For this story, published in September 1918 (Mita Bungaku [Mita Literature]), Akutagawa adopts a form of late medieval Japanese appropriate to the period. Along with Greco-Latin ecclesia, there is also a generous sprinkling of Portuguese borrowings. Nearly all have a specifically Christian reference, e.g. zencho (from gentio) ‘Gentile’, and so, unlike such everyday terms as pan ‘bread’ (from pão) and kappa ‘raincoat’ (from capa), were as archaic or obsolete in Akutagawa’s day as they are today. In the Japanese title of the short story, the word for ‘disciple’ (hōkyōnin), lit. ‘one who serves the Church /the faith’, has likewise long since fallen out of ordinary use.
1This Japanese version of Guia do Peccador (Guide for Sinner) was apparently published in 1599. The Keichō era extended from 1596 to 1615.
O’er a Withered Moor (Karenoshō)
Bashō ‘banana plant’ is the sobriquet adopted by the poet born Matsuo Kinsaku in 1644. In the West, he is doubtlessly the best-known composer of the seventeen-syllable verse form (5-7-5) that has subsequently come to be called haiku. Also widely read, both in Japanese and in translation, is his travel diary of 1689, Oku no Hosomichi (The Narrow Road to the Deep North).
A native of Ueno, Iga Province (now Mie Prefecture), in central Japan, Bashō had been living in Edo for some eight years when in 1680 he moved to a hut on the outskirts of the city. Hitherto known by the nom de plume of Tōsei ‘peach blue’, he renamed himself for the banana plant that a student had given him. In the spring of 1680 or 1681, accompanied by his disciple Enomoto Kikaku, he composed his most famous, oft-cited, structurally ambiguous, and therefore barely translatable poem. About it, written when the melancholic Bashō had begun to practice Zen, enough ink has been spilled to fill more than a pond:
Furu-ike ya/ kawazu tobi-komu/ mizu no oto
An old pond: the sound of a frog jumping into the water
In the autumn of 1684, Bashō began the first of his journeys, first traveling from Edo to Ueno, then to Nara, Ogaki, and Kyōto. The following year, having returned to Edo, he published Nozarashi no kikō (tr. Records of a Weather-beaten Skeleton), from which the last verse cited by Akutagawa is drawn. Having recently lost his mother, Bashō, already forty and never in very good health, was conscious of his own mortality.
Toward the end of his journey of 1689, as he passed southward through Kanazawa on the Sea of Japan, he sought to meet a fellow poet, Isshō, whom he only knew from correspondence. On learning that he had died at the end of the previous year, Bashō visited his grave, composing another renowned verse, the second of the three cited by Akutagawa.
Bashō resided in Kyōto for two years before returning once more to Edo. Then in the summer of 1694 he set off again for the west but fell ill with dysentery in Ōsaka and died. The date according to the modern calendar is November 28, 1694. His death verse, cited at the beginning of Akutagawa’s story, is nearly as familiar to Japanese as that of the pond, the frog, and the sound of the water.
Though still a revered figure in Akutagawa’s time, Bashō had also come under attack by the poet and critic Masaoka Tsunenori (1867–1902), known by his pen name, Shiki. He in turn was a close friend of Akutagawa’s mentor, the renowned novelist Natsume Sōseki, whose premature death in 1916 at the age of forty-nine clearly contributed to the background of “O’er a Withered Moor,” published in October 1918 (Shinshōsetsu [New Fiction]). The story should thus be read not as hagiography but rather as the writer’s own intensely personal meditation.
The story makes mention of haikai and hokku. The former refers both to what would now be called haiku and to haikai no renga ‘linked verse’, the latter to the initial stanza (5-7-5) of such. As this had long been used as a poem in itself, Shiki advocated the use of a distinct term, hence haiku, which has been generalized in Japan and internationalized abroad.
1Tabi ni yande/ yume wa kareno wo / kake-meguru.
2Sometime between four and five in the afternoon.
3The Buddhist custom of wetting the lips of the dying (or sometimes of the deceased) survives to the present day. A “plumed stick” (hane-yōji) was used both for administering medicine and, by married women, for applying tooth-blackener.
4Tsuka mo ugoke/ waga naku koe wa/ aki no kaze.
5Nozarashi wo/ kokoro ni kaze no/ shimu mi kana.
6In reality, Inenbō outlived his master by nearly fifteen years.
The Garden (Niwa)
In Edo-period Japan, there were five main highways, converging in Nihonbashi, near what is now the Imperial Palace in Tōkyō. The busiest and best-known of these was the Tōkaidō (East Sea Road), celebrated in Andō Hiroshige’s woodblock prints. All were administered by the central government, whose strict and precise regulations covered everything from road maintenance to traveler accommodations. The great lords of the provinces, obliged by the shogunate to spend alternate years in the capital, journeyed to and fro with large retinues, spending their nights at the best and most prestigious inns of the post-station towns: the honjin (‘headquarters’).
In the original, Akutagawa identifies the Nakamuras’ inn as one of the honjin, and while he does not directly name the highway, numerous clues point to Nakasendō (‘Central Mountain Road’), whose semicircular route passed through what are now Saitama, Gunma, Nagano, and Shiga prefectures. First, there is the mention of Princess Kazu (1846–77), who in 1862 was betrothed to Shōgun Iemochi and sent from the old imperial capital to Edo, now Tōkyō, on a long and difficult journey along the Nakasendō, accompanied by a party of ten thousand. Then there is the mention of the mendicant poet Seigetsu, an actual historical figure. Moreover, the elements of dialogue that appear in the story are all consistent with dialects spoken in the mountainous Chūbu region, specifically what is now Nagano Prefecture. The small stream that the second son sets out to dig is, for example, called a senge, a local word. The song that the grandmother sings likewise refers to events that took place in this same region.
Akutagawa, who first published this story in July 1922 (Chūō-kōron), is writing of the great transitional era two decades before his own birth, the decline of the garden—and the fall of the Nakamura family—emblemizing the passing of Old Japan. The perspective of the writer, himself very much part of the modern era, blends a sense of sad inevitability with the subtle irony that is a consistent characteristic of his work.
The vain and irascible first son may be seen as representing the last of the old order, his younger brothers being unable either to sustain it or to adapt to the new. With the death of the eldest, the third son returns to assume his duties but apparently can do no more than fantasize about making easy money. In the entrepreneurial flurry of the early Meiji period, rice speculation was very much a reality. (In 1872, exactly a half century before the publication of this story, a modern silk-reeling mill had been established in Tomioka, Gunma, a town lying on a secondary route connected to the Nakasendō.)
The ballad sung by the old woman refers a battle in November 1864, between, on the one hand, the Suwa and Matsumoto clans, defenders of the shogunate, and, on the other, pro-imperial rebels from Mito in eastern Japan. Akutagawa’s notes suggest that it was his own adoptive father who passed on the song, having learned it from a courtesan he had engaged while traveling.
In describing the dissolute second son, Akutagawa uses the Sino-Japanese term hōtō, in his own time already familiar to his readers as the loan-translation of a word used in a well-known New Testament parable. It is perhaps not too much to suppose that here too Akutagawa is being ironic, for the prodigal, having, it is suggested, squandered his absconded portion on harlots and even contracted syphilis, returns not to a loving father but to a younger brother, who, rather than forgiving, is simply indifferent.
1Variously translated as ‘cuckoo’ and ‘nightingale,’ the hototogisu makes a frequent appearance in Japanese verse. It is said to sing until it coughs up blood and has thus often been used as a symbol for tuberculosis.
The Life of a Fool (Aru Ahō no Isshō)
Whatever self-deprecation there is in Akutagawa’s use of the word, he is also putting himself in the grand tradition of socially alienated, morally flawed, but nonetheless prophetic “fools”—specifically, no doubt, of Strindberg, whose Confessions of a Fool (En dåres försvarstal [1887], lit. ‘A Madman’s Defense’) is mentioned in the text. Though Akutagawa does not, for all his many other literary allusions, refer to Shakespeare, the English-speaking reader may also recall the words of Jaques in As You Like It: “Oh that I were a fool! I am ambitious for a motley coat . . . Invest me in my motley; give me leave to speak my mind, and I will through and through cleanse the foul body of the infected world.”
Though Akutagawa explicitly identifies himself with Icarus, there appears to be a more consistent, albeit implicit, suggestion of Baudelaire’s famous albatross, the gracefully soaring bird, which, when land-bound, becomes terribly awkward, its name in Japanese being, appropriately enough, ahō-dori, lit. ‘fool-bird’. The mention of “flying sickness” in “Cogwheels” suggests much the same idea.
“The Life of a Fool,” published in October 1927 (Kaizō [Reconstruction]), three months after Akutagawa’s death, is not without its painful excesses. Surely a single line of Baudelaire is not “worth more than all of life,” and even the vain Goethe might have blushed at being compared (favorably) to Christ. Yet, together with “Cogwheels,” likewise published posthumously, we may read it both for its poignant flashes of brilliance and as a chronicle, both lyrical and grim (Dichtung und Wahrheit), of the author’s relentless journey into night.
1A reference to the novelist Tanizaki Jun’ichirō (1886–1965), with whom Akutagawa often collaborated. Together with other writers, they met in June 1917, at Café Maison Ōtori-no-su in Nihonbashi. In conformity to Japanese thinking, Akutagawa regarded Tanizaki as an “upperclassman” (senpai), as he had also attended Tōkyō Imperial University. Tanizaki had, however, interrupted his studies two years before Akutagawa began his own.
2In the original, the term used derives from Classical Chinese, meaning literally ‘acid nostrils’.
3Koshibito refers to a person from northeastern Japan. Akutagawa composed (in classical form) the collection of twenty-five love poems by that title as a means of resisting the temptation to become involved with the poetess and translator Katayama Hiroko, an older woman married to a banker originally from Niigata, a prefecture in the northeast.
4Though Villon was sentenced to be hanged in 1462, at the age of 31, he was reprieved in early 1463; his subsequent life is unknown . . . The poet Edward Young reported that on a walk through Dublin, Jonathan Swift saw an elm tree with a withered crown and (prophetically) remarked: “I shall be like that tree; I shall die at the top.”
5The words attributed to the young writer Radiguet (1903–1923) before his death of typhoid fever, are, in fact: “Dans trois jours je vais être fusillé par les soldats de Dieu” (‘In three days I shall be shot by the soldiers of God.’)
The Villa of the Black Crane (Genkaku-sanbō)
In the central character of this story, published in January–February 1927 (Chūō-kōron), when his own health was failing, Akutagawa undoubtedly sees something of himself, though the story is otherwise hardly autobiographical. The biting irony with which it concludes might be seen as social commentary, particularly regarding the status of women. Yet Akutagawa is an observer, not a revolutionary, the writer of elegies, not manifestos. If Jūkichi’s cousin is reading Wilhelm Liebknecht, the father of the Sparticist Karl Liebknecht, Jūkichi himself is merely staring out the window, wearily noting the changing urban landscape and, with it, the passing of his father-inlaw’s era.
Genkaku is written with the Chinese characters meaning ‘black crane’, but there is much homophony in Japanese, so that though the inquiring student surely knows this, he asks why Genkaku has chosen the name as his nom d’artiste. Written with other characters, genkaku can variously mean not only ‘strict’ but also ‘hallucination’.
The death of the artist Genkaku suggests parallels to that of the admittedly nobler but nonetheless forlorn poet Bashō in “O’er a Withered Moor.” More distantly, the description of a selfish old man contemplating his miserable life and impending death in an isolated room surrounded by a family he has somehow contrived to alienate may be heard echoing in François Mauriac’s (1932) Le Noeud de Vipères (The Vipers’ Tangle). The difference, of course, is that while Mauriac’s Louis ultimately experiences grace, the despairing Genkaku chants familiar words from the twenty-fifth chapter of the Lotus Sutra and then thinks of a decidedly profane folk song and dance. When we last see him, he is quite unintentionally amusing his grandson with a failed attempt to strangle himself by means of his own loincloth. The reader is grimly reminded of Akutagawa’s own experiment, as recorded in “The Life of a Fool.”
1Bunka-mura: the word bunka ‘culture’ was a highly fashionable term of embellishment and thus came to be applied to newly constructed suburban settlements.
2Shoes left at the entrance are normally turned outwards to facilitate departure. The task would normally be that of the host or a servant. The fact that the woman performs it herself indicates her sense of inferiority—or her residual status as a domestic.
3A mother would normally not address her own son as “Botchan” (‘young master’); O-yoshi is presumably doing so as a sign of deference toward the child’s father and his family.
4This was the slogan of the political parties that sought to challenge the power of the bureaucratic elites. In 1913, they forced the resignation of the prime minister and in 1918 saw one of their own brought to power.
5Translated by Burton Watson as: “Wonderful sound, Perceiver of the World’s Sounds, Brahma’s sound, the sea tide sound—they surpass those sounds of the world.”
Cogwheels (Haguruma)
The first section of this story appeared under the title of Rēn-kōto (‘Raincoat’) in the June 1927 edition of Daichōwa (‘Great Harmony’). All six sections were published in Bungei-shunjū in October of the same year; the posthumous title was Haguruma, lit. ‘toothed wheel(s)’.
The image easily suggests Charlie Chaplin’s vision of Modern Times (1936), the hapless human individual caught in inhuman, industrial machinery, but, anachronism aside, the reader soon realizes that Akutagawa’s themes are, as ever, far more personal and psychological than social.
As with the previous story, there is autobiographical detail that is not so much lost in translation as obscured by time; there is also, of course, the issue—especially given the writer’s state of mind—of the boundary between fact and fiction. Moreover, Akutagawa, the voracious reader, was not a meticulous scholar. The story about the lad who went home “meandering like a reptile” is indeed from ancient China, but Akutagawa has his sources confused, for the folktale is found in Autumn Floods by the Daoist Zhuāngzĭ (fourth Century BCE), not in Hÿn Fēizĭ by the third century BCE legalist philosopher Hÿn Fēi. And the atheist Prosper Mérimée did not, in fact, convert to Protestantism but merely arranged for a Protestant burial to spare his friends scandal.
Not surprisingly, Akutagawa drops hints that are more apparent to Japanese than to non-Japanese readers. When he refers to dragons, he plays on his own name, the ryū (‘dragon’) of Ryūnosuke; black and white are funeral colors. “White” occurs so often in the story that even the “white, rectangular U” at the wedding reception becomes, at least in retrospect, a morbid symbol. The Sino-Japanese word for ‘four’ (shi) is homophonous with that for ‘death’, resulting in a superstition shared by other East Asian peoples.
1In March 1914, Henriette Caillaux, wife of Joseph Caillaux, the former prime minister and at the time the minister of finance, shot and killed the editor of Le Figaro. She was acquit
ted, and by the time of this story, her husband was again in the throes of directing financial policy . . . The member of the Japanese imperial family to whom reference is made is probably Prince Higashikuni (1887–1990), who had studied at the Ecole Supérieure de Guerre in Paris from 1920 to 1926. Having become accustomed to la dolce vita, he had to be ordered home by the Imperial Household Ministry.
2Clearly taken from Jeremiah 10:24, cf. Psalms 6 and 38.
3In Canto XIII of The Inferno, Virgil guides Dante to the Seventh Ring of Hell, in which they encounter gnarled, black trees, inhabited, he learns, by the souls of those who have done themselves harm, squandering their wealth or committing suicide.
4The statue is of Kusunoki Masashige, the warrior chieftain who in obedience to the reckless orders of exiled Emperor Go-Daigo went off in 1336 to certain death in battle with the turncoat Ashikaga Takauji, founder of the Muromachi shogunate. Kusunoki was idealized by both Edo period Neo-Confucianists and modern nationalists as a symbol of loyalty.
ADDITIONAL TERMINOLOGY
dhārāni: A long chant, recited in Chinese-transcribed Sanskrit, as pronounced in Japanese, intended, among other things, to ward off evil.
fènghuáng (Chinese): Whatever the cross-cultural roots of the qílín (Sino-Japanese kirin) and the fènghuáng (Sino-Japanese hōō), the narrator’s bold and improbable suggestion in “Cogwheels” that they are of Occidental origin is clearly intended to provoke. Similarly, though Yáo and Shùn are thought to exemplify the wisdom of nonhereditary rule, a distinctly un-Japanese idea, Confucianism was part of Japan’s eclectic ideology, so that the narrator is again baiting the scholar by denying the historical existence of the philosopher-kings.
ginkgo-leaf style (Japanese ichō-gaeshi): Originally the hairstyle of unmarried women of the samurai class, it came to be common among women of various ages and classes after the beginning of the Meiji era, including apprentice geishas.
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