What we must aim for today, of course, is not a superficial accommodation with an alien culture but a more positive, essential, and interactive engagement. Having been born in Japan, a country with its own particular cultural environment, we have inherited its language and history, and we live here. Obviously, we need not—and cannot—become completely Westernized or globalized. On the other hand, we must never allow ourselves to descend into narrow nationalism. This is the one great lesson, the inflexible rule, that history has taught us.
Today, when the world is growing ever smaller through the spectacular development of the Internet and the increasingly rapid flow of economic interchange, we find ourselves in a pressing situation whereby, like it or not, our very survival depends on our ability to exchange cultural methodologies on an equivalent basis. To turn toward a stance of national exclusivity, regionalism, or fundamentalism in which nations become isolated politically, economically, culturally, or religiously could bring about unimaginable dangers on a worldwide scale. If only in that sense, we novelists and other creative individuals must simultaneously broadcast our cultural messages outward and be flexible receptors of what comes to us from abroad. Even as we unwaveringly preserve our own identity, we must exchange that which can be exchanged and understand that which can be mutually understood. Our role is perfectly clear.
Upon reflection, it seems to me that my departure point as a novelist may be rather close to the position adopted by Akutagawa. Like him, I leaned heavily in the direction of modernism at first, and I half-intentionally wrote from a stand point of direct confrontation with the mainstream I-novel style. I, too, sought to create my own fictional world with a style that provisionally rejected realism. (In contrast to Akutagawa’s day, though, we now have the handy concept of post-modernism.) I also learned most of my technique from foreign literature. Unlike him, however, I am basically a novelist rather than a short-story writer, and after a certain point I went on to actively construct my own original storytelling system. I also live an entirely different kind of life. Emotionally, though, I continue to be drawn to several of the best works that Akutagawa left us.
To be sure, I have not modeled my fictional world on his. This is not to say that one approach is right and the other wrong. Such simplistic comparisons are both impossible and meaningless. We live in different eras, our personalities are different, we grew up in different circumstances, and our aims are (as far as I can tell) different. All I want to say is that I—and probably most of Akutagawa’s readers—learn a great deal from his works and from the vivid traces of his life, and we continue to draw from them as we move on through our own lives. In other words, Akutagawa Ryūnosuke still lives and functions in actuality as a “national writer” of ours. He lives on as an immovable fixed point in Japanese literature, as a part of our shared intellectual foundation.
Finally, I would like to commend the translator for his efforts in producing this book. From among Akutagawa’s numerous short stories he has chosen several of the undisputed masterpieces and several highly interesting lesser works (most of which have not been translated into English before), assembled them into four apposite categories, and translated them with great accuracy while conveying the spirit of the originals. This has been done with a level of attention to detail that bespeaks a warm enthusiasm for Akutagawa’s works and assured literary judgment. I can only hope that this book inspires a new appreciation for Akutagawa abroad.
Murakami Haruki
NOTES
1. On the list with Akutagawa would be such figures as Natsume Sōseki (1867–1916), Mori ōgai (1862–1922), Shimazaki Tōson (1872–1943), Shiga Naoya (1883–1971), Tanizaki Jun’ichirō (1886–1965), and the 1968 Nobel Prizewinner Kawabata Yasunari (1899–1972). Less certain of a place might be Dazai Osamu (1909–48) and Mishima Yukio (1925–70). Sōseki would unquestionably come out at the top. This totals only nine; I can’t think of a good candidate for tenth place.
2. Natsume Sōseki, Botchan, tr. J. Cohn (Tokyo: Kodansha International, 2005). On his name, see Chronology, note 2.
3. Shiga Naoya, “The Shopboy’s God” (“Kozōno kamisama”), tr. Lane Dunlop, in The Paper Door and Other Stories by Shiga Naoya (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1987), and Kawabata Yasunari, “The Dancing Girl of Izu” (“Izu no odoriko”), tr. J. Martin Holman, in The Dancing Girl of Izu and Other Stories (Washington, D.C.: Counterpoint, 1998).
4. Tanka is the dominant verse form through most of Japanese literary history, written in five lines of 5-7-5-7- 7 syllabic structure.
5. Mori Ōgai, “The Dancing Girl” (“Maihime”), tr. Richard Bowring, in Mori ōgai: Youth and Other St ories, ed. J. Thomas Rimer (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1994), and “San shō the Steward” (“SanshōDayū”), tr. J. Thomas Rimer, in The Historical Fiction of Mori ōgai (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1991).
6. Tanizaki Jun’ichirō, The Makioka Sisters (Sasameyuki), tr. Edward Seidensticker (New York: Knopf, 1957).
7. “Tu Tze-chun” (“Toshishun”), in The Essential Akutagawa, The Three Treasures, and The Spider’s Thread and Other Stories; “The Art of the Occult” (“Majutsu”), in The Three Treasures and The Spider’s Thread and Other Stories; and “Yam Gruel” (“Imogayu”), in Rashomon and Other Stories, tr. Takashi Kojima. For bibliographical details here and below, see Further Reading.
8. “Kappa,” in Exotic Japanese Stories and Kappa.
9. Mori ōgai is fine, too, but to the eye of the modern reader the style of his language is a little too static and classical. Kawabata’s works, to be quite honest, have always been a problem for me. I do, of course, recognize both their literary value and his considerable abilities as a novelist, but I have never been able to identify very closely with his fictional world. With regard to Shimazaki and Shiga, I can only say I have no particular interest in them. I have hardly read a thing of theirs aside from what I found in the school textbooks, and what I have read has left little trace in my memory.
10. “The Lady, Roku-no-Miya” (“Roku-no-miya no himegimi”), in Exotic Japanese Stories. For English translations of the classical collections, see Translator’s Note, notes 2 and 3.
11. ARSJ, p. 176. (For publication information, see list of abbreviations, p. 237.)
12. Kikuchi Kan, “Inshōteki na kuchibiru to hidarite no hon,” in Shinchō (October 1917), p. 30.
13. See Edward Seidensticker, Low City, High City (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1983).
Further Reading
AKUTAGAWA STORIES IN ENGLISH TRANSLATION
Most earlier anthologies tend to be out of print or difficult to find except in libraries. All those listed here contain stories not included in the present volume. Individual stories mentioned in the Introduction are noted along with other titles of particular interest.
The Essential Akutagawa, ed. Seiji M. Lippitt (New York: Marsilio, 1999). Contains “Tu Tze-chun” (“Toshishun”), “Kesa and Morito” (“Kesa to Moritō”), “The Faint Smiles of the Gods” (“Kamigami no bishō”), “A Note to a Certain Old Friend” (“Aru kyūyūe okuru shuki”), “Autumn Mountain” (“Shūsanzu”)
Exotic Japanese Stories, tr. Takashi Kojima and John McVittie (New York: Liveright, 1964). Contains “Kappa” (“Kappa”), “The Lady, Roku-no-Miya” (“Roku-no-miya no himegimi”), “The Badger” (“Mujina”), “Heresy” (“Jashūmon”, the unfinished sequel to “Hell Screen”), “The Handkerchief” (“Hankechi”), “The Dolls” (“Hina”), “A Woman’s Body” (“Nyotai”)
The Heart is Alone, ed. Richard McKinnon (Tokyo: Hokuseido, 1957). Contains “Flatcar” (“Torokko”), “A Clod of Soil” (“Ikkai no tsuchi”)
Hell Screen and Other Stories, tr. W. H. H. Norman (Tokyo: Hokuseido, 1948). Contains “Heresy” (“Jashūmon”, the unfinished sequel to “Hell Screen”)
Japanese Short Stories, tr. Takashi Kojima (New York: Liveright, 1961). Contains “A Clod of Soil” (“Ikkai no tsuchi”), “The Tangerines” (“Mikan”)
Kappa, tr. Geoffr
ey Bownas (Tokyo: Tuttle, 1971, 2000). Contains “Kappa” and a lengthy introduction
Rashomon and Other Stories, tr. Takashi Kojima (New York: Liveright, 1952, 1999). Contains “Yam Gruel” (“Imogayu”), complete translation of “Dragon” (“Ryū”), “The Martyr” (“Hōkyōnin no shi”)
Rashomon and Other Stories, tr. Glenn W. Shaw (Tokyo: Hara Shobo, 1964). Essentially a reissue of Tales Grotesque and Curious
The Spider’s Thread and Other Stories, tr. Dorothy Britton (Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1987). Contains “Tu Tzechun” (“Toshishun”), “The Art of the Occult” (“Majutsu”), “Flatcar” (“Torokko”), “The Dolls” (“Hina”), “The Tangerines” (“Mikan”)
Tales Grotesque and Curious, tr. Glenn W. Shaw (Tokyo: Hokuseido, 1930). Contains “Tobacco and the Devil” (“Tabako to akuma”), “Lice” (“Shirami”), “The Handkerchief” (“Hankechi”), “The Wine Worm” (“Shuchū”)
The Three Treasures, tr. Takamasa Sasaki (Tokyo: Hokuseido, 1951). Contains “Tu Tze-chun” (“Toshishun”), “The Art of the Occult” (“Majutsu”)
STUDIES OF AKUTAGAWA
Cavanaugh, Carole, Akutagawa Ryūnosuke: An Abbreviated Life (Cambridge: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University, forthcoming)
Hibbett, Howard S., “Akutagawa Ryūnosuke and the Negative Ideal,” in Personality in Japanese History, ed. Albert M. Craig and Donald H. Shively (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970), pp. 425– 51
——, “Akutagawa Ryūnosuke,” in Modern Japanese Writers, ed. Jay Rubin (New York: Scribner’s, 2001), pp. 19– 30
Keene, Donald, Dawn to the West: Japanese Literature of the Modern Era (New York: Holt Rinehart and Winston, 1984), pp. 556– 93
Lippitt, Seiji M., “The Disintegrating Machinery of the Modern: Akutagawa Ryūnosuke’s Late Writings,” Journal of Asian Studies 58, no. 1 (1999), pp. 27–50
Yu, Beongcheon, Akutagawa: An Introduction (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1972)
Translator’s Note
(New readers are advised that this section discusses
details of the plots.)
The stories in this volume have been arranged in chronological order according to the time of their setting rather than the order of their publication, and the part titles are my own. Except as noted below, the translations are based on texts in IARZ and compared with those in CARZ and NKBT.1 The completion dates with which Akutagawa closed his manuscripts (usually month and year) are preserved here in accordance with customary publishing practice. So, too, are the various text separators he used in each story, such as the solid lines in “Loyalty” and the asterisks in “The Writer’s Craft.” The choice of stories is intended to reflect the great range of Akutagawa’s fictional world, based on my reevaluation of the complete works. Many of the acknowledged masterpieces are here, including the two on which the Kurosawa film Rashōmon is based, but the important late novella “Kappa,” which is readily available in translation, has been excluded primarily because of its length. My reasons for including several less well-known pieces appear in the following remarks on the individual stories. I like to think that the Akutagawa presented in this book is funnier, more shocking, and more imaginative than he has been perceived to be until now in the English-speaking world.
A WORLD IN DECAY
The Heian Period (794–1185) was Japan’s classical era, a time of peace and opulence, when the imperial court in Heian-kyō (“Capital of Peace and Tranquility”: later Kyoto) was the fountainhead of culture, and the arts flourished. Toward the end, however, political power slipped from the aristocracy to the warrior class, the decline of the imperial court led to the decay of the capital, and peace gave way to unrest. This was the part of the Heian Period that interested Akutagawa, who identified it with fin-de-siècle Europe, and he symbolized the decay with the image of the crumbling Rashōmon gate that dominates his story. Director Kurosawa Akira borrowed Akutagawa’s gate and went him one better, picturing it as a truly disintegrating structure, entirely bereft of its Heian lacquer finish, and suggestive of the moral decay against which his characters struggle. His film Rashōmon (1950) was based on two of Akutagawa’s stories, “Rashōmon” and “In a Bamboo Grove.” Both—themselves based on tales from the twelfth century—reach far more skeptical conclusions than the film regarding the dependability of human nature and its potential for good.2
“Rashōmon” was one of Akutagawa’s earliest stories, and in it he showed himself to be a master of setting and texture. He went on to become a master of voice. (He would learn not to throw French vocabulary—sentimentalisme—into narratives about ancient Japan for one thing.) The teller of the tale is usually a major character in his stories: a piece set in the late Heian Period could be narrated by an imagined member of the society (“Hell Screen”), by a quasi-scholarly modern observer who refers to “old records” (“Rashōmon”), by a disembodied editor who somehow manages to assemble several spoken eyewitness accounts of a single incident (“In a Bamboo Grove”), or by an objective-seeming writer who hardly acknowledges that he exists at all (“The Nose”).
Two of these stories use the Heian setting to focus on the comical foibles of human nature. “The Nose” and “Dragon: The Old Potter’s Tale” depict men of religion who are more concerned with their physical appearance than with nobler matters of the spirit, and both suggest that crass reality is far more important to people than the otherworldly questions of religion.3 “Dragon” toys with the likelihood that religion is nothing more than mass hysteria, a force so powerful that even the fabricator of an object of veneration can be taken in by it.
“The Spider Thread” is included here despite its being timeless rather than set in any specific period. Given the “peep-box” mentioned near the beginning, the telling of the story might be said to have occurred in the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries when such mechanical contraptions were an important form of entertainment. The story’s sinful robber/protagonist, Kandata, is meant to be Indian, and the tale has been traced to sources as diverse as Fyodor Dostoevsky’s “The Onion” (from The Brothers Karamazov (1880)) and an 1894 story in The Open Court, an American journal “Devoted to the Work of Establishing Ethics and Religion Upon a Scientific Basis.”4 Its despairing view of human nature, however, fits the tone of the other stories of “a world in decay,” and its traditional images of Hell reflect medieval Japanese religious conceptions and provide an ideal introduction to “Hell Screen.” My translation of “The Spider Thread” follows Akutagawa’s manuscript (as in CARZ) rather than the edited version that appeared in the children’s magazine for which it was written (as in IARZ).
“Hell Screen,” the story of an artist, can be seen as Akutagawa’s examination of his devotion to his own art, but it works on a more universal level by pitting animal instinct against human intellect and questioning their place in human relationships. Based on a far simpler thirteenth-century classic,5 the work is almost operatic in its bravura presentation of the doomed events, but it stops short of shrillness thanks to the measured tones of the narrator’s voice. The elderly retainer of the Great Lord of Horikawa is not only a restrained commentator, but in denying what we all know to be true, he allows us to maintain the tension between denial and dread right up to the climactic fire. Akutagawa’s detailed visualization of his late-Heian world—the clothing, the architecture, the construction of the oxcart, the balance of light and shadow, and, of course, the amazing conflagration that brings Hell into this world—shows him at his stylistic best. If only one work of his were going to survive, this should be it.
UNDER THE SWORD
Warfare dominated Japan’s history between the end of the Heian Period and the imposition of peace under the Tokugawa Shōguns, the warrior-bureaucrats who ruled from 1600 to 1868. Once they had established their power base in Edo (modern Tokyo), the Tokugawas were afraid of change and did everything they could to remain at the pinnacle of a frozen social order. (They left the emperor in place as a figurehead and so
urce of legitimacy for their own position.) Tokugawa “centralized feudalism” was remarkable for the way it imposed the principle of joint responsibility on all parts of society, punishing whole families, entire villages, or professional guilds for the infractions of individual members. This fostered a culture based on mutual spying, which promoted a mentality of constant vigilance and self-censorship.
One threat the Tokugawas dealt with early on was Christianity, which had been introduced by Portuguese missionaries in the sixteenth century, largely through Nagasaki, in the west of Japan. The foreign religion was perceived as a precursor of foreign invasion, partly because it threatened to undermine the absolute loyalty that the Tokugawas demanded of their retainers.
“Dr. Ogata Ryōsai: Memorandum” and “O-Gin” depict ordinary people trapped between an uncompromising faith and an intractable government. As in “Dragon,” Akutagawa straddles the line between miracle and hysteria. By using the vocabulary of Edo Christianity, with its error-filled Portuguese and Latin and its mixing of Christian and Buddhist terms, Akutagawa suggests again that human beings create their own objects of veneration. No direct source has been determined for either story.
Based on two nineteenth-century fictionalized narratives about an actual eighteenth-century event, the psychological drama “Loyalty” depicts the pressure of Tokugawa rule on members of the samurai class. The startling parallels between the madness of the protagonist depicted in this early story, however, and the more openly autobiographical “Spinning Gears,” written ten years later, reveal how thoroughly modern Akutagawa remained even as he maintained meticulous fidelity to his source materials.