MODERN TRAGICOMEDY
Akutagawa wrote many wholly fictitious stories set in his own time, though even here he tended to favor exotic materials, as seen in the Chinese settings of “The Story of a Head That Fell Off” and “Horse Legs.” The former, set during the Sino-Japanese War, is more of a modern-historical piece than a contemporary work for Akutagawa, who was still a toddler at the time. Its intense cry against the horror and absurdity of war remains, unfortunately, as relevant in our barbaric twenty-first century as it was in his day.
“Horse Legs” is one of the funniest and wildest (and least well-known) pieces Akutagawa ever wrote. Reminiscent in its surrealistic twists of Gogol or Kafka, it is a nearly perfect—and perfectly hilarious—fictional portrayal of the universal human fear of having one’s true nature revealed to others. Akutagawa performs a comic reversal of the commonly-used Sino-Japanese expression for an embarrassing self-betrayal, “Bakyaku o arawasu”—literally, “to reveal the horse’s legs,” as when the human legs of a stage horse are inadvertently exposed. The theme is pursued relentlessly (though with rich comic surprises at every turn), down to the final ironic two-line illustration of a moralist whose death leads to the revelation of his hypocrisy. No one is safe. My text incorporates the revisions that Akutagawa made after the story first appeared in a literary journal.6
“Green Onions” shows Akutagawa at his most technically playful. It is an unabashedly self-referential piece, a comic tour de force, a simultaneous send-up of romanticism and skepticism, and an unsparing look at the art and business of writing fiction. Akutagawa performs an amazing balancing act here by creating a heroine about whom we can truly care while reminding us repeatedly that she is an entirely artificial creation made to satisfy a magazine deadline. At one point, the author curses himself for becoming emotionally involved in her romanticized world, and at the end he bemoans the inevitable loss of her virginity while suggesting that she is going to be vanquished not only by her lover but by the critics.
AKUTAGAWA’S OWN STORY
The word “story” is used here advisedly. Throughout most of his career, Akutagawa refused to join the autobiographical mainstream of Japanese fiction, and he challenged his critics to see beneath the surface of his writings. He eventually succumbed to critical pressure, however, and began to examine his own life without the period costuming. The late pieces in this part all contain a strong autobiographical element, and they have been ordered so as to suggest the life story of a persona created by Akutagawa to resemble himself. Murakami’s Introduction sensibly locates much of their fascination in the tension between their seeming confessionality and their perceptible manipulation of their materials.
The protagonists of these stories may be very much like Akutagawa, but fidelity to the facts of the author’s life is less important than the consistency and intensity of the portrait of a hypersensitive individual trapped by the demands of family and profession and society. Like Akutagawa, this persona was adopted as an infant when his birth mother lost her mind, felt torn between his biological and adoptive fathers, and had a strong-willed aunt on the scene trying to control his life and the life of his wife. He yearned for liberation from family responsibilities but continued to live in the household of his adoptive parents with his wife and children. He was ambivalent about fatherhood, and he suffered the pangs of guilt when he strayed from his marriage. He became a writer, but writing at a time in Japan when only unadorned confession was deemed worthwhile, he became obsessed with the idea that the “manmade wings” (“The Life of a Stupid Man,” “Spinning Gears”) of his highly wrought art would lead him to disaster. He suffered, too, with the irrepressible fear that he had inherited from his mother a tendency to madness that would eventually reach out to claim him.
Ever since Akutagawa’s suicide, it has been impossible to read this character’s story in retrospect without knowing that Akutagawa could endure the strain of being himself no longer than thirty-five years. “His own works were unlikely to appeal to people who were not like him and had not lived a life like his,” writes the narrator in Section 49 of “The Life of a Stupid Man.” Had he lived longer, Akutagawa might have come to realize that he was far from alone.
“Daidōji Shinsuke: The Early Years” gives us the fullest account of Akutagawa’s childhood and student years. He originally intended to extend the narrative with sequels, but when he subsequently wrote about his later life, he used other forms and other names for his protagonist. Even at his most autobiographical, Akutagawa is always consciously shaping his material for effect. He may well have believed, like the young Shinsuke, that his personality owed much to his having been raised on cow’s milk; he may have been ashamed of his parents’ petty-bourgeois behavior; and he certainly was a ferocious bookworm. But behind the startling images he relates to us we see a young man haunted by the virtually universal question, “Why am I different from everybody else?”
After graduating from the prestigious Tokyo Imperial University, Akutagawa taught at the Naval Engineering School from 1916 to 1919. Between 1922 and 1925, he wrote ten stories based on this phase of his life using a protagonist named Horikawa Yasukichi. “The Writer’s Craft” is the most fully realized story of the series.
“The Baby’s Sickness,” which shows Akutagawa as a family man, has been included as an example of the kind of thing he most often chose not to write—an “I-novel” peek at the private life of an author—but which he could imbue with an intensity and focus not often seen in the form. The story opens with the dream of a dead man, which is never a good omen, and it resolves into a struggle between intellect and superstition, but for the most part it is set firmly in the world of reality. The writer’s workaday world, described by Akutagawa with the kind of high-strung precision he brought to the world of the painter in “Hell Screen,” offers the writer only interruptions, outrageous demands, and a sense of guilt for exploiting his family in the service of his art—yet another echo of “Hell Screen.” “The Baby’s Sickness,” it might be noted, is the nextto-last story Akutagawa wrote before the deadly Kantō earthquake of 1 September 1923. Though he wrote some factual descriptions of the death and destruction wrought by the earthquake, surprisingly little of this horrific experience is directly reflected in the fiction (Section 31 of “The Life of a Stupid Man” is the one vivid exception). Thus we can only speculate as to what influence it might have had on the dark later works.
“Death Register,” “The Life of a Stupid Man,” and “Spinning Gears” all show Akutagawa probing the meaning of the life he has led to that point, and moving ever closer to the voluntary end of it. “Death Register” is the most lyrical and the most simply touching of the three, a sad look back at his estranged, insane mother, the elder sister he never knew, and the father who gave him up as an infant and tried unsuccessfully to win him back. The piece is more a contemplative essay than a story, and it reveals its traditional poetic roots by ending with a haiku. The ostensible subject of “Death Register” is three dead members of his family, but the haiku suggests that the difference between the living and the dead is something barely perceptible—a mere shimmer of heat in the summer air.
“The Life of a Stupid Man” reduces the entire life of the protagonist to a series of poetic moments of intense self-awareness, and it contains some of Akutagawa’s most unforgettable imagery. Here more concrete treatment is given to his involvement with several women, an important factor in “Spinning Gears.” The story opens in a bookstore and at many points shows the gradually aging protagonist experiencing life more through books than directly, always aware of his literary “master,” the novelist Natsume Sōseki. Akutagawa’s protagonist, like one of Sōseki’s, sees his only options as faith, madness, or death.
If “Hell Screen” is Akutagawa’s early masterpiece, “Spinning Gears” is undoubtedly the late one. Instead of the fragmented story of the entire “Life of a Stupid Man,” here the whole life is boiled down to a few intense days of suffering. Like “Hell Scr
een,” “Spinning Gears” conveys a sense of doom, but it replaces melodrama with inexhaustible paranoia in a phantasmagoric “night town” sequence. The narrator knows that the world is out to destroy him, but his ragged nerves do not permit him the luxury of creating the perfectly researched and recreated world of “Hell Screen.” This is Hell itself.7
There could easily have been more categories than the above four to represent Akutagawa’s broad interests, including Meiji Period settings, Chinese settings, and children’s stories.
Nine of the stories in this volume are published in English for the first time: “Dr. Ogata Ryōsai: Memorandum,” “O-Gin,” “Loyalty,” “Green Onions,” “Horse Legs,” “Daidōji Shinsuke: The Early Years,” “The Writer’s Craft,” “The Baby’s Sickness,” and “Death Register.”
All have been translated in their entirety except “Dragon: The Old Potter’s Tale,” which omits a ponderous framing device, and “The Baby’s Sickness,” which omits a brief dedication to Akutagawa’s good friend Oana Ryūichi.8
A word about the annotations. As mentioned in the Introduction, Akutagawa’s language is rich, which means it is full of vocabulary that requires annotation for modern Japanese readers. This is especially true when Akutagawa draws heavily from medieval or Chinese sources or mines his broad knowledge of European literature. Correspondences between the life and the autobiographical works call for annotation as well. Many of the notes contain information so widely shared among modern Akutagawa annotated texts that individual attribution would be nearly meaningless. Where no source is cited, IARZ, CARZ, and/or NKBT can be assumed. Some of the information also comes from useful Akutagawa Japanese “dictionaries.”9 In one or two cases I managed to identify items that had remained obscure in Japanese annotated texts, and I hope this will be a small repayment for the enormous benefit I gained from the extensive Japanese scholarship on Akutagawa. For some stories a headnote gives background information, and the reader may want to consult these before reading the story, especially “Loyalty.”
NOTES
1. For publication information, see list of abbreviations, p. 237.
2. For English translations of the original “Rashōmon” story from Konjaku monogatari, see Marian Ury, Tales of Times Now Past (Ann Arbor, Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan, 1979/1993), pp. 183–4, Royall Tyler, Japanese Tales (New York: Pantheon Books, 1987), p. 88, or Yoshiko K. Dykstra, The Konjaku Tales, 3 vols. (Osaka: Intercultural Research Institute, Kansai Gaidai University, 1998–2003), 3:245–6, and of the original “In a Bamboo Grove” story from Konjaku monogatari, see Ury, Tales, pp. 184–6, or Dykstra, Konjaku Tales, 3:250–53. See also Ambrose Bierce’s “The Moonlit Road” for a possible source of “In a Bamboo Grove” (The Complete Short Stories of Ambrose Bierce, compiled by Ernest Jerome Hopkins (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984)). Akutagawa enthusiastically introduced Bierce to the Japanese reading public in 1921.
3. For an English translation of the early thirteenth-century sources for “The Nose” and “Dragon: The Old Potter’s Tale”, see D. E. Mills, A Collection of Tales from Uji: A Study and Translation of Uji shūi monogatari (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), pp. 172–5 and 344–5.
4. The story, “Karma: A Tale with a Moral,” was written by Paul Carus (1852–1919), a German-born scholar of Eastern philosophy and editor and publisher of The Open Court. Leo Tolstoy translated the piece into Russian. Akutagawa’s immediate source was D. T. Suzuki’s 1898 Japanese translation of the 1895 revised version of the Carus story. See Yamaguchi Seiichi, “Akutagawa Ryūnosuke to Pōru Keōrasu: ‘Kumo no ito’ to sono zaigen ni kansuru oboegaki saihen,” in Miyasaka Satoru (ed.), Akutagawa Ryūnosuke sakuhinron shūsei, 5 vols. (Kanrin shobō, 1999), 5:7–25.
5. For an English translation of the original see Mills, Collection of Tales from Uji, pp. 196–7.
6. As noted in IARZ 12:390–91.
7. On correspondences between “Spinning Gears” and Strindberg’s Inferno, see Mats Arne Karlsson, “Boku wa kono angōo bukimi ni omoi… Akutagawa Ryū nosuke ‘Haguruma,’ Sutorindoberi, soshite kōyki,” in Nichibunken Fōramu, No. 177 (Kyoto: Kokusai Nihon bunka kenkyū sentã, 2005). See August Strindberg, Inferno and From an Occult Diary, tr. and with an introduction by Mary Sandbach (Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics, 1979).
8. For a complete translation of the first under the original title, “Dragon,” see Rashomon and Other Stories, tr. Takashi Kojima (New York: Liveright, 1952), pp. 102–19. On Oana Ryūichi, see Chronology (1927).
9. Kikuchi Hiroshi et al. (eds.), Akutagawa Ryūnosuke jiten (Meiji shoin, 1985); Sekiguchi Yasuyoshi and Shōji Tatsuya (eds.), Akutagawa Ryū nosuke zensakuhin jiten (Bensei shuppan, 2000); Sekiguchi Yasuyoshi (ed.), Akutagawa Ryū nosuke shin-jiten (Kanrin shobō, 2003).
A WORLD IN DECAY
RASHŌMON
Evening, and a lowly servant sat beneath the Rashōmon, waiting for the rain to end.*
Under the broad gate there was no one else, just a single cricket clinging to a huge red pillar from which the lacquer was peeling here and there. Situated on a thoroughfare as important as Suzaku Avenue, the Rashōmon could have been sheltering at least a few others from the rain—perhaps a woman in a lacquered reed hat, or a courtier with a soft black cap. Yet there was no one besides the man.
This was because Kyoto had been struck by one calamity after another in recent years—earthquakes, whirlwinds, fires, famine—leading to the capital’s extraordinary decline. Old records tell us that people would smash Buddhist statues and other devotional gear, pile the pieces by the roadside with flecks of paint and gold and silver foil still clinging to them, and sell them as firewood. With the whole city in such turmoil, no one bothered to maintain the Rashōmon. Foxes and badgers came to live in the dilapidated structure, and they were soon joined by thieves. Finally, it became the custom to abandon unclaimed corpses in the upper story of the gate, which made the neighborhood an eerie place everyone avoided after the sun went down.
Crows, on the other hand, flocked here in great numbers. During the day they would always be cawing and circling the roof’s high fish-tail ornaments. And when the sky above the gate turned red after sunset, the crows stood out against it like a scattering of sesame seeds. They came to the upper chamber of the gate to peck the flesh of the dead. Today, however, with the late hour, there were no crows to be seen. The only sign of them was their white droppings on the gate’s crumbling steps, where long weeds sprouted from cracks between the stones. In his faded blue robe, the man had settled on the topmost of the seven steps and, worrying a large pimple that had formed on his right cheek, fixed his vacant stare on the falling rain.
We noted earlier that the servant was “waiting for the rain to end,” but in fact the man had no idea what he was going to do once that happened. Ordinarily, of course, he would have returned to his master’s house, but he had been dismissed from service some days before, and (as also noted earlier), Kyoto was in an unusual state of decline. His dismissal by a master he had served for many years was one small consequence of that decline. Rather than say that the servant was “waiting for the rain to end,” it would have been more appropriate to write that “a lowly servant trapped by the rain had no place to go and no idea what to do.” The weather, too, contributed to the sentimentalisme of this Heian Period menial. The rain had been falling since late afternoon and showed no sign of ending. He went on half-listening to the rain as it poured down on Suzaku Avenue. He was determined to find a way to keep himself alive for one more day—that is, a way to do something about a situation for which there was nothing to be done.
The rain carried a host of roaring sounds from afar as it came to envelop the Rashōmon. The evening darkness brought the sky ever lower until the roof of the gate was supporting dark, heavy clouds on the ridge of its jutting tiles.
To do something when there was nothing to be done, he would have to be prepared to do anything at all. If he hesitated, he would end up starving to dea
th against an earthen wall or in the roadside dirt. Then he would simply be carried back to this gate and discarded upstairs like a dog. But if he was ready to do anything at all—
His thoughts wandered the same path again and again, always arriving at the same destination. But no matter how much time passed, the “if” remained an “if.” Even as he told himself he was prepared to do anything at all, he could not find the courage for the obvious conclusion of that “if”: All I can do is become a thief.
The man gave a great sneeze and dragged himself to his feet. The Kyoto evening chill was harsh enough to make him yearn for a brazier full of warm coals. Darkness fell, and the wind blew unmercifully through the pillars of the gate. Now even the cricket was gone from its perch on the red-lacquered pillar.
Beneath his blue robe and yellow undershirt, the man hunched his shoulders and drew his head down as he scanned the area around the gate. If only there were some place out of the wind and rain, with no fear of prying eyes, where I could have an untroubled sleep, I would stay there until dawn, he thought. Just then he caught sight of a broad stairway—also lacquered red—leading to the upper story of the gate. Anybody up there is dead. Taking care lest his sword, with its bare wooden handle, slip from its scabbard, the man set one straw-sandaled foot on the bottom step.
A few minutes later, halfway up the broad stairway, he crouched, cat-like, holding his breath as he took stock of the gate’s upper chamber. Firelight from above cast a dim glow on the man’s right cheek—a cheek inflamed with a pus-filled pimple amid the hairs of a short beard. The servant had not considered the possibility that anyone but dead people could be up here, but climbing two or three more steps, he realized that someone was not only burning a light but moving it from place to place. He saw the dull, yellow glow flickering against the underside of the roof, where spider webs hung in the corners. No ordinary person could be burning a light up here in the Rashōmon on a rainy night like this.
Rashōmon and Seventeen Other Stories Page 5