Mandarins: Stories by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa

by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa

  Wakatsuki may be seen as embodying social and cultural contradictions very much on the mind of the author. On the one hand, he is the sort of “modern man” who wears a jumper. (In the original, Akutagawa adds an exotic air by rendering the word chanpa with the same characters as those for the ancient Southeast Asian kingdom. Though janpā, ‘jumper,’ is a familiar word today, the garment would have been unknown to the great majority of Dr. Wada’s contemporaries.) On the other hand, Watasuki lives in an artistic milieu that could just as well have been that of the Edo period. Mentioned in this story are Ike no Taiga (1723–76), an Edo-period artist and calligrapher, and Katō Chikage (1735–1808), an Edo-period scholar and poet. Mushanokōji Saneatsu (1885–1976) was a writer and artist who at the time Akutagawa wrote the story had recently founded a utopian village à la Tolstoy.

  1“Seigai’s Collected Poems”; Seigai literally means “blue lid.”

  The Handkerchief (Hankechi)

  The Japanese have long been known for ruminating on who they are and where they are going—especially in relation to Western culture. Even if the notion of reviving bushidō (‘the way of the warrior’) is now (almost entirely) out of fashion, the concerns of Professor Hasegawa would make him feel quite at home among today’s Japan’s earnest, if self-absorbed, intellectuals. Plus ça change . . .

  As would have been obvious to many of Akutagawa’s contemporaries, when the story was published in October 1916 (Chūō-kōron), Professor Hasegawa is based on Nitobe Inazō (1862–1933). Born in northern Japan, he first studied agricultural economics in Hokkaidō and then, following his conversion to Christianity, entered Tōkyō Imperial University to study English literature. He spent a total of six years abroad, in the United States and Germany, earning several doctorates and publishing books in several languages. Like Professor Hasegawa, he married an American woman and perceived himself as a “bridge” between Japan and the West. At Tōkyō Imperial University, he became a professor of colonial policy before leaving with his wife for the United States, where in 1899 he published Bushidō: The Soul of Japan, a widely read, if controversial, book. In 1918, he attended the Versailles Peace Conference and later served as the undersecretary general of the League of Nations.

  Akutagawa’s portrait of Professor Hasegawa may, on the whole, seem unsympathetic. Westerners familiar with Japan may also squirm at the repeated references to the Gifu lantern, seeing in it a symbol of naïve and sentimental exoticism. Yet the story is arguably not intended as a satire on individuals but rather as a meditation on abstract intellectualism and facile multiculturalism.

  1German Manier (Swedish manér) is in the original, transcribed in Japanese as maniiru. The earliest translations of Strindberg were into German and English.

  2Shonanoka: the day of the death being included in the calculation.

  3German Mätzchen ‘nonsense, hokum’ is apparently the translation of the Swedish choser ‘affectations’. Akutagawa uses the Japanese word kusami ‘bad odor, affectation’, glossing it phonetically as mettsuhen.

  An Enlightened Husband (Kaika no Otto)

  In the original title, Kaika no Otto (February 1919, Chūgai [Home and Abroad]), the Sino-Japanese term kaika ‘opening, enlightenment, progress’ forms part of a Meiji-era slogan: bunmei-kaika ‘civilization and enlightenment’. Akutagawa, who had just become an adult when that era ended in 1912, looks back on it with a characteristic mixture of nostalgia and irony, the question posed by Viscount Honda at the end of the story being very much his own. At the same time, the setting reflects Akutagawa’s enduring love for the capital’s eastern region, his childhood home, in particular the Sumida River, which he first celebrated in Ōkawa no Mizu (‘The Waters of the Great River’), published in 1914, when the writer was still a university student.

  From the Meiji era until 1947, Japan had a peerage system, whereby aristocratic titles were conferred first on former samurai and later on successful entrepreneurs and distinquished civil servants. Viscount Honda also appears in Akutagawa’s Kaika no Satsujin [A Civilized Murder] (July 1918, Chūō-kōron).

  Both in form and mood, “An Enlightened Husband” may remind readers of Natsume Sōseki’s Kokoro, published only five years before, in 1914. There too most of the story is taken up by a secondary narration, telling of love and shattered ideals. Yet while the beautiful woman portrayed in Sōseki’s novel is almost implausibly innocent, the women in Akutagawa’s short story have an aura of evil about them.

  1In the original, the term is gonsai (‘apparent provisional wife’); this became a commonly used euphemism in the Meiji era as Japanese society adopted “modern ways,” albeit fitfully. Miura’s choice of words is the unadorned mekake (‘concubine’).

  2The word in the original is kōtō, lit. ‘high grade’, a Sino-Japanese compound that came to be used to express concepts ranging from higher education to higher species. Like kaika (‘enlightened’), Akutagawa uses it with irony. By the time of this story, kōtō had also come to appear in Tokubetsu-kōtō-keisatsu, “Special Higher Police.”

  3The Kabuki play by Kawatake Mokuami (1816–93) was written in 1879, shortly after the trial and execution (the last legal decapitation) of Takahashi O-den, a notorious young murderess. The play serves to extol the new civil code, including ideal male-female roles hardly consistent with the couple being described by Viscount Honda.

  4Kan-tsū, a punishable offense for women until 1947.

  Autumn (Aki)

  “Autumn” first appeared in the April 1, 1920, edition of Chūō-kōron (The Central Review). The beginning of the story may lead the reader to expect a sad but familiar tale of quintessentially “Japanese” self-sacrifice and the crushing of a woman’s budding literary talent by a brutish, philistine husband. The actual content, however, proves to be richer and subtler—and indeed ultimately ambiguous.

  Akutagawa’s grim description of the Tōkyō suburb where Teruko and her husband live may be seen as consistent with her apparent unhappiness, yet it also clearly reflects the writer’s own view of residential expansion, a development that was only accelerated by the Great Kantō Earthquake of 1923.

  1The renowned swordsman Miyamoto Musashi (1584–1645) developed the two-sword fencing style. Gorin no Sho (The Book of the Five Rings), attributed to him, became something of a cult classic in the English-speaking world during the 1980s.

  2Rather than Rémy de Gourmont (1858–1915), the French symbolist poet and critic, the source is more likely the English illustrator Aubrey Beardsley (1872–98).

  3Jūsan’ya, the thirteenth day of the ninth month according to the lunar calendar, a traditional moon-viewing evening. (Jūsan’ya is the title of a novel by Higuchi Ichiyō [1872–96] about an unhappy marriage.)

  4The price of rice rose in 1914 with the outbreak of the First World War. Newspaper coverage of the rice riots of 1918 led to press censorship.

  Winter (Fuyu)

  Though “Winter” is fictional, Akutagawa was clearly thinking of his elder sister’s husband, Nishikawa Yutaka, when he completed this story in June 1927, a month before his death. Both the theme and ambience are familiar: unhappy family relations set against the background of a cold and gray society. They may also remind us, particularly in the description of the prison visit, of another writer: Franz Kafka, whose posthumous work Der Prozess (The Trial) had been published just two years before.

  The narrator visits his incarcerated relative, to whom he refers as his cousin, more precisely, we may surmise, his cousin-in-law. (There are speech-level differences in the original that suggest he is not a blood relative.) He then travels to his home on the western edge of Tōkyō, in “uptown” Yamanote, which, particularly after the Great Kantō Earthquake, was becoming culturally dominant. His general hints at the social contrasts in wealth and status are reinforced by his remarks about the vicissitudes of fortune relating to his cousin.

  The oppressiveness of a highly conformist society is reflected in the reference to the youth organization (seinendan) of which T is
a leader. Such groups were already taking on a nationalistic, militarist character, and though the story is set in the waning years of “Taishō Democracy,” Akutagawa would have been well aware that at the end of that period, in 1925, all seinendan had come under government control in a federation known as the Dai Nippon Rengō Seinendan. That same year had seen the passage of the Peace Preservation Law, intended to introduce thought control and suppress dissent.

  The nature of the charges against the narrator’s cousin-in-law are never specified, but whatever they are, Akutagawa does not need to explain to his readers the dire social consequences of T’s arrest or the significance of the narrator’s question to his cousin: “The neighborhood doesn’t know yet?”

  Ichigaya is located to the northwest of the Imperial Palace in central Tōkyō. Though the inmates of the now long-since-vanished prison were for the most part the not-yet-convicted, it was also there that prominent radicals were hanged for high treason.

  The ending of the story seems to echo Akutagawa’s account in “Cogwheels” of his visit to his sister following the suicide of Nishikawa Yutaka. Another autobiographical element is the fact that Akutagawa, like the narrator, was at one time a journalist, though his contributions were that of a writer, not a news reporter.

  1In the original, this literally means ‘varieties of people’ but perhaps refers specifically to The Charactres by Theophrastus (372–287 BC).

  2“Long live Master T!”

  Fortune (Un)

  The title of the original is a Sino-Japanese word that may be variously rendered into English as ‘fate’, ‘fortune’, or ‘luck’. Published in January 1917 (Bunshō-sekai), the story is among those Akutagawa adapted from the folk-tale collection Konjaku Monogatari [Tales of Times Now Past]. The setting is the imperial capital in the late Heian period. As in Akutagawa’s famous Rashōmon, inspired by the same folktale collection, there is an aura of decay. Just as the great city gate has fallen into ruin and become a refuge for outlaws, so has the Yasaka pagoda been taken over by a thief and his apparent confederate, an elderly nun.

  In Konjaku Monogatari, all thirty-nine stories in Volume 16 center upon the wondrous workings of the bodhisattva Kannon (Kanzeon), known in India as Avalokiteçvara, in China as Guānyīn, and sometimes in the English-speaking world as the goddess of mercy. KJM 16:33 is consistent with the other tales of piety. A poor woman takes a pilgrimage to Kiyomizu-dera (‘temple of clear water’) to pray to Kannon, where she is told in a vision to comply with the commands of a man she is to meet. He takes her to the nearby Yasaka pagoda of Hōkanji and, in the morning, offers her both marriage and gifts of valuable cloth. He then departs, leaving her with strict instructions to remain. When she discovers his treasure horde, she concludes that he must be a thief. Waiting until the old nun attending to her has gone for water, she makes her escape, taking the gifts with her. She makes her way to a friend’s house and spies the thief in the hands of the authorities. Having profited from the sale of the cloth, she is able to marry and live in comfort.

  In Akutagawa’s otherwise faithful adaptation, the waters are muddied by the moral uncertainty concerning the old nun’s death and the religious agnosticism implicit in the old potter’s role as narrator. The banter between the two men strikes a note of ironic—and irreverent—humor entirely lacking in KJM.

  1An aozamurai (or aozaburai), lit. ‘blue retainer’, a low-ranking attendant.

  2Foxes were regarded as quasi-supernatural creatures, capable of assuming the form of humans and of bewitching them. There are many stories concerning them in Japanese folklore.

  3The bush warbler (ettia diphone), uguisu in Japanese, known for its beautiful song, is regarded as a symbol of joy and good fortune.

  4One of Kyōto’s landmarks. The formal name for the temple is Hōkanji, of which only the oft-destroyed and rebuilt pagoda remains.

  Kesa and Moritō (Kesa to Moritō)

  Published in April 1918 (Chūō-kōron), the story is based on an incident recorded in Genpei-seisuiki [The Rise and Fall of the Genji and Heike]. First compiled in the late thirteenth or early fourteenth century, this work is an account of the colossal struggle between the Minamoto and Taira, culminating in the final defeat of the latter in 1185.

  Late Heian-period Japan saw the rise of such warrior clans and their usurpation in all but name of imperial authority. The characters in the story are Kesa, a court lady married to Minamoto no Wataru, and Endō Moritō, a guard in the palace of the retired emperor.

  In the original version, Kesa’s mother, Moritō’s aunt, has lived in the northeast, in the Minamoto enclave of Koromogawa, hence the name by which she is called. She returns to the the Heian capital, where she resides in straitened circumstances with her beautiful daughter. At the age of fourteen, Kesa is wed to Wataru. Three years later, at the dedication of a bridge, Moritō catches a furtive glimpse of her through the bamboo screen of her carriage and is infatuated. Moritō rebukes his aunt for not having given Kesa to him and even threatens to kill her.

  Kesa, as suggested by her name, referring to a Buddhist monk’s modest surplice, is a paragon of fidelity and self-sacrifice. In order to save her mother, Kesa yields to her cousin and then, fearful for her husband’s life as well, pretends to contrive with Moritō to kill him. Wetting her long hair and tying it up into a knot to make herself resemble a man, she lies in Wataru’s bed; Moritō stealthily enters and, intending to cut off his rival’s head, slays instead his beloved. When he realizes what he has done, he is mad with grief and remorse. He wanders about with Kesa’s head until, renouncing the world, he becomes a Buddhist ascetic.

  Moritō is known to history by his priestly name, Mongaku. Later a sometime associate of Minamoto no Yoritomo, the first Kamakura shogun, he is thought to have died in the early thirteenth century.

  The story of Kesa’s fate has been dramatized many times, notably in Kinugasa Teinosuke’s 1953 film Jigokumon (Gate of Hell). The female role is played by Kyō Machiko, who also appears in Kurosawa’s Rashōmon.

  Japanese Buddhism is replete with tales of black-hearted sinners who, seeing at last the evil of their ways, embark on the arduous path to sainthood. In his retelling of this story, Akutagawa not only alters details but also narrows the focus. Clearly, he is more interested in damnation than redemption, as he probes the complex motives not only of Moritō but also of Kesa—none of which is touched upon in the original version. Here Kesa is driven to adultery not by sacrificial love for others but rather by despair, vanity, and strangely ambivalent feelings toward Moritō. Her mother becomes, in Akutagawa’s version, an incidental aunt. The tale thus offers an ironic twist on the star-crossed lover motif, a familiar theme in Japanese lore.

  The language, no less than the psychology, is modern, the story containing lexical concepts introduced only after the beginning of the Meiji era. The Sino-Japanese word ai ‘love’, for example, which Akutagawa uses with striking frequency, traditionally referred primarily to affection, attachment, or (in Buddhist terminology) carnal lust. Occurring once in Moritō’s soliloquy is the compound ren’ai, a Meiji-period coinage referring to romantic love. Moritō and Kesa’s musings about their true feelings and motives are thus couched in terms that are clearly and deliberately anachronistic.

  In Romeo and Juliet, external miscommunication contributes to tragedy. In “Kesa and Moritō,” intense introspection on the part of each character is juxtaposed with a disastrous misunderstanding of the other’s thoughts and intentions. In that respect, the story may be seen as a forerunner of “In the Grove” and radical point-of-viewism.

  Death of a Disciple (Hōkyōnin no Shi)

  In the late sixteenth century, Nagasaki, the setting of Akutagawa’s story, the fortunes of the Christian community were dramatically shifting. In February of the following year, twenty-six believers, seventeen Japanese and nine missionaries were crucified in Nagasaki. It was only in 1873, less than twenty years before the birth of Akutagawa, that the Meiji government finally lifted its anti-
Christian edicts. Akutagawa had a strong interest in the predominant faith of the West, as is reflected in many of his stories, even if his view of religion in general was ambivalent.

  Despite Akutagawa’s pseudo-documentary postscript, including his reference to the eighteenth-century Chronicles of Port Nagasaki (Nagasaki-minato-gusa) The Death of a Disciple is clearly fiction. (Though, for example, the thirteenth-century Legenda Aurea is clearly a real work, there is no edition to which descriptions of Japanese Christians have been added.) In fact, it may not be too much to say that the motifs here, albeit placed in the historical context of Japan’s “Christian century,” reflect the influence of those early medieval Japanese folktales that inspired some of the writer’s most famous stories. The saintly figure of Lorenzo would be quite at home in the Buddhist tales of Konjaku Monogatari. Indeed, he is first described even by the Christians of Nagasaki as a tendō, a strictly Buddhist term, referring to fierce guardian deities disguised as boys. Akutagawa’s comments at the end of the narration may be seen as an imitation (or parody) of the moralizing didacticism with which those stories inevitably conclude. The word translated into English as ‘depravity’—bonnō—is itself the rendition of a Sanskrit Buddhist term: klesa.

  In particular, the surprise ending points to a mélange of traditions. In the minds of the story’s first readers, Lorenzo would surely have evoked a non-Christian figure with a nonetheless specifically Christian association: Kannon. A well-known subterfuge of the “hidden Christians” during the centuries of persecution was to use images of this enormously popular bodhisattva (cf. “Fortune”) to represent the Virgin Mary. Kannon, as it happens, was originally male, becoming female along the journey to Japan from India via China. In a story that was surely known to Akutagawa, she is born Miào-Shàn, the daughter of a rich king in Sumatra, who seeks to thwart her in her desire to become a Buddhist nun, even to the point of setting fire to the temple in which she resides. She miraculously puts out the flames but in the end is put to death.