Akutagawa Ryūnosuke was born in Tōkyō on the first day of March, 1892,
and drank poison and died in Tōkyō early on the morning of July 24,
1927. Of the thirty-five years of his life, lived almost entirely in
that same Tōkyō, he spent some eighteen mostly in school as a young
prodigy and some eleven mostly at his desk as the fashioner and
polisher of perhaps 200 over-wrought short stories, of which this book
contains eleven, translated into English as nearly word for word as
possible.
His father, a man named Niihara Toshizō, is said to have given him the
name Ryūnosuke (Dragon-helper) because he was born at the dragon hour
on a dragon day in the dragon month of a dragon year. But his father’s
part in the story ends there. His mother was unwell, and he was given
in infancy, in the Japanese way, to her childless elder brother,
Akutagawa Shōdō. His adoptive mother’s great uncle is reported to have
been a man of fashion in the latter days of the old Edo period, but
beyond this very frail hint, no home influence has been suggested as
contributing to his genius.
When in the third year of primary school, bright young Ryūnosuke
picked up Tokutomi Roka’s book of sketches, _Shizen to Jinsei_
(Nature and Man) and read it with a pleasure that is said to have
turned him to literature. He went into the First High School in Tōkyō
on recommendation without examination, passed through the school an
honor student and entered the Imperial University of Tōkyō, where he
studied English literature, graduating in 1916. His graduation thesis
was entitled, _Wiriamu Morisu Kenkyū_ (A Study of William Morris).
He was like Morris in his surrender to the fascination of the Middle
Ages, but he had none of the practical reforming tendencies of that
artist socialist. He has been more aptly compared to Flaubert for
the seriousness with which he took his art and the preciousness of
his style. And the post-bellum point of view has been expressed by a
Japanese social worker who, at his death, compared him, as a man with
a keen sense of humor and knowledge of human nature and “an arbiter of
elegance in the vicious society in which he lived,” to Petronius.
He says of himself while at the University that he did not attend
classes very well and was an idle student, but we may take this for
the expression of a sincere wish to be more like some of his hardier
classmates, for Kikuchi Kan, one of them and to-day the literary Crœsus
of Japan, says that Akutagawa went to his classes faithfully and had
the confidence of his professors.
Writing some time after 1921, Kikuchi said of his friend Akutagawa
that, when he thought of him as he was during their school days
together, the first thing he always saw was the bright spot his
red lips made in his pale white face. Akutagawa was very quiet and
self-contained as an honor student. He was always buying new literary
books, and always carried one with him wherever he went. Kikuchi
envied him the books but thought at first that he was trying to show
off when he carried them about with him. And he disliked the clever
remarks and paradoxes with which Akutagawa was wont to pepper his
conversation. Later he admired him as a writer. His life, like his
writing, was most meticulous. He had a good memory and was full of
ideas and of a delicate understanding. He was doing, Kikuchi felt, the
most artistic work then being produced in Japan, but he was too cold
and intellectual. He played with life with silver tweezers, but never
touched it and had no real experience of it.
In 1923 Kikuchi was writing again that he thought Akutagawa, who
had turned down an offer of a professorship at the Kyūshū Imperial
University, should be given the recently vacated chair of English
literature at the Kyōto Imperial University. It was his opinion
that Akutagawa, who always had hanging on his door the sign, “Sick,
Compliments to Callers,” that he might have more time to read, was
the most scholarly of the literary men of Japan. He expressed a wish,
however, that Akutagawa would forsake Persia and Greece and their
curios and devote more time to men like Marx and Shaw.
Kikuchi first came to admire Akutagawa when, with a few others at the
University, they began in 1914 the publication of the third series of
the magazine _Shinshichō_. His maiden effort appeared in the first
issue, attracting no particular attention. But in the following year
he published in the magazine _Teikoku Bungaku_ two stories, the
second of which, Rashōmon, became the title story of his first volume,
published in May, 1917, and is now always associated with his name.
It is a gruesome thing concerning the old two-storied south gate of
Kyōto in the days when that landmark was falling into decay with the
rest of the ancient capital toward the end of the twelfth century. By
way of lame extenuation, this much, at least, may be said for the story
(which is the fourth in this volume), that in other tales, Akutagawa
has written with even more disgusting realism of this truly distressing
period.
In December, 1915, while still at the University, Akutagawa became
a disciple of the preëminent writer of the day, Natsume Soseki, who
probably had a greater influence than any other man on his literary
life. Mori Ogai, the versatile army surgeon, who tried his hand at
so many things in the literary field during the periods of Meiji and
Taishō, has been credited with having had the next greatest influence
on him.
In 1916, in a fourth revival of the magazine _Shinshichō_,
Akutagawa published _Hana_ (The Nose), the second story in this
book, which drew from Natsume the highest praise. He told his young
disciple that if he would write twenty or thirty more stories like it,
he would find himself occupying a unique position among the writers
of his country, a prophecy which came true. Out of old material, with
the greatest attention to detail and to the atmosphere of the period
of which he wrote, Akutagawa had produced a grotesquely amusing thing,
writing into it some modern psychology and the little lesson that
ideals are precious only so long as they remain ideals. This new way of
treating historical material in Japan attracted the attention of his
countrymen and became characteristic of much of Akutagawa’s work. Of
this sort of tale, “Lice” and the Chinese story, “The Wine Worm,” go
one step further in grotesquery, while “The Pipe” turns to lighter and
more wholesome humor.
In 1917, when Akutagawa published his second volume of short stories,
_Tobako to Akuma_ (The Devil and Tobacco), he had already
established himself as one of the foremost writers of the day. The
title story of the volume is the opening story in this book. In it
we see an Oriental saturated with western literature playing with an
old theme in a highly amusing and clever way. (Incidentally Akutagawa
was himself an inveterate cigarette smoker.) It is one of the many
stories he wrote about the early Catholic missionaries of the sixteenth
century, one of them so cleverly that it fooled Japanese students of
the period into believing that it was a translation from an old Latin
text, non-existent, but called by Akutagawa _Legenda Aurea_.
Of the other stories in this volume of translations, a few comments
may be of interest. Prof. Hasegawa in “The Handkerchief” is generally
recognized as the distinguished author of _Bushidō_, Dr. Nitobe
Inazō. “The Spider’s Thread” was written for a young peoples’ magazine.
“The Badger” is one of those comic bits in which Akutagawa, making
extravagant use of his wide reading, loved to play with a quaint
idea in make-believe seriousness. “The Ball” is a re-creation of a
fragment of that strange and romantic period in Japanese history when,
soon after the Restoration, the West was being swallowed whole, only
to be cast up again in revulsion in the inevitable reaction of the
nineties. The Rokumeikan was the, to later eyes ridiculous, center of
the social phase of this effort, and Pierre Loti, fresh from the sordid
little transaction in Nagasaki out of which he made his best-known
book on Japan, makes quite a respectable hero there. Who could have
been the original of Mōri Sensei in the character study at the end of
the volume, I do not know, but I have seen so many Mōri Senseis like
him during my years in Japanese schools that I cannot read it without
a doubtless gratuitous, but none the less poignant, feeling of the
futility of many men’s lives, or should I, in a very general sense,
say, “of all our lives?”
Just before he killed himself, Akutagawa coolly set down at
considerable length an explanation of the ending of his short life
(naming all the suicides of Eastern and Western history, including
even Christ) on highly reasoned and philosophical grounds, which do
not matter much here, for the simple truth seems to be that he was
at the time a physical and nervous wreck, having been all his life
a high-strung and frail man. Though he mentions an unnamed woman as
furnishing some immediate excuse for it (he was a normal husband and
father), and though the poetess Byakuren has gone out of her way to
drop a hint that this woman was her own very good friend Kujō Takeko,
the poetess and woman of letters whom public sentiment has made the
ideal woman of modern Japan, Akutagawa seems simply to have been
world-weary and, after coldly contemplating death for years, not able
himself to say exactly what did drive him to it. All that can be said
surely about it is that it took the vast majority of his countrymen
greatly by surprise.
Then here ends the story of a sort of literary ascetic, whose history,
as one biographer puts it, is really little more than a list of
the dates on which he published his stories and the names of the
magazines in which they appeared. But there can be no doubt that he
had more individuality than any other writer of his time and has
left in Japanese literature a mass of artistic work, often grotesque
and curious, that, while it undoubtedly angers the proletarian
experimenters who now hold the stage and fight with lusty pens and a
highly developed class consciousness against all that he stood for,
will continue to live as long as men go on treasuring the fancies their
fellows from time to time set down with care on paper.
The translation of _Rashōmon_ here given was first published in
the English study magazine, _Eigo Seinen_, in 1920, three years
after Akutagawa published the original in his first book. “Lice” was
published in the same magazine in 1921. I am grateful to the magazine
for permission to republish them in this volume. I am once more
grateful, too, to my very sympathetic Japanese colleagues, whom I have
always used freely when, from time to time, dictionaries and my own
imagination have failed me. And finally I am grateful to the author,
whom, though his days of seeing and hearing are over, I here address as
would a Japanese: Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, at last I am publishing the book
I started with your approval years ago. May you find it pleasing.