first husband, a veterinarian, after the second’s death. Akutagawa never got along well with her or with his half-brother, Tokuji, “but his position as first son gave him a lifelong responsibility for their welfare” (Howard S. Hibbett, “Akutagawa Ryūnosuke,” in Jay Rubin (ed.), Modern Japanese Writers (New York: Scribners, 2001), p. 20). All three appear in “Spinning Gears.”
22. a short Russian man: This is thought to be an image of Lenin.
23. a story: This has been thought to refer to “Noroma ningyō” (“Noroma puppets”), an early story (1916) in which a nearly defunct form of traditional Japanese comic puppetry provokes the narrator to thoughts of universality vs. cultural determination in the arts. If there is any hint of self-reproach in the story regarding his inability to be fully liberated, it is very subtle. Other scholars have noted thematic ties with “Loyalty” (see IARZ 16:338, n. 57.2).
24. “Woman of Hokuriku”: Akutagawa stated that he had no affairs after the age of thirty and that writing lyric poetry helped him avoid the complications of an affair when he did feel love for a married woman one last time. “Woman of Hokuriku” (“Koshibito”) was a series of twenty-five poems in the archaic sedōka form (5-7-7, 5-7-7 syllables), though the piece he quotes is one of three archaic four-line “Love Letter Poems” (sōmon)(7-5, 7-5, 7-5, 7-5) that were also prompted by the near affair. Akutagawa no doubt chose the old forms because the fear of compromised reputations was a theme in Japanese love poetry from the earliest times. Katayama Hiroko (1878–1957), wife of a prominent bureaucrat, wrote poetry and achieved fame as a translator of Irish literature under the name Matsumura Mineko. She was not actually from Hokuriku, but Akutagawa’s close call with her occurred in the resort town of Karuizawa (see “Spinning Gears,” note 8), near the old rout
e to Hokuriku, in the summer of 1924(CARZ 6:207, 214; 8:117; NKBT 38:258, nn. 3–7).
25. Punishment: Here, “fukushū” (normally “vengeance”) is thought to mean the punishment that later events can wreak for earlier actions (NKBT 38:258, n. 8).
26. Divan: Goethe’s West-östlicher Divan (West-Eastern Divan (1819)), a volume of poetry inspired in part by his reading of the Persian poet Hafiz in German translation.
27. Tōson’s New Life: Shimazaki Tō son (1872–1943) has often been criticized for exploiting his family to create his autobiographical novels. In Shinsei (New Life (1918–19)), he exposed his affair with a niece.
28. the tree Swift saw: While barely fifty, Jonathan Swift (1667–1745) is reported to have pointed to a withered tree and predicted, with unsettling accuracy, “I shall be like that tree. I shall die from the top.” See Robert Wyse Jackson, Jonathan Swift: Dean and Pastor (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1939), p. 94.
29. fond of her: Hiramatsu Masuko, a close friend of Fumi, had been ill in her youth, and never married.
30. a shii tree: Shii can designate either Castanopsis cuspidata or Castanopsis sieboldi. The “Japanese chinquapin” is related to the Giant Evergreen-chinkapin of the northwestern United States.
31. “Poetry and Truth”: Dichtung und Wahrheit is the subtitle of Goethe’s autobiography Aus meinem Leben (1811–33).
32. One of his friends went mad: Akutagawa’s good friend, the novelist Uno Kōji, was suffering from mental illness and was treated (first with a rest cure at a hot-spring resort, later with actual hospitalization) by Saitō Mokichi, who also treated Akutagawa (see “Spinning Gears,” note 19). The rose-eating episode was simply one example of Uno’s odd behavior at the time (ARSJ, pp. 605–10).
33. “God’s soldiers are coming to get me”: Given as, “Listen to something terrible. In three days I am going to be shot by God’s soldiers,” in “Foreword” by Jean Cocteau, in Raymond Radiguet, Count d’Orgel’s Ball (1924), tr. Annapaola Cancogni (Hygiene, Colorado: Eridanos Press, 1989), p. xii.
SPINNING GEARS (Haguruma)
1. Tōkaidō Line: The 320-mile-long Tōkaidō (Eastern Sea Road) has been the main route between Kyoto and Tokyo since the seventeenth century, traveled at first on foot and horseback (nowadays on the Shinkansen “Bullet” train). In late April 1926, Akutagawa, suffering from a host of ills including insomnia and nervous exhaustion, left his two older sons at home and took his wife Fumi and infant son Yasushi for the first of several lengthy stays through the end of that year in Kugenuma, off the Tōkaidō main rail-line, to which he would connect by car for the thirty-mile trip to Tokyo (see ARSJ, p. 350). For further autobiographical details, see the Chronology.
2. natsume: This round fruit comes from a jujube or Chinese date tree. The word also echoes the name of Natsume Sōseki, whose presence as Akutagawa’s erstwhile literary “Master” (Sensei) can be felt on many levels in this reconsideration of the role of the writer and the man-made wings that bring him too close to the sun. See also note 20.
3. Oyako-donburi: Literally, “parent-child bowl,” a bowl of rice topped with a moist concoction of chicken cooked in eggs.
4. elementary-school girls: Under the revised school system of 1907, six years of compulsory elementary education could be followed by another four years of “higher elementary school.” The girls mentioned here would be of middle-school age today.
5. infection: Literally he senses she has empyema (chikunōshō)in her nose. The term was used loosely, with none of its dire clinical overtones, to describe a nasal voice when there were no obvious cold symptoms.
6. cooperatives: Farmers’ cooperative societies were an increasingly important feature of the Chinese economy at the time, and the friend’s overseas venture may have been doomed by a failure to obtain credit with such organizations.
7. Mme. Caillaux’s shooting: In 1914, Henriette, the wife of the French Minister of Finance, Joseph Caillaux, killed the newspaper’s owner for attacks on her husband’s reputation. Joseph resigned to participate in her successful defense.
8. Karuizawa: A fashionable summer resort with a large foreign contingent.
9. modern whatchamacallems: He is trying to recall “modan gãru” (modern girl), Japan’s equivalent of “flapper.”
10. kirin… hōō: Japanese pronunciations of the Chinese mythical beasts qilin (or kylin) and fenghuang. The kirin, which is said to appear on auspicious occasions such as prior to the birth of a sage, is a composite of several animals but is overall deerlike and does indeed have a single horn like a unicorn’s. (The word has been borrowed to mean “giraffe” in modern Japanese.) See also note 36. The equally auspicious hō ō is often compared with the Western phoenix.
11. Yao and Shun… Han period: Yao and Shun were model emperors from the misty legendary era of Chinese history. Also known as the Chronicles of Lu, the Spring and Autumn Annals is a simple chronology of the Chinese state of Lu, covering the years 722–481 BC. As with the other classics discussed by Confucius in the sixth century BC, its authorship is unknown, but it certainly predated the Han dynasty (206 BC–220 AD).
12. “Worm”… a legendary creature: Akutagawa is probably relating this to the Old English “wyrm,” meaning “serpent,” and also to a part of his own name meaning “dragon.”
13. one sandal: Jason’s single sandal marked him as an enemy of the wicked king Pelias and led to his being sent on the quest for the golden fleece.
14. volcanic stone: The stone referred to here is tufa, or Neocene quartz, a greenish-gray rock formed of heat-fused volcanic detritus, and this architectural detail leaves little doubt that “Spinning Gears” is set in Frank Lloyd Wright’s fashionable, expensive Imperial Hotel, a Tokyo landmark. Wright’s liberal use of the soft, easily-carved stone was a mark of his architecture in Japan. He found his supply in the town of Ōya-machi, where it was popularly called Ōya stone, but Akutagawa repeatedly refers to it by the more general term gyōkaigan (fused ash stone), perhaps recalling its volcanic (= hellish?) origin. Hiramatsu Masuko’s father (see Sections 47 and 48 of “The Life of a Stupid Man” and note 29), a lawyer connected with the hotel, probably was able to make affordable arrangements for the famous author (see ARSJ, pp. 566–79).
15. arson… perjury: See “The Life of a Stupid Man,” Section 31 (and note 21).
16. Die, damn you:“Kutabatte shimae!” This was the curse hurled at the young Hasegawa Tatsunosuke (1864–1909) when he told his father he wanted to be a novelist, and from which he created his pen name, Futabatei Shimei. Akutagawa is probably echoing Futabatei’s well-known misgivings about the writing of fiction as a profession.
17. “Oh, Lord… soon perish”: This “prayer,” which begs the deity of the Bible both for punishment and for a withholding of wrath, bears some resemblance to Psalm 38, in which David begs God to ease off on his anger, which is causing him a laundry list of physical and mental afflictions: “O Lord, rebuke me not in thy wrath: neither chasten me in thy hot displeasure. For thine arrows stick fast in me, and thy hand presseth me sore” (verses 1–2; King James Version).
18. nerves: Akutagawa wrote similar aphorisms several times. E.g. in Words of a Dwarf (Shuju no kotoba), an aphoristic essay series, which was serialized in 1923: see also note 25 below (see IARZ 16:82).
19. Aoyama… Numal: Akutagawa was obtaining drugs from the head of the Aoyama Hospital, Saitō Mokichi, who was shocked to hear that Akutagawa had killed himself, perhaps with the very drugs that he had given him (“Introduction,” Mokichi Saitō, Red Lights, tr. and introduction by Seishi Shinoda and Sanford Goldstein (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue Research Foundation, 1989), p. 59). (See also note 41.) Veronal (a white crystalline British product known also as Diethylmalonyl urea, diethylbarbituric acid, and Barbital) was a brand-name barbiturate that Virginia Woolf had used in an early suicide attempt. Akutagawa succeeded in ending his life with it. The other drugs have not been identified.
20. bashōplants at the Sōseki Retreat: Sōseki
Sanbō (“retreat”) was the poetic name for Sōseki’s study (and, more generally, his home), especially in connection with the Thursday gatherings. See also “The Life of a Stupid Man,” notes 10 and 12. The large but fragile leaves of the bashō (banana or plantain) are a traditional symbol of evanescence, as employed in the pen name of Bashō; see also Section 13 of “The Life of a Stupid Man” (and note 14).
21. Legends: Akutagawa uses a Japanese translation of the title of August Strindberg’s Legender (1898). Maruzen is the bookstore mentioned in Section 1 of “The Life of a Stupid Man.” It remains the premier retailer of foreign books in Japan.
22. Chinese story… Handan style: Akutagawa mistakenly attributes this anecdote by Zuangzi (or Chuang Tzu, fourth-century BC Daoist philosopher) to Han Fei (280?–233? BC). For an English translation, see Zuangzi, The Complete Works of Chuang Tzu, tr. Burton Watson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1968), 2. p. 187.
23. art of slaughtering dragons: A metaphor for a useless skill. Again the anecdote comes from Zuangzi. For an English translation, see The Complete Works of Chuang Tzu, tr. Watson, p. 355.
24. inkstone: A flat, usually rectangular, carved stone slab used for grinding sticks of dried India ink with a few drops of water to make black ink for use in calligraphy, ink painting, etc.
25. “Life is… hell itself”: The quotation appears in the section titled “Hell” (“Jigoku”) (IARZ 13:52 and CARZ 5:80).
26. Suiko… embodiment of loyalty: Suiko was an empress who reigned from 592 to 628. Akutagawa never wrote this piece. The (bronze) statue of Kusunoki Masashige (1294–1336) was of a general known for his absolute loyalty to the emperor. Though considered a rebel by many of his contemporaries, Masashige was honored after 1868 in support of the modern myth of imperial divinity.
27. A Dark Night’s Passing: An’ya kōro (1921; 1922–37) by Shiga Naoya (1883–1971), tr. by Edwin McClellan (Kodansha International, 1976). The anguished hero was still far from attaining his final calm when Akutagawa read the parts of the novel available in his day.