28. crazy girl: See “The Life of a Stupid Man,” Sections 21, 26 and 38(and notes 15and 17).
29. Anatole France… Prosper Mérimée: Akutagawa gives the titles in Japanese. He is known to have owned Nicolas Ségur’s C onversations avec Anatole France (1925) and Paul Gsell’s Propos recueillis d’Anatole France (1921). Several editions of Mérimée’s letters would have been available to Akutagawa: see also note 40.
30. Shu Shunsui stone: Zhu Shun-Shui (1600–1682) was a late-Ming Chinese Confucianist whose politics led him to seek asylum in Japan in 1659, where he won official patronage and flourished as the scholar Shu Shunsui. Akutagawa obviously feels this Japanese pronunciation of his name to be a fully naturalized part of the language. A stone memorial was erected on the campus of the First Higher School, Akutagawa’s alma mater, on 2June 1912.
31. “insomnia”: More precisely, the narrator feels he will not be able to pronounce the syllable “shō” in the word for insomnia, “fuminshō.” The fact that he is having trouble with words containing “sh” (or, in the translation, with four-syllable words) seems less significant than that he is obsessively perceiving this as a psychological problem. Hence his subsequent remark.
32. The wife… American film actor: Kamiyama Sōjin (1884–1954; actual name Mita Tadashi) and his wife, the actress Yamakawa Uraji (1884–1947), were the primary founders in 1912of the Modern Theater Society (Kindaigeki kyō kai), which performed such major productions as Hedda Gabler in 1912, with Uraji in the title role, and Mori Ō gai’s translations of Faust and Macbeth at the Imperial Theatre in 1913. The Society survived until 1919, when the couple left for America. With her superior English, Uraji became Sō jin’s agent. He acted in many Western-made films, mainly as an “Oriental villain,” and in a number of Japan ese films. He played the Mongol Prince opposite Douglas Fairbanks in The Thief of Bagdad (1924) and the blind lute-playing priest in Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai (1954). See Nihon Kindai Bungakkan (ed.), Nihon kindai bungaku daijiten, 6 vols. (Tokyo: Kō dansha, 1977–8), 4:53–4.
33. the unfinished play… burned in that faraway pinewood: Akutagawa wrote only a handful of armchair dramas. In a letter of 24 May 1926, written while he was living among the pines at the Kugenuma shore, Akutagawa mentions an attempt to write a play. Since no such work has survived, it may well have been consigned to flames. (See IARZ 15:311, 20:234.)
34. his big toe: Hippolyte Taine (1828–93) described Ben Jonson as “often morose, and prone to strange splenetic imaginations. He told Drummond that for a whole night he imagined ‘that he saw the Carthaginians and Romans fighting on his great toe,’” commenting in a footnote that “There is a similar hallucination to be met with in the life of Lord Castlereagh, who afterwards committed suicide,” in History of English Literature (1863), Book II, Chapter Third, Section I.
35. a certain old man: Muroga Fumitake (1869–1949) had been employed as a milk deliveryman in the Niiharas’ dairy, after which he became a door-to-door peddler, and later worked for the American Bible Society on the Ginza. In a letter of 5 March 1926, Akutagawa thanks him for a Bible and says he has been reading the Sermon on the Mount with a new sense of its meaning (IARZ 20:227).
36. kirin child of the 1910s: A child prodigy, a “whiz kid” of the sort that Akutagawa would have been in the mid-1910s when he made his spectacular debut. The “1910s” given here assumes that the “910s” in the original text is either a misprint or a deliberate abbreviation. See also note 10.
37. coils over her ears: This look was one of the Western hair styles popular in the early 1920s.
38. Bien… d’enfer: Good… very bad… why? / Why?… the devil’s dead! / Yes, yes… from Hell…
39. burned by the sun: Akutagawa says Icarus’ wings were “burned” rather than melted.
40. author had become a Protestant: A lifelong skeptic to the point of being rabidly anticlerical, Prosper Mérimée (1803–70)was nonetheless upset enough by the lack of ceremony at Stendhal’s funeral to declare himself an adherent of “the Augsburg confession” and have himself buried in a Protestant cemetery. His funeral was cut short when an atheist admirer caused an uproar in response to anti-Catholic remarks by the Protestant minister (A. W. Raitt, Prosper Mérimée (New York: Scribner’s, 1979), pp. 19, 23, 354, 359). Akutagawa may have been familiar with Sainte-Beuve’s comment that “Mérimée does not believe that God exists, but he is not altogether sure that the Devil does not” (ibid., p. 24).
41. Red Lights:(Shakkō) Saitō Mokichi’s first poetry collection was published in 1913 (translated into English in 1989). Notable here for themes of madness, death of the mother, and the color red. See also note 19.
42. my own self-portrait: Akutagawa finished “Kappa” on 11February 1927.
43. Sparrow of Joy: The magpie, a sign of good luck when it enters the home.
44. four separate times: The number four in Japanese can be a homonym for “death.”
45. Horsehead Kannon: Usually a gentle, androgynous Buddhist god(dess) of mercy, Kannon (or Kanzeon; Sanskrit: Avalokitesvara). In this variation, wearing a crown containing the image of a horse’s head (or with a full horse’s head), Batō Kannon (Sanskrit: Hayagrīva) is a fierce deity designed to defeat all evil spirits and passions; in early modern times, it was often worshiped as a protector of horses.
46. my wife’s younger brother: Akutagawa’s in-laws had brought their tubercular son to Kugenuma for extended rest therapy; hence the Akutagawas’ stay there in an attempt to soothe Akutagawa’s own mental and physical ills.
* For this and other stories with historical backgrounds, see the headnote to each story in the Notes.
Rashōmon and Seventeen Other Stories Page 33