haikai: Refers both to what would now be called haiku and to haikai no renga ‘linked verse’.
haori: A jacket worn over a kimono.
hokku: An initial stanza, consisting of 5-7-5 syllables, sometimes functioning as a verse on its own.
kana: Referring to the two sets Japanese syllabic letters, hiragana and katakana, deriving originally from simplified Chinese characters.
koto: A thirteen-stringed plucked zither.
-kun: A somewhat less polite honorific name suffix than “-san,” typically used in reference to young men.
marumage: A married woman’s hairstyle, with a bun at the top. It was going out of fashion even in Akutagawa’s time.
Meisen: A famous silk fabric produced in Tochigi Prefecture and characterized by its glossy sheen.
nagauta: Kabuki dance music, lit. ‘long song’.
o-: An honorific prefix; until recent times, it was still used before women’s names, as in “The Villa of the Black Crane.”
ojisan: Lit. ‘uncle’, though often used fictively, particularly as a vocative.
okusan: A polite term for wife, it is sometimes used vocatively.
otōsan: ‘Father’, as a polite term of reference or address, sometimes used by wives when speaking to or about their husbands.
qílín: The birth of sages, notably Confucius, is said to be heralded by the qílín. (Also see fènghuáng.)
sen: One-hundredth of a yen, valued at the time at fifty cents.
sensei: Derived from Chinese (lit. ‘prior-born’), the term is used most commonly to address and refer to teachers and physicians, but also, more generally, attorneys, politicians, and writers. It can be used sarcastically and, as such, is regarded with ambivalence, particularly by frequent addressees. Akutagawa nonetheless refers in his writings to his mentor Natsume Sōseki as “Sensei.”
shaku: A measure of length, ca. 14.4 inches.
shamisen: A three-stringed plucked lute.
shōchū: Sometimes described as “Japanese gin,” it is a distilled liquor made variously from rice, barley, and sweet potatoes.
suikan: An upper garment, washed without starch and left to dry, came to be part of the uniform dress of low-ranking attendants, though the thief in “Fortune” is also noted as wearing one at the time of his capture.
tatami: A straw mat covered with a soft reed surface. A six-mat room measures approximately 18 square feet.
ukiyoé (lit. ‘pictures of the floating world’): This genre of woodblock print, a symbol of the Edo period, was already dying in the Meiji era.
yukata: An unlined summer kimono, typically made of cotton.
NAMES
Abbot Toba (or Toba Sōjō, 1053–1140): Best known for his association with the Heian-period satirical depiction of frolicking animals, he is no longer believed to have been the author of this or any other work credited to him.
Fukuzawa Yukichi (1835–1901): Born into a low-ranking samurai family, Fukuzawa became a highly influential educator and writer, founding what is now Keiō University. His image appears on the Japanese ten-thousand-yen note.
Gozeta Hōbai: A play on the names Goseda Hōryū(1827–92) and Goseda Yoshimatsu (1855–1915). Hōryūwas a student of the Italian painter Antonio Fontanesi; Yoshimatsu, his son, studied in France and was known in particular as a portrait artist.
Hé Rú Zhāng (1838–91): China’s first modern ambassador to Japan (1876–79).
Hiroshige (1797–1858): The nom d’artiste of Andō Tokutarō, most famous for his Fifty-three Stations of the Tokaido Road.
Ichikawa Sadanji I (1842–1904): One of the three great Kabuki actors of the Meiji era.
Inoue Seigetsu (1822–87): The wandering poet was much extolled by Akutagawa. He is buried in the City of Ina in Nagano Prefecture.
Iwai Hanshirō VIII (1829–82): A famous onnagata, a Kabuki female impersonator.
Kikugorō V (1844–1903): Regarded as one of the two greatest Kabuki actors of the period, he first appeared in Western garb in the 1880s.
Mushanokōji Saneatsu (1885–1976): A painter as well as an important literary figure; a co-founder of Shirakaba (‘White Birch’), a literary school intended to offer an alternative to naturalism.
Shu Shunsui (1600–82): Japanese form of ZhūShùnshuĭ, who fled Manchu rule in China to settle in Japan, where he made an important contribution to the understanding of Neo-Confucianism. The monument was erected in 1912 at the elite Tōkyō First Higher School, where Akutagawa was a pupil.
Sonojo (1649–1723): A female disciple of Bashō.
Taiso Yoshitoshi (1838–92): Known for his realistic, indeed shocking, wood-block prints; became a newspaper illustrator in the Meiji era.
Tōkabō: Also Watanabe no Kurō, Kagami Shikō. Still in his late twenties when Bashō died, he had only recently become a disciple. He later wrote Oi–Nikki (Knapsack Diary), one of the accounts of Bashō’s death.
PLACES
Asakusa: Located on the west bank of the Sumidagawa not far from where Akutagawa grew up, it is a symbol of shitamachi, the low-lying eastern area of Tōkyō known both for the temple Sensōji (Asakusa Kannon) and for its entertainment area, including the Rokku area.
Hagidera (lit. ‘bush-clover temple’): An alternate name for Ryūganji, located in eastern Tōkyō, across the Sumida River from Miura’s mansion.
Keijō: The Korean capital (Seoul) as it was known during Japanese rule (1910–1945).
Oumayabashi: The bridge crosses the Sumidagawa just below Kumakata, once the site of the entrance to Asakusa Temple.
Shubi-no-matsu: In Edo times, men would take boats through a canal of the Sumida River to Machiyama and there proceed to Shin-Yoshiwara, the licensed quarter. The tree in question (‘pine tree of beginnings and endings’) was a point of rendezvous going to and fro.
Suijin: In the forested area (‘the grove of the water god’) of Mukōjima Shrine, on the eastern side of the Sumida River.
HISTORICAL AND LITERARY REFERENCES
An’ya Kōro: A Dark Nights Passing is as heavily autobiographical novel by Shiga Naoya (1883–1971).
Divan: West-Östlicher Divan, written between 1814 and 1819, reflects both Goethe’s Orientalism and his ambivalence toward Christianity.
Divine Age: Kamiyo, a term dating back to the early eighth-century Chronicles of Japan (Nihon-shoki), which begins with a mythological account of the nation’s origins.
Jigokuhen: “Hell Screen,” Akutagawa’s heavily adapted story from a Heian-period collection of tales (Uji-shūi Monogatari) about a brilliant but monstrous painter.
Jinpūren Rebellion: The “League of the Divine Wind” (also Shinpūren) was formed in 1872 by former samurai in Kumamoto, Kyūshū. Deprivation of their right to wear swords triggered a short-lived rebellion in 1876, leading to other insurrections in southern Japan.
Nansō-Satomi-Hakkenden: Chronicle of the Eight Dogs of Nansō Satomi. The epic by Takizaki Bakin (1767–1848) is set in the fifteenth century. After being defeated in a rebellion, the warrior family Satomi puts down roots in Kazusa (Nansō). The eight “dogs” (with each bearing ‘-inu’, ‘canine’, as a name suffix) are the warriors who lead the successful restoration of the clan.
Shakkō: Red Lights by Saitō Mokichi, Akutagawa’s friend, physician, and the provider of the Veronal with which Akutagawa killed himself.
Shinsei: New Life by the writer Shimazaki Tōson (1872–1943), who confessed to having seduced and impregnated his own niece Komako before running off to France to escape the consequences.
Shuju no Kotoba: Words of a Dwarf, serialized between 1923 and 1927 in Bungeishunjū.
Tenkibo: Death Register, published in 1926. The autobiographical sketch mentions, among other things, the mental illness of Akutagawa’s mother, hence the comment that ends the conversation.
TRANSLATOR’S AFTERWORD
“The district in which I was born,” wrote Akutagawa Ryūnosuke in 1912, “lies near the banks of the Great River.” Still in secondary school when h
e composed a youthfully exuberant encomium to the lower reaches of the Sumidagawa, flowing through the heart of Japan’s capital and into the bay, he was already composing autobiographical fiction. In fact, the author was born in Akaishi, on the western side of the river, not far from Tsukiji. His boyhood home was Mukōjima, situated on the eastern bank, across from Asakusa, and known for its geisha and teahouses. The date of his birth was March 1, 1892.
As is clear from the stories, Akutagawa was a voracious and eclectic reader. Since boyhood, he had been particularly fond of the classical folktale collection Konjaku Monogatari [Tales of Times Now Past]. While still a student, he wrote several ironic and psychologically insightful adaptations of these (cf. “Fortune”). If judged solely by titles, the most famous of these is Rashōmon, published in 1915, though in actual content, it is Yabu no Naka [In a Grove] (1922), which centers on a crime of rape and murder (or suicide) related from multiple perspectives. It is this story that forms the basis of Kurosawa Akira’s renowned 1950 film Rashōmon. Though the film’s title is only peripherally related to Akutagawa’s tale of the same name, it has nonetheless become the source of rashomonesque, an epithet for the theme of subjectivism.
In his later years, Akutagawa suffered greatly from physical and psychological ailments, the latter aggravated by his fear of hereditary insanity. On July 24, 1927, a Bible beside his bed, Akutagawa took an overdose of Veronal. Included in letters left for his wife and friends is the oft-cited, cryptic explanation: “a vague sort of anxiety about my future” (boku no shōrai ni tai-suru tada bon’yari to shita fuan). The event was cause for a huge media sensation, and these words in particular were seized upon by pundits as somehow symbolic of the times and portentous for Japan.
It is not difficult to imagine that Akutagawa himself would have found it all both amusing and exasperating. In 1935, a literary prize in his honor was established at the suggestion of his friend and fellow writer, Kikuchi Kan (1888–1948), by the magazine Bungei-Shunjū. In the West, Akutagawa’s name, though hardly unknown, is most likely to be associated with those stories containing macabre or supernatural elements, with the theme of Rashōmon, or simply with Japan’s oft-noted history of literary suicides. His more famous works have been translated and retranslated, with considerable variation in literary skill, leaving Akutagawa to suffer less from obscurity than from typecasting. The present collection, containing several stories made available to the English-speaking audience for the first time, is intended to contribute to a richer understanding and appreciation of this, one of Japan’s early modern literary giants.
The original texts are taken from the Akutagawa-zenshū [The Complete Works of Akutagawa Ryūnosuke], Volumes 1–4, published by Chikumashobō, Tōkyō, 1964 [1970]. Japanese names are given in East Asian order, surname preceding personal name. Chinese names and words are treated according to context. The name of the Chinese restaurant in “An Evening Conversation” is rendered in Sino-Japanese: Tōtōtei, not Táotáo-díng; on the other hand, the word that the narrator in “Cogwheels” would presumably have pronounced as Sino-Japanese kirin is represented in qílín.
A brief note about the Romanization of Japanese and Chinese names may be in order. The macron over vowels (e.g. ō vs. o) indicates length for Japanese words. For Chinese words, the four tones are marked, e.g. ō, ó, ǒ, and ò. For Japanese words, n before m, p, and b is pronounced m.
Resisting a propensity widespread among academics, I have kept the notes to a minimum. Particularly for “The Life of a Fool” and “Cogwheels,” where literary references and autobiographical allusions abound, the temptation to “explain” has been strong—and thus partially placated with “Additional Terminology” at the end. Curious readers may avail themselves of that appendix, though it is not—and is not intended to be—complete. Not even Akutagawa’s own Japanese contemporaries would have understood all of his fragmentary and troubled musings at the end of his life, and to relentlessly render factual—historical or biographical—what should be left as literary would surely spoil the story.
I wish to express boundless gratitude to Jill Schoolman for her wisdom and patience over several years, as I struggled to complete this work, and to Masako Nakamura, from whose keen eye, extraordinary linguistic sense, cross-cultural learning, and unending generosity I have undeservedly benefited for more than twenty years. Finally, to my family and above all to my wife, Keiko: Arigatō gozaimasu.
Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, Mandarins: Stories by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa
Thank you for reading books on BookFrom.Net Share this book with friends