When I was twenty-eight and still teaching, I received a telegram saying “Father hospitalized,” and I rushed from Kamakura to Tokyo. He was in the Tokyo Hospital with influenza. I spent the next three days there with my Aunts Fuyu and Fuki, sleeping in a corner of the room. I was beginning to feel bored when a call came for me from an Irish reporter friend11 inviting me out for a meal at a Tsukiji tea house. Using his upcoming departure for America as an excuse, I left for Tsukiji even though my father was on the verge of death.
We had a delightful Japanese dinner in the company of four or five geisha. I think the meal ended around ten o’clock. Leaving the reporter, I was headed down the steep, narrow stairway when, from behind, I heard a soft feminine voice calling me “Ah-san” in that playful geisha way. I stopped in mid-descent and turned to look up toward the top of the stairs. There, one of the geisha was looking down, her eyes fixed on mine. Wordlessly, I continued down the stairs and stepped into the cab waiting at the front door. The car moved off immediately, but instead of my father what came to mind was the fresh face of that geisha in her Western hairstyle—and in particular her eyes.
Back at the hospital, I found my father eagerly awaiting my return. He sent everyone else outside the two-panel folding screen by the bed, and, gripping and caressing my hand, he began to talk about long-ago matters that I had never known—things from the time when he married my mother. They were inconsequential things—how he and she had gone to shop for a storage chest, or how they had eaten home-delivered sushi—but before I knew it my eyelids were growing hot inside, and down my father’s wasted cheeks, too, tears were flowing.
My father died the next morning without a great deal of suffering. His mind seemed to grow confused before he died, and he would say things like “Here comes a warship! Look at all the flags it has flying! Three cheers, everybody!” I don’t remember his funeral at all. What I do remember is that when we transported his body from the hospital to his home, a great big spring moon was shining down on the hearse.
4
In mid-March of this year, when it was still cold enough for us to carry pocket warmers, my wife and I visited the cemetery for the first time in a long while—a very long while. Still, however, there was no change at all in either the small grave itself (of course) nor in the red pine stretching its branches above it.
The bones of all three people I have included in this “Death Register” lie buried in the same corner of the cemetery in Yanaka—indeed, beneath the same gravestone. I recalled the time my mother’s coffin was gently lowered into the grave. They must have done the same with Little Hatsu. In my father’s case, though, I remember the gold teeth mixed in with the tiny white shards of bone at the crematorium.
I don’t much like visiting the cemetery, and I would prefer to forget about my parents and sister if I could. On that particular day, though, perhaps because I was physically debilitated, I found myself staring at the blackened gravestone in the early spring afternoon sunlight and wondering which of the three had been the most fortunate.
A shimmering of heat—
Outside the grave
Alone I dwell.
Never before had I sensed these feelings of Jōsō’s12 pressing in upon me with the force they truly had for me that day.
(September 1926)
THE LIFE OF A STUPID MAN
To my friend, Kume Masao:1
I leave it to you to decide when and where to publish this manuscript—or whether to publish it at all.
You know most of the people who appear here, but if you do publish this, I don’t want you adding an index identifying them.2
I am living now in the unhappiest happiness imaginable. Yet, strangely, I have no regrets. I just feel sorry for anyone unfortunate enough to have had a bad husband, a bad son, a bad father like me. So goodbye, then. I have not tried—consciously, at least—to vindicate myself here.
Finally, I entrust this manuscript to you because I believe you probably know me better than anyone else. I may wear the skin of an urbane sophisticate, but in this manuscript I invite you to strip it off and laugh at my stupidity.
Akutagawa Ryūnosuke
20 June 1927
1. The Era
He was upstairs in a bookstore. Twenty years old at the time, he had climbed a ladder set against a bookcase and was searching for the newly-arrived Western books: Maupassant, Baudelaire, Strindberg, Ibsen, Shaw, Tolstoy…
The sun threatened to set before long, but he went on reading book spines with undiminished intensity. Lined up before him was not so much an array of books as the fin de sieècle itself. Nietzsche, Verlaine, the Goncourt brothers, Dostoevsky, Hauptmann, Flaubert…
He took stock of their names as he struggled with the impending gloom. The books began to sink into the somber shadows. Finally his stamina gave out and he made ready to climb down. At that very moment, directly overhead, a single bare light bulb came on. Standing on his perch on top of the ladder, he looked down at the clerks and customers moving among the books. They were strangely small—and shabby.
Life is not worth a single line of Baudelaire.
He stood on the ladder, watching them below…
2. Mother
All the lunatics had been dressed in the same gray clothing, which seemed to give the large room an even more depressing look. One of them sat at an organ, playing a hymn over and over with great intensity. Another was dancing—or, rather, leaping about—in the very center of the room.
He stood watching this spectacle with a doctor of notably healthy complexion. Ten years earlier, his mother had been in no way different from these lunatics. In no way. And in fact in their smell he caught a whiff of his own mother’s smell.
“Shall we go, then?”
The doctor led him down a corridor to another room. In a corner there were several brains soaking in large jars of alcohol. On one of the brains he noticed something faintly white, almost like a dollop of egg white. As he stood there chatting with the doctor, he thought again of his mother.
“The man who had this brain here was an engineer for the XX lighting company. He always thought of himself as a big shiny black dynamo.”
To avoid the doctor’s eyes, he kept looking out the window. There was nothing out there but a brick wall topped with embedded broken bottles. It did, though, have thin growths of moss in dull white patches.
3. The House
He was living in the upstairs room of a house in the suburbs.3 The second story tilted oddly because the ground was unstable.
In this room, his aunt would often quarrel with him, though not without occasional interventions from his adoptive parents. Still, he loved this aunt more than anyone. She never married, and by the time he was twenty, she was an old woman close to sixty.
He often wondered, in that suburban second story, if people who loved each other had to cause each other pain. Even as the thought crossed his mind, he was aware of the floor’s eerie tilt.
4. Tokyo
A thick layer of cloud hung above the Sumida River. From the window of the little steamer, he watched the Mukōjima bank drawing closer. To his eyes, the blossoming cherry trees there looked as dreary as rags in a row. But almost before he knew it, in those trees—those cherry trees that had lined the bank of Mukōjima since the Edo Period4—he was beginning to discover himself.
5. Ego
He and an elder colleague5 sat at a café table puffing on cigarettes. He said very little, but he paid close attention to his companion’s every word.
“I spent half the day riding around in an automobile.”
“Was there something you needed to do?”
Cheek resting on his hand, the elder colleague replied with complete abandon, “No, I just felt like riding around.”
The words released him into a world of which he knew nothing6 —a world of “ego” close to the gods. He felt a kind of pain but, at the same time, a kind of joy.
The café was extremely small. Beneath a framed picture of the god
Pan, however, a rubber tree in a red pot thrust its thick leaves out and down.
6. Illness
In a steady ocean breeze, he spread out the large English dictionary and let his fingertip find words for him.
Talaria: A winged sandal.
Tale: A story.
Talipot: A coconut palm native to the East Indies. Trunk from 50 to 100 feet in height, leaves used for umbrellas, fans, hats, etc. Blooms once in 70 years…
His imagination painted a vivid picture of this bloom. He then experienced an unfamiliar scratchy feeling in his throat, and before he knew it he had dropped a glob of phlegm7 on the dictionary. Phlegm? But it was not phlegm. He thought of the shortness of life and once again imagined the coconut blossom—the blossom of the coconut palm soaring on high far across the ocean.
7. Picture
It happened for him suddenly—quite suddenly. He was standing outside a bookstore, looking at a Van Gogh volume, when he suddenly understood what a “picture” was. True, the Van Gogh was just a book of reproductions, but even in the photographs of those paintings, he sensed the vivid presence of nature.
This passion for pictures gave him a whole new way of looking at the world. He began to pay constant attention to the curve of a branch or the swell of a woman’s cheek.
One rainy autumn evening, he was walking beneath an iron railroad bridge in the suburbs. Below the bank on the far side of the bridge stood a horse cart. As he passed it, he sensed that someone had come this way before. Someone? There was no need for him to wonder who that “someone” might have been. In his twenty-three-year-old heart, a Dutchman with a cut ear and a long pipe in his mouth was fixing his gaze on this dreary landscape.
8. Sparks: Flowers of Fire
Soaked by the rain, he trod along the asphalt. It was a heavy downpour. In the enveloping spray, he caught the smell of his rubberized coat.
Just then he saw the overhead trolley line giving off purple sparks and was strangely moved. His jacket pocket concealed the manuscript of the piece he was planning to publish in their little magazine. Walking through the rain, he looked back and up once again at the trolley line.
The cable was still sending sharp sparks into the air. He could think of nothing in life that he especially desired, but those purple sparks—those wildly-blooming flowers of fire—he would trade his life for the chance to hold them in his hands.
9. Cadavers
A tag on a wire dangled from the big toe of each cadaver. The tags were inscribed with names, ages, and such. His friend bent over one corpse, peeling back the skin of its face with a deftly wielded scalpel. An expanse of beautiful yellow fat lay beneath the skin.
He studied the cadaver. He needed to do this to finish writing a story—a piece set against a Heian Period background8—but he hated the stink of the corpses, which was like the smell of rotting apricots. Meanwhile, with wrinkled brow, his friend went on working his scalpel.
“You know, we’re running out of cadavers these days,” his friend said.
His reply was ready: “If I needed a corpse, I’d kill someone without the slightest malice.” Of course the reply stayed where it was—inside his heart.
10. The Master9
He was reading the Master’s book beneath a great oak tree. Not a leaf stirred on the oak in the autumn sunlight. Far off in the sky, a scale with glass pans hung in perfect balance. He imagined such a vision as he read the Master’s book…
11. Dawn
Night gradually gave way to dawn. He found himself on a street corner surveying a vast market. The swarming people and vehicles in the market were increasingly bathed in rose light.
He lit a cigarette and ambled into the market. Just then a lean black dog started barking at him, but he was not afraid. Indeed, he even loved this dog.
In the very center of the marketplace, a sycamore spread its branches in all directions. He stood at the foot of the tree and looked up through the branches at the sky. A single star shone directly above him.
It was his twenty-fifth year—the third month after he first met the Master.10
12. Naval Port
Gloom filled the interior of the miniature submarine. Crouching down amid all the machinery, he peered into a small scope. What he saw there was a view of the bright naval port.
“You should be able to see the Kongō,11 too,” the naval officer explained to him.
As he was looking at the small warship through the square eyepiece, the thought of parsley popped into his mind for no reason—faintly aromatic parsley on top of a thirty-yen serving of beefsteak.
13. The Master’s Death12
In the wind after the rain, he walked down the platform of the new station. The sky was still dark. Across from the platform three or four railway laborers were swinging picks and singing loudly. The wind tore at the men’s song and at his own emotions.
He left his cigarette unlit and felt a pain close to joy. “Master near death,” read the telegram he had thrust into his coat pocket.
Just then the 6:00 a.m. Tokyo-bound train began to snake its way toward the station, rounding a pine-covered hill in the distance and trailing a wisp of smoke.
14. Marriage
The day after he married her, he delivered a scolding to his wife: “No sooner do you arrive here than you start wasting our money.” But the scolding was less from him than from his aunt, who had ordered him to deliver it.13 His wife apologized to him, of course, and to the aunt as well—with the potted jonquils she had bought for him in the room.
15. He and She
They led a peaceful life, surrounded by the garden’s broad green bashō leaves.14
It helped that their house was located in a town by the shore a full hour’s train ride from Tokyo.
16. Pillow
Pillowing his head on his rose-scented skepticism, he read a book by Anatole France. That even such a pillow might hold a god half-horse, he remained unaware.
17. Butterfly15
A butterfly fluttered its wings in a wind thick with the smell of seaweed. His dry lips felt the touch of the butterfly for the briefest instant, yet the wisp of wing dust still shone on his lips years later.
18. Moon
He happened to pass her on the stairway of a certain hotel. Her face seemed to be bathed in moonglow even now, in daylight. As he watched her walk on (they had never met), he felt a loneliness he had not known before.
19. Man-Made Wings
He moved on from Anatole France to the eighteenth-century philosophers, though not to Rousseau. Perhaps this was because one side of him—the side easily moved by passion—was too close to Rousseau. Instead, he approached the author of Candide, who was closer to another side of him—the cool and richly intellectual side.
At twenty-nine, life no longer held any brightness for him, but Voltaire supplied him with man-made wings.
Spreading these man-made wings, he soared with ease into the sky. The higher he flew, the farther below him sank the joys and sorrows of a life bathed in the light of intellect. Dropping ironies and smiles upon the shabby towns below, he climbed through the open sky, straight for the sun—as if he had forgotten about that ancient Greek who plunged to his death in the ocean when his man-made wings were singed by the sun.
20. Shackles
He and his wife came to live with his adoptive parents when he went to work for a newspaper.16 He saw his contract, written on a single sheet of yellow paper, as a great source of strength. Later, however, he came to realize that the contract saddled him with all the obligations and the company with none.
21. Crazy Girl
Two rickshaws sped down a deserted country road beneath overcast skies. From the sea breeze it was clear that the road was headed toward the ocean. Puzzled that he felt not the slightest excitement about this rendezvous, he sat in the second rickshaw thinking about what had drawn him here. It was certainly not love. And if it was not love, then… but to avoid the conclusion, he had to tell himself, At least we are in this as equals.
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The person riding in the front rickshaw was a crazy girl. And she was not alone in her madness: her younger sister had killed herself out of jealousy.
There’s nothing I can do about this anymore.
He now felt a kind of loathing for this crazy girl—this woman who was all powerful animal instinct.
The two rickshaws soon passed a cemetery where the smell of the shore was strong. Several blackened, pagoda-shaped gravestones stood within the fence, which was woven of brushwood and decorated with oyster shells. He caught a glimpse of the ocean gleaming beyond the gravestones and suddenly—inexplicably—he felt contempt for the woman’s husband for having failed to capture her heart.17