A period of trial and error followed in the years to 1925 in which the gap between his successful and unsuccessful works loomed especially large. Now he wrote not only stories modeled on classical works but he worked long and hard and in varied forms to produce a more contemporary fictional world that was also more his own. Still, he could not seem to find that one type of story that was a perfect fit for his own inborn mentality and sensibility. The stories he wrote during this time lacked intensity: they were never more than “well made.” They did not convey an aura of necessity to the reader; there was never a clear sense that the author had something he needed to communicate. He put each story together well enough, but the very dexterity with which he managed to do this seemed to be holding him back.
Akutagawa was always pointed toward modernism. When he was born in 1892, nearly twenty-five years—a full generation—had gone by since Japan had ended two and a half centuries of isolation under the rule of the Tokugawa government and performed that major surgery on itself known as “modernization.” In other words, Akutagawa was born a child of the modern age. Western civilization and Western-style education were already things that could be taken for granted. He studied in the modern educational system, was well versed in foreign languages, progressed along the elite course and compiled an outstanding record in the institution that stood at the apex of the educational pyramid, Tokyo Imperial University. He read many of the foremost writers of the age—Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Anatole France, Maupassant, Strindberg—in the original language or English translation, and he internalized Western sensibilities. He wore Western suits, smoked cigars, drank coffee, ate beef, conversed now and then with foreigners, and appreciated opera. Such a Westernized lifestyle was, for him, entirely natural and entirely comfortable.
During the years in which Akutagawa was actively writing, 1915–27, the First World War sent Japan’s economy into boom conditions. These were also the years known as “Taishō Democracy” (in the Taishō Period, 1912–26), which perhaps might be called Japan’s Weimar Age. After the bitterly-fought Sino-Japanese (1894–5) and Russo-Japanese (1904–5) Wars, Japan had solidified its position in the world order, as a result of which the suffocating tensions of the Meiji Period (1868– 1912) relaxed, liberal tendencies arose in their place, and people sang the praises of modernism. The impact of the Russian Revolution aroused the socialist labor movement. Skirts grew short and the movement for the emancipation of women got started. This liberal climate was thoroughly crushed by the 1929 stock market crash, the ensuing worldwide Depression, and the rise of militarism and fascism, but that all happened after Akutagawa had left the world. With him, we are still in the midst of Taishō Democracy, liberalism, and modernism.
Take a step back from Tokyo, in which these revolutionary changes were taking place, however, and the most basic aspects of the life of the Japanese were still being governed by the old indigenous culture. In reality, a world in pre-modern dress still enveloped the ways of the modernized city to which Akutagawa gave representation. Not that this should be cause for surprise: a mere fifty years earlier, samurai had been walking around with swords, their hair done up in to pknots. For 220 years, the Japanese had been locked in their little islands, virtually out of touch with other countries, preserving their unique culture in a system resembling feudalism. Only one generation had gone by since the end of that age, hardly enough time to reshape people’s inner landscapes. Superficial aspects such as new systems could be adopted eagerly (or in some cases reluctantly, through compulsion), but certain basic things remained untouched: sensibility, values, archetypal mental images. In fact, the Meiji government openly promoted a policy supporting precisely such a bifurcation, as represented by the slogan “Japanese spirit, Western technology.” They wanted to incorporate the technological progressiveness and efficiency of Western systems, but they also wanted the people to remain good, submissive Confucianists. That made it easier for them to run the country. In other words, to some degree the dregs of feudalism were left in place intentionally. Amid this nearly overwhelming sea of indigenous culture, urban culture became increasingly isolated, and Akutagawa was simply one member of a tiny elite. Before long, this began to prey on his nerves.
Akutagawa successfully imported his propensity for modernism into a fictional world in the borrowed container of the folk tale. In other words, he succeeded in giving his modernism a “story” by skillfully adapting the pre-modern—the medieval tale form that had flourished almost a thousand years earlier. Instead of creating a purely modernistic literature, he first transposed his modernism into a different form. This was his literary starting point, and it was an extremely stylish, intellectual approach. By employing this strategy, he was able to capture the sympathies of a large readership. Had he chosen instead to write modernistic literature as a pure modernist, he would almost certainly have had only the success of a salon writer with a limited, intellectual readership, and his fiction would have quickly run up against its own limitations. Akutagawa had the instinctive (or perhaps strategic) literary sense to avoid such a dead end. In the first part of this collection, “A World in Decay,” the reader can enjoy several examples of Akutagawa’s works that adapt pre-modern materials to modern ends.
One thing I hope to make clear here is that Akutagawa was by no means simply a modernist with Western affectations. He grew up in the “low city” (Shitamachi), the old eastern side of Tokyo where the common people had lived since the capital city of the Tokugawa Shōgun was called Edo and where the roots of Edo Period (1600–1868) culture were still strong. (The new middle class, with its strong individualist tendencies, generally preferred to live in the hilly “high city” known as Yamanote.)13 From childhood he was deeply immersed in Kabuki, the popular drama that had continued to flourish in the low city, and he enjoyed the witty writings of the Edo literati. He also had a rich knowledge of the Chinese language and literature that had been indispensable to any educated person in pre-modern times. (The visual beauty of the Chinese characters that Akutagawa used deserves special mention, though unfortunately this cannot be seen in translation.)
Thus, the fierce clash between the modern and the premodern was occurring not only in his relations with the world around him but deep inside him as well. The same can be said of the Meiji literary giants who had immediately preceded him—Natsume Sōseki and Mori ōgai, for example. East vs. West: for Japan’s budding cultural elite, whose stance was far from definitively settled, it could be fatal to lean too far in one direction or the other. As if taking out a kind of insurance policy, they had to strive to internalize both Eastern and Western high culture in equal doses so that they could be ready at a moment’s notice to switch from one to the other. There is an expression used to characterize cultured Japanese of the first rank: Ko-kon-tō-zai ni tsū-jiru (to be conversant with old-neweast-west), which was, for them, the essence of political correctness. It was precisely because he had thoroughly absorbed this kind of “old-new-east-west” education that Akutagawa could so freely switch between the pre-modern and the modern in constructing his own unique fictional world. He could just as easily transpose Western literary forms intact into Japanese, and this technique was another powerful weapon of the early Akutagawa.
Sheer technique, however, though skillfully applied, does not necessarily translate into original literature. A fictional world that was not truly his own and that used borrowed containers would eventually reach an impasse and come to stand in his way like a high wall. Further pursuit of fictional method could only yield technical polish. And not surprisingly, the novelty would wear thin and readers would tire of seeing the same devices.
For Akutagawa, however, after 1925 it was not possible to advance in the direction of writing purely modernistic fiction. He was already too important—and too old—to escape into sophisticated intellectual play. The era had moved on as well since his debut. The giant tremors of the Russian Revolution had reached Japan, and the dense shadow of Marxism had begun to stretch across the earth. The sp
irit of the age was edging toward a demand for “literature of substance.’People’s attention was beginning to shift toward a literature that depicted the burdens of life with realistic precision. In Japan, this new writing was called “Marxist” and later “proletarian” literature.
There was also the “I-novel” (watakushi-shōsetsu) to think about, a form that had been gaining strength in Japan since the turn of the century and which garnered the greatest critical respect as it became the mainstream of modern Japanese fiction. In the I-novel (orperhaps “I-fiction,” since the style was employed in both full-length novels and short, essay-like stories), the author provides a scrupulous depiction of the trivia of his surroundings, with an exhibitionistic emphasis on negative aspects of his own life and personality. This was the way Japan modified European Naturalism for domestic consumption.
In this way, modernist fiction became the object of a pincer attack from both the I-novel and Marxist literature, which shared an inflexible emphasis on the principle of realism. Akutagawa, with his inborn quality of lofty detachment, could not easily contribute to either side. He could never fully accept either kind of bare-bones realism. What Akutagawa chose to do was to cloak human shame in the artifice of storytelling and a sophisticated stylistic technique: this was how he lived and this was how he wrote. The literary method upon which both the I-novel and proletarian fiction were based was fundamentally opposed to his lifestyle. Cornered by the forces of the age, however, and finding it necessary to weigh the I-novel method against the Marxist method on his own personal scale, Akutagawa inevitably inclined toward the former. He was far too skeptical, far too individualistic, and far too intelligent ever to believe that he could become an effective intellectual spokesman for the working class.
Akutagawa’s later strategy was to borrow the I-novel style but to use it with a “reverse grip,” so to speak, in order to insert artificial confessions into this seemingly artless container. This was a sophisticated and highly risky strategy. But for Akutagawa, who needed “props,” it was probably an unavoidable choice.
Works from his last two or three years are included here in the last part, “Akutagawa’s Own Story.” Together they comprise an introspective, neurotic, and remarkably depressive group of stories. Their somberness never degenerates into a mere blurting out of emotion, however, but stands firmly upon a foundation of Akutagawa-style artifice. Some works may have their moments of wheel-spinning, but each work as a whole retains its artistic autonomy. He may be writing something close to the facts of his own life, yet his stylistic control remains strong, and his writing reveals enough literary design to put the reader on guard: “You will never quite know,” he seems to be warning us, “how much of this is true and how much is fiction.”
Opinion is divided as to whether these experiments of Akutagawa’s are successful as literature. Some say that these late works are his only masterpieces, while others say just the opposite. I don’t see either group of works as superior or inferior: each was conceived quite differently, each constitutes a wheel of the carriage we call Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, and each deserves to be evaluated on its own merits. Where the degree of literaryperfection is concerned, the early works have qualities to which the late works cannot hope to aspire. But in some of the late works—“Spinning Gears” in particular—the acuity of the protagonist’s vision and the elegantly spare style have a truly spine-tingling brilliance, and their meticulously wrought mental images attain a powerful reality that will long remain deep in the reader’s psyche.
I read “Spinning Gears” when I was fifteen—some forty years ago. Reading it again in order to write this introduction, I was amazed at how vividly I still recalled many of its images. There they were still, in my mind, not just as flat pictures but in all their three-dimensional reality, complete with the modulations of the light shining into the scene and tiny sounds in the background. Even taking into account the fifteen-yearold’s special sensitivity to works of art, I believe we can declare such memories to be a product of the work’s innate power. “Spinning Gears” leaves us with the impression that we have just read the story of a man who has pared his life down and then pared it down again until he was perilously close to the edge, and once he was sure he had reached the point where he could pare it down no farther, he turned the whole thing into fiction. It is a stunning performance. In Japanese there is the expression, “Let the enemy cut your flesh so that you can cut his bone.” This is precisely what Akutagawa has accomplished in “Spinning Gears.” There is no longer any sign here of technique for the sake of technique, and his tendency to flaunt his wit and erudition is also (in effect, at least) greatly reduced. Such are the reasons why, even as I retain some minor misgivings with regard to the degree of its maturity, I rank this posthumous work of Akutagawa’s so highly.
For a psyche as vulnerable as Akutagawa’s, writing such works was by no means healthy. He drove himself as far as he could possibly go despite a tendency to mental illness in the family. His mother had suddenly gone insane less than eight months after his birth, and he was raised by his mother’s brother and sister and the brother’s wife. He spent his life plagued by a fear that he himself might go mad at any moment, and the maintenance of his mental stability was complicated by his infrequent contacts with his birth parents. We will never know for certain whether the neuroses from which he suffered later in life were caused by hereditary factors, mental instability, or his latent fears, but sickness of mind casts a heavy shadow on the late stories and would end up taking his life. Surely it would be no exaggeration to say that writing these late works effectively shortened his life, but it is also true that he was unable to find a way to go on living as a writer without writing works of this nature—and once he could no longer live as a writer, his life would cease to have meaning.
It well could be that Akutagawa had to turn to the world of storytelling and technique in order to find refuge from his dark heredity. Rather than face the real world, so full of terror and pain, he might have transported himself mind and body into another world in hopes of finding a kind of salvation in its fictionality. Or perhaps in the dynamism of such a move he hoped to find that life possessed some radiance after all. In the end, however, he was compelled to return to his starting place—to a world ruled by pain and fear, a world that demanded his isolation. For, at a certain point, he came to a profound realization that he must fulfill his social responsibility as a writer and as a leading intellectual of his age. He determined that he could not simply park himself in one comfortable spot as a kind of cultural correspondent.
Perhaps the true reason that Akutagawa Ryūnosuke continues to be read and admired today as a “national writer” lies in this—in the realization and determination that effectively pushed him into a dead end. He started out as one of the chosen few: a Japanese intellectual with a consciousness torn between the West and Japan’s traditional culture, in the border regions of which he succeeded in erecting a uniquely vigorous world of story. As he matured, he attempted to fuse the two different cultures inside himself at a higher level. He attempted structurally to combine the distinctively Japanese style of the I-novel with his own elegant fictional method. He hoped, in other words, to pioneer a newer, more uniquely Japanese form of serious literature. But this would have required a strenuous, long-term effort that his hypersensitive nerves and delicate constitution could not sustain. Pursued by the dark visions that crawled out of the gloom, he would finally despair and cut his life short. Akutagawa’s terrible suicide administered a great shock to the minds of his contemporaries. It signaled both the defeat of a member of the intellectual elite and a major turning point in history.
Many Japanese would see in the death of this one writer the triumph, the aestheticism, the anguish, and the unavoidable downfall of the Taishō Period’s cultivated elite. His individual declaration of defeat also became a signpost on the road of history leading to the tragedy of the Second World War. In the period just before and after his death, the flowe
r of democracy that had bloomed with such promise in the TaishōPeriod simply shriveled and died. Soon the boots of the military would resound everywhere. The writer Akutagawa Ryūnosuke stands as an illuminating presence in the history of Japanese literature, a symbol of his age’s brief glory and quiet defeat.
Has Akutagawa left behind a lesson for Japan’s contemporary writers (including me)? Of course he has, both as a great pioneer and, in part, as a negative example. One thing he has to teach us is that we may flee into a world of technique and storytelling artifice but will eventually collide with a solid wall. It is possible to borrow the containers for our first stories, but sooner or later we have to transform the borrowed container into our own. Unfortunately for Akutagawa (and it really was unfortunate), he took too long to make his move, and that may well have ended up costing him his life. Perhaps, though, for a life so short, there was no other choice.
The other lesson he has for us concerns the way we overlay the two cultures of the West and Japan. With great pain and suffering, the self-consciously “modern” Akutagawa groped for his identity as a writer and as an individual in the clash of the two cultures, and just at the point where he had begun to find what was, for him, a hint of a way to fuse the two, he unexpectedly ended his life. For us now, this is by no means someone else’s problem. Long after Akutagawa’s time, we are still (with some differences) living amid the clash of things Western and Japanese, only now we may call them “global” and “domestic.”
We can say for sure, however, whether with regard to Akutagawa’s day or our own, that a half-baked eclecticism of the “Japanese spirit, Western technology” variety is not only fairly useless in the long run, it is downright dangerous. Joining the two cultural systems through a clever technique is never more than a temporary solution to the problem. Eventually, the bond just falls a part. Akutagawa was fully cognizant of the danger, and as an advanced intellectual of his time, he strove to discover the point of union that was right for him. He adopted the correct stance in this regard, and when we catch glimpses of it in his stories, it reverberates for us even now.
Rashōmon and Seventeen Other Stories Page 3