Mandarins: Stories by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa

by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa

  An hour later, a bellboy brought me a bundle of mail. Among the items was a letter from a publisher in Leipzig, asking me to write an essay on the modern Japanese woman. Why did he specifically want me for the project? The letter, written in English, included a handwritten postscript: “A simple black-and-white depiction, in the style of a Japanese painting, with no color, would also suit our purposes.” The words reminded me of the whiskey brand. I tore the letter to shreds. I opened another envelope, the one closest to hand, and read the enclosed missive, written on yellow stationery. It was from an unknown youth. I had not read more than two or three lines when I saw something that could only set me on edge: a reference to Jigokuhen.

  I opened a third envelope, containing a message from a nephew. Now at last came a sigh of relief, as I read of domestic problems. But then I came to the line at the end and felt bowled over: “I am sending you a new edition of the poetry collection Shakkō.”

  I heard taunting laughter in my ears—Shakkō!—and fled the room. There was no one in the corridor. Propping myself up with a hand against the wall, I managed to get to the lobby, where I sat down in a chair and thought that I should at least light a cigarette. Oddly enough, it was an Air Ship. (Since coming to the hotel, I had made it a habit of smoking only Star.) The two artificial wings appeared again before my eyes. I called over a bellboy and sent him to purchase two packs of Star, but as luck would have it, according to his report, there were none left.

  “We still have Air Ship, sir . . .”

  I shook my head and looked around the spacious lobby. At the far end were four or five foreigners sitting around a table. It seemed that one of them—a woman in a red dress—was sometimes glancing in my direction, while speaking in a low voice.

  “Mrs. Townshead . . .”

  An unseen presence was whispering Misesu-Taunzuheddo in my ear, a name I had, of course, never heard before. And even if it were indeed to be the name of the woman sitting over there . . . I got up from the chair and returned to my room, terrified at the thought that I was going mad.

  It had been my intention to make an immediate call to the psychiatric hospital. But to have myself admitted as a patient there would be tantamount to dying. After agonizing hesitation, I tried to distract myself from my fears by reading Crime and Punishment. Randomly choosing a page, I found, however, that it was a passage from The Brothers Karamazov. Thinking I had confused the books, I looked at the cover, but there was no doubt about the title. I could see that it was to this binding error at the publishing house and to this very page that the finger of fate was pointing. Yet even as I was driven to continue reading, I had not finished a single page before my entire body began to tremble, for here was the passage that describes Ivan being tormented by the Devil. Ivan, Strindberg, Maupassant, and now I, here in this room . . .

  My only salvation was sleep. But I had not a single packet of sleeping medicine left. The thought of more miserable insomnia was unbearable, but summoning up a desperate sort of courage, I had coffee brought and resolved to go on writing as frantically as any madman.

  Two, five, seven, ten pages . . . The manuscript was burgeoning before my eyes. I was filling the world of my fictional work with supernatural animals, and one of them was a self-portrait. But now fatigue was gradually clouding my mind. At last I got up from the desk and lay flat on my back in bed. I may have slept for forty or fifty minutes when I thought I heard words being whispered in my ear and immediately bolted up:

  “Le diable est mort.”

  Beyond the tuff-framed window, a pale, cold dawn was breaking. I was standing directly against the door, looking at the empty room, when I saw something in the mottled pattern of steam condensed on the window by the frigid air outside. It was an autumn-yellow pine forest facing the sea. I approached, my heart pounding. Though I realized that it was but a mirage, created by the garden’s withered grass and the pond, it evoked a longing akin to mal du pays.

  I waited until nine and then called the magazine office to settle a question of payment. Putting everything on the desk into my satchel, books and manuscripts, I resolved to return home.

  6. Airplane

  I had taken a taxi from a railway station on the Tōkaidō Line and headed for a summer resort in the western hinterlands. Despite the cold, the driver was oddly dressed in an old raincoat. To avoid thinking about the eerie coincidence, I fixed my gaze away from him and on the passing scenery. Behind the row of low-lying pines—perhaps on what had been the post-station road—I saw a funeral procession. There were neither white-paper nor dragon lanterns, but both before and behind the palanquin were artificial lotuses, gold and silver, gently swaying . . .

  Having at last arrived home, I spent several rather peaceful days there, benefiting both from the company of my wife and children and from the efficacy of barbiturates. From my domain on the second floor, I could look out on the pine forest and faintly glimpse the sea beyond. I had decided to work at my desk only in the mornings, the cooing of the pigeons in my ears. There were other birds, pigeons and crows, as well as sparrows, which came flying down onto the veranda. This too gave me pleasure. The happy sparrow enters the temple, I would remember the phrase each time, pen in hand.

  On a warm, cloudy afternoon, I had gone to a sundries shop to buy ink, but the only color on display was sepia, a tint that invariably unsettled me more than any other. Having no alternative, I left the shop and wandered aimlessly along the mostly deserted streets. Coming toward me from the opposite direction was a foreigner, fortyish and apparently myopic, swaggering along by himself. He was the Swede who lived nearby, a man suffering from paranoia. His name was Strindberg. As we passed, I felt a physical jolt.

  The street was no more than three hundred meters long, but in the time it took me to walk it, a dog, its face black on one side and white on the other, passed me four times. I turned down a side street, thinking of Black and White, and then remembered that Strindberg’s tie was likewise black and white. I could not imagine this a mere coincidence. And if it were not . . . I had the feeling that only my head was moving along; I stopped for a moment in the middle of the pavement. Behind the wire fence along the street lay a discarded glass bowl faintly radiating the colors of the rainbow. There appeared to be along the sides at the bottom a winglike pattern. Sparrows now came fluttering down from the top of the pines, but when they came close to the bowl, they all took flight, as though by common accord, rising again into the sky . . .

  I arrived at my wife’s family home and sat in a rattan chair—in the garden, next to the veranda. Inside a wire netting situated in a corner at the other end, leghorn chickens were quietly walking about. A black dog lay at my feet. Even as I painfully endeavored to resolve questions comprehensible to no one, I chatted with my wife’s mother and younger brother in a strictly superficial tone of sobriety.

  “Ah, coming here . . . It is so quiet!”

  “Yes, as compared to Tōkyō . . .”

  “Is it sometimes noisy here too?”

  “Well, after all, we still inhabit the same human world!”

  My mother-in-law said this with a laugh. In fact, even this refuge from the summer heat was indisputably situated within that “human world.” I knew all too well just how many crimes and tragedies had taken place here within the last year: the physician who had attempted to subject a patient to slow poisoning; the old woman who had set fire to the house of an adopted couple; the lawyer who had sought to deprive his younger sister of her assets . . . The mere sight of their homes was for me none other than a vision of the hell that lies at the heart of human existence.

  “You have a local madman, don’t you?”

  “Do you mean young H?” asked my mother-in-law. “He’s not insane; he’s merely become imbecilic.”

  “Dementia praecox, as they say. Whenever I see him, I feel horror. I saw him recently bowing—for whatever reason—in front of the statue of Batō Kannon.

  “‘Horror’ you say? You need to be of stronger dispositio
n.”

  “Well, my brother-in-law is of much stronger than the likes of me.”

  He was sitting up in his bed, his face unshaven, entering into the conversation with his usual sense of reserve.

  “But in strength there is also weakness,” I replied.

  “Well, well, whatever are we to say to that?”

  I looked at my mother-in-law as she said this and could not help a wry smile. My brother-in-law too smiled, and continued to speak as though in a trance, gazing at the distant pine forest beyond the hedge. (The young convalescent sometimes seemed to me to be a pure, disembodied spirit.)

  “Oddly enough, it is just when we think we have cast off our mere humanity that our all too human desires become all the more intense . . .”

  “A man thought virtuous may also be a man of vice.”

  “No, an opposition more striking than that between good and evil . . .”

  “Well then, the child found in the adult.”

  “That’s not it either. I cannot express the idea clearly . . . Perhaps it is like two electric poles. They are antipodes that form a whole.”

  At that moment we were startled by the rumbling of an airplane. Without thinking, I glanced at the sky and saw the machine as it barely cleared the tops of the pine trees. It was an unusual mono-plane, with yellow wings. The chickens and the dog, alarmed at the sound, ran about in all directions, the dog in particular, its tail between its legs, baying and barking, before crawling beneath the veranda.

  “Won’t the airplane crash?”

  “No . . . By the way, do you know what ‘flying sickness’ is?”

  Instead of responding with a verbal “no,” I shook my head, as I lit a cigarette.

  “It seems,” he explained, “that those who fly such airplanes become so accustomed to breathing the air at high altitudes that gradually they find themselves unable to tolerate ordinary terrestrial air . . .”

  I had put the house of my wife’s mother behind me and now walked through the pine forest. Not a branch was stirring, as I went on, steadily falling into depression. Why had the airplane flown above my head rather than elsewhere? Why was only the Air Ship brand of cigarette on sale at the hotel? Tormented by such questions, I wandered the least trodden paths.

  Beyond a low dune lay the sea, covered by a gray sheet of fog. Atop the dune was the frame of a children’s swing, with neither seat nor ropes. I looked at it and immediately thought of a gallows. And indeed several crows were perched on it. They stared at me, with no sign of flight. The one in the middle, its beak pointed to the sky, cawed—I am certain—four times.

  I had been walking along an embankment of withered grass and sand but now turned down a narrow street lined with villas. On the right, I expected to see, despite the tall pines in front of it, a whitish, two-storied wooden structure of Occidental style. (A close friend had called it “The House of Spring.”) But when I came to where it was supposed to be, there was only a bathtub, sitting on the cement foundation. Fire! was my immediate thought. I walked on, averting my eyes. A man on a bicycle was coming directly toward me. He was wearing a burnt umber fowling cap and had a strangely fixed expression, his body bent over the handlebars. I sensed that the face resembled that of my elder sister’s husband and so took another small side street before we came eye to eye. But there I encountered, right in the middle of the road, lying belly up, the decaying body of a mole.

  In the knowledge that something was stalking me, I felt renewed anxiety with each step I took. One by one, semitransparent cogwheels were beginning to block my vision. I walked stiff-necked, fearing that my last hour might well be nigh. The cogwheels were turning ever more rapidly, even as their number was increasing. At the same time, I was seeing the intertwining branches to my right as if through finely cut glass. I felt the palpitations of my heart growing more intense. Again and again I tried to stop along the way, but even that was no easy task, as I felt myself being pushed forward . . .

  Thirty minutes later I was home again, lying on my back upstairs, my eyes tightly closed, as I endeavored to endure my throbbing headache. Behind my eyelids I began to see a wing, its silver feathers enfolded like fish scales. The image was clearly printed on my retinas. I opened my eyes and looked up to the ceiling, and having ascertained that, of course, nothing of the kind could be there, I closed them again, only to find the silver wing still there in the dark. I suddenly remembered that I had seen a wing on the radiator cap of a taxi I had recently taken . . .

  I thought I heard hurried footsteps coming up the stairs and then clattering back down again. I knew them to be those of my wife. Startled, I got up and went down into the semidarkness of the sitting room directly below the stairs. She was lying prostrate, taking short, shallow breaths, it seemed, her shoulders constantly shaking.

  “What is it?”

  “Oh, nothing, my dear.” she replied. Raising her head and giving me a forced smile, she continued. “It was really nothing at all—only that I had the feeling that you were about to die . . .”

  This was the most terrifying experience of my life . . . I have no strength to go on writing. To go on living in this frame of mind would be unspeakable torment. Oh, if only someone would gently and kindly strangle me in my sleep.

  NOTES

  Mandarins (Mikan)

  The Japanese mikan (Citrus unshui) is a small, easy-to-peel citrus fruit. Enormous quantities of mikan are eaten in Japan, particularly during the winter months. Also known as the Satsuma orange or mandarin, it has been variously translated as “mandarin orange” and “tangerine”; strictly speaking, it is neither. So representative is it of Japanese daily life, at least when in season, that English-speaking residents of Japan have come to refer to Tōkyō as the Big Mikan.

  Akutagawa published this story in the May 1919 edition of Shinchō [New Tide], two months after resigning from his position as an English teacher at the Naval Engineering School in Yokosuka, four months after the opening of the Paris Peace Conference, to which the story alludes. The electrically powered trains that today travel to and from this coastal city in hilly southeastern Kanagawa Prefecture still pass through tunnels.

  At the Seashore (Umi no Hotori)

  Although the story was published in September 1925 (Chūō-kōron, The Central Review), well after the beginning of Akutagawa’s struggles with mental illness and depression, it is set in the years of the writer’s happier youth, with scarcely a trace of the gloomily misanthropic musings so apparent elsewhere. Here we catch a glimpse of seemingly carefree, relatively privileged, but hardly affluent, youths, balancing literary ambition with awareness of economic realities, boastfully, aggressively “male” toward one another, awkward in the presence of females, who, quite literally, swim away from them, apparently quite immune to the stinging jellyfish.

  The setting of the story is Chiba Prefecture, occupying the entire Bōsō Peninsula across the bay from Tōkyō-Yokohama. In American terms, Chiba might be seen as standing in relation to Tōkyō as New Jersey does to New York City. Today, the communities that lie immediately to the east of the Edo River, including Chiba City, are culturally almost entirely indistinguishable from the capital. Yet journeying farther east, north, or south brings one at least to a landscape, if not to a way of life, that is no longer metropolitan. Needless to say, this would have been all the more so in Akutagawa’s day.

  Until the end of the Edo period, the Bōsō Peninsula was divided into three provinces: roughly, Shimōsa to the north, Awa to the south, and Kazusa between them. It is the last of these that appears in Akutagawa’s autobiographical story: In the late summer of 1916, he and his friend Kume Masao (1891–1952), himself a novelist-to-be, lodged in Ichinomiya, on the eastern coast of Kazusa. In his description of the attraction felt by “M” (Kume) for the girl in the scarlet bathing suit, Akutagawa may well have been thinking of his friend’s unrequited love for the daughter of Natsume Sōseki, their common mentor, who was to die in December of that same year. (The cigarette description at the
beginning of the story appears to echo a passage in Sōseki’s last—and unfinished—novel, Meian, tr. Light and Darkness). It was also in their seaside cottage that Akutagawa wrote his first love letter to his future wife, Tsukamoto Fumi.

  1The Sino-Japanese term in the original (enzen) suggests the beguiling smile of a woman.

  2‘Sensual face’; in Japanese universities, German was the second most commonly studied foreign language after English.

  3A better-known cicada (semi) hs come to be associated in Japanese culture with the summer, while the evening cicada (higurashi) remains a symbol of early autumn. The literal meaning is “day-darkening.”

  An Evening Conversation (Issekiwa)

  Though the geisha is a perennially—and perhaps excessively—popular topic in Occidental descriptions and discussions of Japan, “An Evening Conversation,” which appeared in the July 1922 edition of Sandee [Sunday] Mainichi, is less about the female entertainer Koen, ‘Little Penny,’ (and even less about the plight of such women in Akutagawa’s time) than about what Dr. Wada calls tsūjin (‘sophisticates, men of the world’). The story follows in a long Japanese literary tradition of rambling conversations among males concerning life, love, and art. In a famous passage in the The Tale of Genji, four young aristocrats while away a rainy summer’s night in the Imperial Palace, waxing philosophical as they comment on their various amorous adventures. Like Wakatsuki, the consummate tsūjin, they put great store on the proper artistic training of their ideal lovers.

  With its flashes of humor and cheerful rather than melancholic irony, the story may seem somewhat atypical of Akutagawa, and indeed it has been suggested that it was intended as a parody of Ame-shōshō (1922, tr. Quiet Rain, 1964) by Nagai Kafū(1879–1959), whose work lovingly focuses on the demimonde.