7. tragedy based on The Cuckoo: A heart-rending melodrama about a handsome young couple forced apart by the groom Takeo’s mother upon her discovery that the beautiful heroine Namiko has tuberculosis, The Cuckoo was a blockbuster as a book, as a play in the modernized Kabuki-style theater (i.e. Shinpa, which, unlike Kabuki, uses actresses in female parts), and as a movie. Several film versions were made between 1909 and 1958, but this story is probably referring to the 1918 version—in which a male actor played the heroine.
8. two mirrors… slipcovers: A beauty parlor customer would sit at a typical Japanese low cabinet to which was attached a tall mirror that was normally kept covered when not in use. Ancient feelings about mirrors as objects of special power still survive in Japan, though in greatly diluted form.
9. 6-yen… 70 sen it cost for a measure of rice: A sen is a hundredth of a yen. Waitresses were paid around 10 yen per month at the time of the story (a college graduate could expect a starting salary of 65 yen or more; Akutagawa was paid 100 yen monthly by the Naval Engineering School in 1917). What with 6 yen of her base pay being consumed by rent, a 3-measure monthly rice supply costing her over 2 yen, and a daily dip in the public bath costing 5 sen, O-Kimi would have had to depend on tips to make ends meet. See Iwasaki Jirō, Bukka no sesō 100-nen (Tokyo: Yomiuri Shinbunsha, 1982), pp. 286–301.
10. the Hundred Poets card game… the martial music of Satsuma: Tanaka’s talents include the memorization of 100 short poems needed to excel in a traditional popular New Year’s card game that calls for snatching up the appropriate card as quickly as possible when the first few lines of a poem are read aloud. He can also accompany himself on a 4-or 5-string lute known as a “biwa” while singing stirring tales of war and heroism, an especially manly art that originated in the Satsuma domain in the sixteenth century.
11. Douglas Fairbanks… Mori Ritsuko: Douglas Fairbanks (1883–1939), a Hollywood film star, and Mori Ritsuko (1890–1961), a popular stage actress of the day.
12. Puvis de Chavannes’ St. Geneviève: Watch of St. Geneviève, the last painting by Puvis de Chavannes (1824–98) is considered one of his most stirring, another of the art works evoking sentimentalisme in this story.
13. “The Wanderer’s Lament”: “Sasurai,” a song made popular at the time by its use in a Tokyo performance of Tolstoy’s The Living Corpse (1911) in Japanese translation.
HORSE LEGS (Uma no ashi)
1. the recently overthrown Qing dynasty: The Republican (First) Revolution began in October 1911 and brought down the Qing dynasty (1644–1912).
2. Shuntian Times:The Shuntian shibao (in Japanese: Junten jihō), founded in 1901 by Japanese entrepreneur Nakajima Masao, was a Chinese-language newspaper for Beijing, the surrounding area of which was known as Shuntian during the Qing era. For some reason, the editor “quoted” below has a Japanese “name,” Mudaguchi, which means “idle chatter.”
3. Annals of Horse Governance… Quality of Horses: All are genuine Chinese reference works: Ma zheng ji, Ma ji, Yuan Heng liao niu ma tuo ji, Bo Le xiang ma jing.
4. ancient records: From the chapter on punishment in Kongcongzi (The Kong Family Masters’ Anthology), a fictitious Confucian text compiled in the third century AD.
5. loudly beat the drum: Echoing Chapter 11, Verse 16 of the Confucian Analects (c. 450 BC).
6. Okada Saburō: Novelist (1890–1954), went to France in 1921 and began publishing French contes that contrasted sharply with the autobiographical fiction that dominated much of Japanese publishing. In 1920, Akutagawa found some of his work at least “promising” (IARZ 6:61). Major Yuasa has not been identified.
DAIDŌJI SHINSUKE: THE EARLY YEARS (Daidōji Shinsuke no hansei/—Aru seishinteki fūkeiga—)
1. Ekō in Temple… Honjo Ward: Founded in 1657, the Ekōin Temple remains an important center of neighborhood life. Akutagawa grew up in this strongly traditional neighborhood of Honjo Ward on the flat, low-lying east bank of the Sumida River after he was adopted, though he was born in Kyōbashi Ward in another, west bank, part of Tokyo’s “low city.” See Edward Seidensticker, Low City, High City (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1983), pp. 4–5, 8–9, 214–20.
2. Roka’s Nature and Man… Beauties of Nature: Tokutomi Roka (1868–1927), Shizen to jinsei (1900), tr. Arthur Lloyd et al., as Nature and Man (Tokyo, 1913)—see also “Green Onions”; Sir John Lubbock (1834–1913), The Beauties of Nature and the Wonders of the World We Live In (1893).
3. mother’s milk: Akutagawa conflates his birth parents and adoptive parents in this story. See the notes below, plus the other stories in this section, and the Chronology for factual accounts of his life.
4. vita sexualis: For an English translation of the controversial novel to which this refers indirectly, see Mori Ōgai, Vita Sexualis (1909), tr. by Kazuji Ninomiya and Sanford Goldstein (Tokyo: Tuttle, 1972).
5. battle of Fushimi-Toba: Akutagawa’s birth father fought with the rebel Satsuma troops against the army of the Tokugawa government on 3 January 1868 in the Kyoto suburbs of Fushimi and Toba, the single greatest clash leading to the downfall of the regime.
6. dairy farm that the uncle owned: Actually Akutagawa’s birth father, who would have been about fifty-five at the time.
7. father… ¥500: The uncle who adopted Akutagawa retired in 1898 as an assistant department head in the Tokyo government’s internal affairs division with an annual stipend of ¥720, rather better than Shinsuke’s father (IARZ 24:57). Compared with the average middle-class annual income of ¥600, Shinsuke’s father’s was on the low side: they were not poor, but not comfortable.
8. school-sponsor meetings: Hoshō nin kaigi, precursor of modern parent-teacher groups.
9. Kunikida Doppo: As a pioneer of the modern Japanese short story, Kunikida Doppo (1871–1908) was Akutagawa’s single most important predecessor. The highly wrought diary that covered Doppo’s mid-twenties, Azamukazaru no ki (Diary without Deceit) was one of the most successful and influential pieces of introspective writing of its day. If Akutagawa himself kept a diary like Shinsuke’s, it has not survived, but the passages “quoted” here read much like Doppo’s; indeed, this story’s pervasive self-conscious use of parallel prose owes much to him. See also notes 14 and 15.
10. Way of the Warrior: Low-ranking samurai like the Buddhist attendants in the story “Loyalty,” the Akutagawas had for generations served as tea masters to the Tokugawa Shōgun. On the Way of the Warrior (bushidō), see Hagakure: The Book of the Samurai, tr. William Scott Wilson (Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1992).
11. middle school to higher school: In Akutagawa’s day, four years of compulsory elementary school were followed by three of upper-level elementary school, five of middle school, and three of higher school. He attended middle school from age 13 to 18 and higher school from 18 to 21.
12. suicide: A hypothetical situation briefly described in Notes from the House of the Dead (1860–61), Part I, Chapter 2.
13. “Dharma”: Good-luck dolls representing the Zen patriarch Bodhidharma tend to be round and have enormous eyes.
14. Katai: Doppo and Tayama Katai (1871–1930) were associated with the “Naturalist School” of fiction that flourished in Japan in the first decade of the twentieth century.
15. A Hunter’s Diary: Turgenev’s A Sportsman’s Notebook (1847–51) had deeply influenced modern Japanese lyricism since its partial translation into Japanese (as Ryōjin nikki (A Hunter’s Diary)) in 1888. Doppo was among those who wrote affectingly about the work. Akutagawa (or at least Shinsuke) would have read the 1906 Constance Garnett translation, A Sportsman’s Sketches, in 1909 when he was seventeen.
16. Outlaws of the Marsh: Translated into English variously as Water Margin, The Men of the Marshes, Outlaws of the Marsh, The Marshes of Mt. Liang, and All Men are Brothers, the multivolume vernacular Chinese adventure novel of the fourteenth century known in China as Shuihu zhuan by Shi Nai-an was translated into Japanese in the early nineteenth century and since then has been widely known and loved in Japan a
s Suikoden. Akutagawa read it in the edited translation by the Edo novelist Takizawa Bakin (1767–1848) which was included in a popular uniform library called Teikoku bunko. Battle flag… Zhang Qing’s inn: from Chapters 76, 23, and 27 respectively; done battle with characters: from Chapters 48 and 4 passim respectively.
17. Reineke Fuchs: Goethe’s 1792 version of Reynard the Fox, first translated into Japanese in 1884.
18. Murata Seifū to Yamagata Aritomo: Murata Seifū (1783–1855) was a pioneer advocate of the kind of strong military policy that Yamagata Aritomo (1838–1922) helped realize as one of the central Restoration leaders.
19. Genroku Period… night heron’s scream: The greatest haiku poet, Matsuo Bashō (1644–1694), flourished during the Genroku Period (see “Green Onions,” note 5). All four images are from haiku by Bashō and his disciples: “Matsutake, oh!/Shape of the mountain/Near the capital” (Matsutake ya/Miyako ni chikaki/Yama no nari) by Hirose Izen (d. 1711); “Here the morning dew!/In turmeric fields/The wind of autumn” (Asa-tsuyu ya/Ukon-batake no/Aki no kaze) by Nozawa Bonchō (d. 1714); “How busy they are—/Offshore in chilly rain/Sails running, sails reefed” (Isogashiya/oki no shigure no/maho-kataho)by Mukai Kyorai (1651–1704); and “A lightning flash!/Into the darkness goes/A night heron’s scream” (Inazumaya/Yami no kata yuku/Goi no koe) by Bashō.
20. used bookstores that lined Jinbōchō Avenue: On Jinbōchō, see “Green Onions,” p. 120.
21. Ōhashi to the Imperial Library: The Ōhashi Library was a private institution founded in 1901 by the publisher and politician Ōhashi Shintarō (1863–1944). The Imperial Library was the fourth incarnation of a public library founded in 1872 in Ueno Park by the national government, and, generally known as the Ueno Library, it is now part of the National Diet Library.
22. Livingstone: David Livingstone (1813–73), Scottish doctor, missionary, and explorer, and author of Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa (1857).
23. Herr und Knecht: Master and servant (German).
24. Mushanokōji Saneatsu:(1885–1976), novelist much admired by young readers of Akutagawa’s day for his philosophical musings. See also “The Writer’s Craft” (and note 3).
25. To be continued: Akutagawa appended a note indicating his intention to expand the story to three or four times its present length. He never did write the longer version, but the other stories in this section have been arranged to continue the narrative of a life resembling Akutagawa’s.
THE WRITER’S CRAFT (Bunshō)
1. Krafft-Ebing… Masoch: Baron Richard von Krafft-Ebing (1840–1902), German neuropsychologist, author of Psychopathia Sexualis (1886). Leopold von Sacher-Masoch (1836–95), Austrian novelist.
2. in the style of the old Japanese Jesuit translations of Aesop: Akutagawa’s “Kirishitohoro-shōnin den” (“The Life of Saint Christopher”) (March 1919), a stylistic tour-de-force which has not been translated into English, employs archaic language modeled on the sixteenth-century Japanese Jesuit translation of Aesop’s Fables.
3. Hitomaro… Saneatsu: Kakinomoto no Hitomaro (late seventh century) and Mushanokōji Saneatsu (1885–1976) mark either end of Japanese literary history as seen at the time of the story. Akutagawa undoubtedly chose Mushanokōji, a master of pseudoprofundities, for his sonorous aristocratic name (see also “Daidōji Shinsuke: The Early Years,” note 24).
4. “Funerals”: Akutagawa never wrote such a story. Ōmoto-kyō, a religion of spirit possession with Shintō roots, was founded in 1892 and suppressed by the Japanese government in 1921 (and again in the 1935–45 wartime period). His predecessor at the Naval Engineering School inadvertently created the position for Akutagawa in 1916 by resigning to enter the controversial sect.
5. Shinnai style: A school of plaintive narrative singing with samisen accompaniment that originated in the eighteenth century.
6. Dōmyō… Hōrinji Temple:Dōmyō (?–1020) was said to be such a marvelous chanter of the Lotus Sutra that deities once came from some of the holiest sites in Japan to hear him chanting at the Hōrinji Temple in Kyoto. For a translation of a twelfth-century story about the event, see Dykstra, The Konjaku Tales, 1:156–9.
THE BABY’S SICKNESS (Kodomo no byōki)
1. Natsume Sensei… Musō: Natsume Sensei—“Master Natsume” —is the novelist Natsume Sōseki, Akutagawa’s late literary “master.” See Chronology and “Spinning Gears.” In this brief dream sequence, Akutagawa deliberately jumbles references to two nineteenth-century Confucian scholars, brothers Hirose Kyokusō (1807–1863) and Hirose Ensō (1782–1856), and the fourteenth-century Zen priest MusōSoseki (1275–1351), whose name means “Dream Window.” The storyteller Tanabe Nansō (1775–1846) will be added to the mix a few paragraphs later.
2. Taka: “Taka” is Akutagawa Takashi, who was seven months old at the time of the story (1923). Since he had already lived in two calendar years, the original text calls him “two years old” following the traditional method of counting ages. His elder brother Hiroshi was three years old.
3. Dr. S: Dr. Shimojima Isaoshi, Akutagawa’s own physician—and close friend—since the family moved to Tabata. The baby’s temperature below (37.6°C) is 99.7°F.
4. like a schoolgirl again: Tsukamoto Fumi was a fifteen-year-old schoolgirl when Akutagawa, eight years her senior, first began to consider the possibility of marrying her.
5. Hōitsu: Sakurai Hōitsu (1761–1828), a figure associated with late-Edo frivolity.
6. Sainted Founder… Lotus Sutra: The founder of the Nichiren sect, the central scripture of which is the Lotus Sutra, was Nichiren (1222–82). On the Lotus Sutra, see “The Nose,” note 1.
DEATH REGISTER (Tenkibo)
1. Shiba Ward: A west-bank “low city” ward near Akutagawa’s birthplace. See also “Daidōji Shinsuke: The Early Years,” note 1. His “Ōji Auntie” (p. 181) is from Ōji Ward at the north end of Tokyo. Yanaka (p. 181) is a west-bank low-city neighborhood with many temples and cemeteries.
2. Story of the Western Wing: Xixiang ji (Seisō ki or Seishōki in Japanese), by Wang Shifu (c. 1250–1300). Akutagawa slightly misquotes the source but with little change in impact. See Wang Shifu, The Story of the Western Wing, tr. Stephen H. West and Wilt L. Idema (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 4. p. 242.
3. Iris Bouquet: Ayame Kōsui seems to have been the brand name of a perfume.
4. memorial tablet: A plain wooden slat, usually 4 or 5 feet long, 4 inches wide and perhaps ’’ thick, inscribed vertically in black India-ink characters with the posthumous Buddhist name of the deceased (see next note) and erected at the cemetery during the interment ceremony. After the first forty-nine days of mourning, a smaller tablet, perhaps 8 inches high and 3 inches wide and usually finished in glossy black lacquer with the posthumous name inscribed in gold characters, is installed in the family altar at home, where prayers are offered up to the departed spirit. On the “tiny memorial tablet” (p. 183) for Little Hatsu: as her younger brother, Akutagawa would have seen only the small tablet in the shrine at home.
5. Kimyō in Myōjō Nisshin Daishi: The lengthy “preceptive appellation” (kaimyō) was an entirely typical agglomeration of Sino-Japanese labels indicating that she was a faithful adult female lay member of the Nichiren sect: Kimyō in (Taking (faithful) refuge in the hall (of Buddha))/Myōjō (Wondrous Vehicle (of the Buddhist Law))/Nisshin (Sun-Advance: a name in the style of sect founder Nichiren (Sun-Lotus))/Daishi (Elder (Lay) Sister). On the Nichiren sect, see “The Baby’s Sickness,” note 6.
6. Little Hatsu: Niihara Hatsu (1885–91).
7. a Mrs. Summers… Tsukiji: Ellen Summers (1843–1907), the wife of English literature instructor James Summers, ran a school in her home c. 1884–1908. Among her pupils was the writer Tanizaki Jun’ichirō (see “The Life of a Stupid Man,” note 5). Perhaps a fifteen-minute rickshaw trip northeast of Shiba, Tsukiji was a treaty-designated foreign residential area in the early Meiji period, until such segregated housing was abrogated by new treaties signed in 1899.
/> 8. boke: The name of the tree, known as a Japanese quince (Pyrus japonica) in English, is a homonym for “dimwit.” Before the aunt can joke with her that both she and the tree are “boke,” Hatsu cleverly makes up her own remarkably similar word play using “baka” (dummy).
9. Shinjuku: Then a western suburb, but now one of the most intensively developed commercial, municipal government, and entertainment districts in Tokyo, Shinjuku could not have supported a pasture much after the death of Akutagawa’s father (in 1919), and certainly not after the earthquake of 1923 triggered its transformation.
10. Uoei restaurant in Ōmori: Local records indicate that the restaurant was in business from approximately 1895 to the mid-Taishō period. Ōmori was a southern ward of Tokyo.
11. Irish reporter friend: Thomas Jones (1890?–1923) came to Japan in 1915 as an English teacher and became a correspondent in the Reuters Tokyo office. Called “my brother’s best friend” by Jones’s sister Mabel, Akutagawa wrote movingly of this some what naïve admirer of Japan when both were idealistic 25-yearolds and then again when they were closer to 30 and more jaded. Jones was killed by smallpox after being reassigned to Shanghai in 1919 (“Kare/Dai ni” (1926) and IARZ 14:289).
12. Jōsō’s: NaitōJō sō (1662–1704), one of Bashō’s “ten wise disciples,” wrote this haiku (Kagerōya/Tsuka yori soto ni/Sumu bakari) on the occasion of a visit to Bashō’s grave that gave rise to thoughts about his own declining health. Jō sō must have sensed that the entire difference between himself and the dead occupant of the grave was as insubstantial as a shimmering wave of heat.
THE LIFE OF A STUPID MAN (Aru ahō no isshō)
1. Kume Masao: The writer (1891–1952) had been one of Akutagawa’s closest friends and literary collaborators since their days together in higher school and university.
2. I don’t want you adding an index identifying them: Scholars of Japanese literature have, of course, done their best to subvert this dying wish of Akutagawa’s, as I shall.