Rashomon and Seventeen Other Stories (3 page)

My own personal favorites among the “Japanese national writers” are S
ō
seki and Tanizaki, followed—at some distance, perhaps—by Akutagawa.
⁹

What I see as the foremost virtue of his literature is the excellence of his style: the sheer quality of his use of the Japanese language. One never tires of reading and re-reading his best works. Akutagawa was a born short-story writer who produced a great many works, some more successful than others. In fact, there are a good number that would seem to be of no particular interest to the modern reader—or at least to the modern general reader. This may be owing in part to Akutagawa's own mental instability and to a loss of directional focus in his literature, but when his focus is steady, the sharpness of his style is uniquely and inimitably his own.

The flow of his language is the best feature of Akutagawa's style. Never stagnant, it moves along like a living thing. His choice of words is intuitive, natural—and beautiful. Thoroughly schooled in his youth in both foreign languages and Chinese literature, he was able to summon up words of classic elegance seemingly out of thin air—expressions that modern-day writers can no longer use—manipulating them at will into arrangements of remarkable grace. This can be seen with special clarity in his early works, particularly the modern-language rewrites of stories he took from Japan's two large and varied collections of medieval folk tales, the twelfth-century
Tales of Times Now Past
and the thirteenth-century
A Collection of Tales from Uji
: “The Nose,” “In a Bamboo Grove,” “Rash
ō
mon,” “Hell Screen,” “Yam Gruel,” “The Lady, Rokuno-Miya.”
¹⁰
The ease with which he is able, through sheer force of style, to bring the classic, fantastic world of the medieval tale vividly into the sphere of modern life is truly breathtaking. Akutagawa published his maiden works, “Rash
ō
mon” (1915)
and “The Nose” (1916), in university magazines when he was still a 23-year-old student, but in them we can already see his finished, fluent, elegant, and spontaneous style. They read like the work of a seasoned writer, not an unformed student.

Natsume S
ō
seki, Akutagawa's senior as “national writer,” was amazed when he read “The Nose,” and he made a point of writing the youthful new author a letter of encouragement: “Put together another 20 or 30stories like this,” he said, “and there will be nobody to match you in the literary world.”
¹¹
As kind as he is known to have been to young writers in general, S
ō
seki never lavished such unstinting praise on anyone else. Surely, with his deep understanding of literature, S
ō
seki must have discovered the diamond glowing at its core. Akutagawa debuted, thus, as a fully-formed writer—at least where style and literary sense were concerned.

Style and literary sense: these were, to be sure, the keenest weapons in Akutagawa's authorial arsenal, but they also became his authorial Achilles” heel. Precisely because these weapons of his were so sharp and effective, they hindered him somewhat when it came to establishing a long-term scope and direction for his literature. This may resemble the situation of a pianist who has been born with a natural gift for superb technique. Because his fingers move so swiftly and with such clarity, the task of pausing occasionally to look long and hard at something—at the inner depths of the music—can be inhibited before he is even aware of it. His fingers move with natural speed and grace and his mind hurries to keep up. Or perhaps his mind forges ahead and the fingers hurry to keep up. In either case an unbridgeable gap begins to form between him and the movement of time in the world around him. Just such a gap almost certainly added to Akutagawa's psychological burdens and impelled him toward suicide.

Still, there is an undeniably breathtaking ferocity to the uninhibited, slashing style of the stories that he wrote in his first five or six years. To take an example from abroad, Akutagawa might well be said to resemble F. Scott Fitzgerald. Fitzgerald, too, was a born writer for whom the short story became the primary battlefield of his career. He made his professional debut
at the tender age of twenty at the time of the First World War, and he instantly took the world by storm with his keen, flowing style and his brilliance. He left a good number of excellent works for later generations, but writing at the popular author's hectic pace, he left fully twice as many works that were not particularly wonderful. Not that this was any great discredit to him. The short-story form itself is marked by just such a history. If ten stories out of a hundred survive to be read by later generations, this has to be counted as a great success. No writer can make every work a masterpiece, nor should a writer be faulted for leaving behind failed or less than fully realized works. In life, it's the long haul that counts. Sometimes things work out well, and sometimes they don't. Sometimes you have to write things you're not too crazy about to make a living. What matters is just how great those ten surviving masterpieces are, which is why both Akutagawa and Fitzgerald still rate highly as authors and their works continue to be read.

More important than the proportion of first-to second-rate works is the form in which the author brings his youthful brilliance to maturity and transforms it into a literary world of greater depth and breadth. Fitzgerald was by nature incapable of learning from anything but his own personal experience, and that experience was mainly domestic tragedy. His wife Zelda succumbed to mental illness, their marriage fell a part, the Great Depression occurred, and all the while he was drowning in alcohol, as a result of which his popularity plummeted. These things contributed to the deepening of his literature. In his last years, he succeeded in creating works of great poignance that were distinctly different in tone from the acute and lyrical style of his youth (though they never achieved the same commercial success).

At the beginning of his career, he wrote a large number of stories modeled after historical events or classical fiction, the stylistic genius of which won him high praise. These are the
ones that continue to be read today as classics. Akutagawa was unrivaled for his fine-grained depiction of psychology and for his aphoristic wit. For a time he even became the darling of his age. Then, beginning around 1922, came his middle period, in which we see a degree of stagnation and confusion. Doubts began to plague him: was it all right for him to go on writing transcriptions of historical pieces, supernatural tales divorced from reality, and witty anecdotes one after another? And in fact such critiques began to arise in literary circles. An image began to take shape of Akutagawa's works as defined by one fellow author: they “seemed to be toying with life with a pair of silver tweezers.” Another called him “a writer who can't write without props.”
¹²
Nor were these views entirely unwarranted. A certain lofty detachment clung to Akutagawa's writings as though they were looking at the world from a set distance through a pane of glass, and such a posture naturally invited negative criticisms from the literary world. Akutagawa's early works had nothing whatever to do with the task we see being performed in S
ō
seki's novels, which do remain loftily detached even as they descend to earth and, with great acumen, depict the hearts of the human beings who live there.

Of course, Akutagawa might conceivably have reacted to such self-doubt and external criticism with defiance, insisting that these were the unique qualities of his writing, whether we like them or not (indeed, no one before him or after him has been able to write as he did). But where this might have been the reaction of a mediocre talent, it was not an available option for Akutagawa, who had been recognized as—and paid the respect due—an author of the first rank. As a writer on the very front line of literature, he was fully awake to the problems of his age and reacted to them with a sense of responsibility and of mission. For better or worse, then, he was a star, one of the chosen. A gallant admission of defeat, a silent withdrawal, a relinquishment of the place he had won: these were not among the life choices he could make. He had to remain where he was: on the front line. And to do so, he would have to clear a new, more ambitious path. This was no easy task for him, however:
he never seemed to find that single thing that he absolutely had to write about.

A period of trial and error followed in the years to 1925 in which the gap between his successful and unsuccessful works loomed especially large. Now he wrote not only stories modeled on classical works but he worked long and hard and in varied forms to produce a more contemporary fictional world that was also more his own. Still, he could not seem to find that one type of story that was a perfect fit for his own inborn mentality and sensibility. The stories he wrote during this time lacked intensity: they were never more than “well made.” They did not convey an aura of necessity to the reader; there was never a clear sense that the author had something he needed to communicate. He put each story together well enough, but the very dexterity with which he managed to do this seemed to be holding him back.

During the years in which Akutagawa was actively writing, 1915–27, the First World War sent Japan's economy into boom
conditions. These were also the years known as “Taish
ō
Democracy” (in the Taish
ō
Period, 1912–26), which perhaps might be called Japan's Weimar Age. After the bitterly-fought Sino-Japanese (1894–5) and Russo-Japanese (1904–5) Wars, Japan had solidified its position in the world order, as a result of which the suffocating tensions of the Meiji Period (1868– 1912) relaxed, liberal tendencies arose in their place, and people sang the praises of modernism. The impact of the Russian Revolution aroused the socialist labor movement. Skirts grew short and the movement for the emancipation of women got started. This liberal climate was thoroughly crushed by the 1929 stock market crash, the ensuing worldwide Depression, and the rise of militarism and fascism, but that all happened after Akutagawa had left the world. With him, we are still in the midst of Taish
ō
Democracy, liberalism, and modernism.

Take a step back from Tokyo, in which these revolutionary changes were taking place, however, and the most basic aspects of the life of the Japanese were still being governed by the old indigenous culture. In reality, a world in pre-modern dress still enveloped the ways of the modernized city to which Akutagawa gave representation. Not that this should be cause for surprise: a mere fifty years earlier, samurai had been walking around with swords, their hair done up in to pknots. For 220 years, the Japanese had been locked in their little islands, virtually out of touch with other countries, preserving their unique culture in a system resembling feudalism. Only one generation had gone by since the end of that age, hardly enough time to reshape people's inner landscapes. Superficial aspects such as new systems could be adopted eagerly (or in some cases reluctantly, through compulsion), but certain basic things remained untouched: sensibility, values, archetypal mental images. In fact, the Meiji government openly promoted a policy supporting precisely such a bifurcation, as represented by the slogan “Japanese spirit, Western technology.” They wanted to incorporate the technological progressiveness and efficiency of Western systems, but they also wanted the people to remain good, submissive Confucianists. That made it easier for them to run the country. In other words, to some degree the dregs of feudalism
were left in place intentionally. Amid this nearly overwhelming sea of indigenous culture, urban culture became increasingly isolated, and Akutagawa was simply one member of a tiny elite. Before long, this began to prey on his nerves.

Akutagawa successfully imported his propensity for modernism into a fictional world in the borrowed container of the folk tale. In other words, he succeeded in giving his modernism a “story” by skillfully adapting the pre-modern—the medieval tale form that had flourished almost a thousand years earlier. Instead of creating a purely modernistic literature, he first transposed his modernism into a different form. This was his literary starting point, and it was an extremely stylish, intellectual approach. By employing this strategy, he was able to capture the sympathies of a large readership. Had he chosen instead to write modernistic literature as a pure modernist, he would almost certainly have had only the success of a salon writer with a limited, intellectual readership, and his fiction would have quickly run up against its own limitations. Akutagawa had the instinctive (or perhaps strategic) literary sense to avoid such a dead end. In the first part of this collection, “A World in Decay,” the reader can enjoy several examples of Akutagawa's works that adapt pre-modern materials to modern ends.

One thing I hope to make clear here is that Akutagawa was by no means simply a modernist with Western affectations. He grew up in the “low city” (Shitamachi), the old eastern side of Tokyo where the common people had lived since the capital city of the Tokugawa Sh
ō
gun was called Edo and where the roots of Edo Period (1600–1868) culture were still strong. (The new middle class, with its strong individualist tendencies, generally preferred to live in the hilly “high city” known as Yamanote.)
¹³
From childhood he was deeply immersed in Kabuki, the popular drama that had continued to flourish in the low city, and he enjoyed the witty writings of the Edo literati. He also had a rich knowledge of the Chinese language and literature that had been indispensable to any educated person in pre-modern times. (The visual beauty of the Chinese characters that Akutagawa used deserves special mention, though unfortunately this cannot be seen in translation.)

Thus, the fierce clash between the modern and the premodern was occurring not only in his relations with the world around him but deep inside him as well. The same can be said of the Meiji literary giants who had immediately preceded him—Natsume S
ō
seki and Mori
ō
gai, for example. East vs. West: for Japan's budding cultural elite, whose stance was far from definitively settled, it could be fatal to lean too far in one direction or the other. As if taking out a kind of insurance policy, they had to strive to internalize both Eastern and Western high culture in equal doses so that they could be ready at a moment's notice to switch from one to the other. There is an expression used to characterize cultured Japanese of the first rank:
Ko-kon-t
ō
-zai ni ts
Å«
-jiru
(to be conversant with old-neweast-west), which was, for them, the essence of political correctness. It was precisely because he had thoroughly absorbed this kind of “old-new-east-west” education that Akutagawa could so freely switch between the pre-modern and the modern in constructing his own unique fictional world. He could just as easily transpose Western literary forms intact into Japanese, and this technique was another powerful weapon of the early Akutagawa.

Sheer technique, however, though skillfully applied, does not necessarily translate into original literature. A fictional world that was not truly his own and that used borrowed containers would eventually reach an impasse and come to stand in his way like a high wall. Further pursuit of fictional method could only yield technical polish. And not surprisingly, the novelty would wear thin and readers would tire of seeing the same devices.

For Akutagawa, however, after 1925 it was not possible to advance in the direction of writing purely modernistic fiction. He was already too important—and too old—to escape into sophisticated intellectual play. The era had moved on as well since his debut. The giant tremors of the Russian Revolution had reached Japan, and the dense shadow of Marxism had begun to stretch across the earth. The spirit of the age was edging toward a demand for “literature of substance.'People's attention was beginning to shift toward a literature that
depicted the burdens of life with realistic precision. In Japan, this new writing was called “Marxist” and later “proletarian” literature.

There was also the “I-novel” (
watakushi-sh
ō
setsu
) to think about, a form that had been gaining strength in Japan since the turn of the century and which garnered the greatest critical respect as it became the mainstream of modern Japanese fiction. In the I-novel (orperhaps “I-fiction,” since the style was employed in both full-length novels and short, essay-like stories), the author provides a scrupulous depiction of the trivia of his surroundings, with an exhibitionistic emphasis on negative aspects of his own life and personality. This was the way Japan modified European Naturalism for domestic consumption.

In this way, modernist fiction became the object of a pincer attack from both the I-novel and Marxist literature, which shared an inflexible emphasis on the principle of realism. Akutagawa, with his inborn quality of lofty detachment, could not easily contribute to either side. He could never fully accept either kind of bare-bones realism. What Akutagawa chose to do was to cloak human shame in the artifice of storytelling and a sophisticated stylistic technique: this was how he lived and this was how he wrote. The literary method upon which both the I-novel and proletarian fiction were based was fundamentally opposed to his lifestyle. Cornered by the forces of the age, however, and finding it necessary to weigh the I-novel method against the Marxist method on his own personal scale, Akutagawa inevitably inclined toward the former. He was far too skeptical, far too individualistic, and far too intelligent ever to believe that he could become an effective intellectual spokesman for the working class.

Akutagawa's later strategy was to borrow the I-novel style but to use it with a “reverse grip,” so to speak, in order to insert artificial confessions into this seemingly artless container. This was a sophisticated and highly risky strategy. But for Akutagawa, who needed “props,” it was probably an unavoidable choice.

Works from his last two or three years are included here in the last part, “Akutagawa's Own Story.” Together they comprise
an introspective, neurotic, and remarkably depressive group of stories. Their somberness never degenerates into a mere blurting out of emotion, however, but stands firmly upon a foundation of Akutagawa-style artifice. Some works may have their moments of wheel-spinning, but each work as a whole retains its artistic autonomy. He may be writing something close to the facts of his own life, yet his stylistic control remains strong, and his writing reveals enough literary design to put the reader on guard: “You will never quite know,” he seems to be warning us, “how much of this is true and how much is fiction.”

Opinion is divided as to whether these experiments of Akutagawa's are successful as literature. Some say that these late works are his only masterpieces, while others say just the opposite. I don't see either group of works as superior or inferior: each was conceived quite differently, each constitutes a wheel of the carriage we call Akutagawa Ry
Å«
nosuke, and each deserves to be evaluated on its own merits. Where the degree of literaryperfection is concerned, the early works have qualities to which the late works cannot hope to aspire. But in some of the late works—“Spinning Gears” in particular—the acuity of the protagonist's vision and the elegantly spare style have a truly spine-tingling brilliance, and their meticulously wrought mental images attain a powerful reality that will long remain deep in the reader's psyche.

I read “Spinning Gears” when I was fifteen—some forty years ago. Reading it again in order to write this introduction, I was amazed at how vividly I still recalled many of its images. There they were still, in my mind, not just as flat pictures but in all their three-dimensional reality, complete with the modulations of the light shining into the scene and tiny sounds in the background. Even taking into account the fifteen-yearold's special sensitivity to works of art, I believe we can declare such memories to be a product of the work's innate power. “Spinning Gears” leaves us with the impression that we have just read the story of a man who has pared his life down and then pared it down again until he was perilously close to the edge, and once he was sure he had reached the point where he could pare it down no farther, he turned the whole thing into
fiction. It is a stunning performance. In Japanese there is the expression, “Let the enemy cut your flesh so that you can cut his bone.” This is precisely what Akutagawa has accomplished in “Spinning Gears.” There is no longer any sign here of technique for the sake of technique, and his tendency to flaunt his wit and erudition is also (in effect, at least) greatly reduced. Such are the reasons why, even as I retain some minor misgivings with regard to the degree of its maturity, I rank this posthumous work of Akutagawa's so highly.

For a psyche as vulnerable as Akutagawa's, writing such works was by no means healthy. He drove himself as far as he could possibly go despite a tendency to mental illness in the family. His mother had suddenly gone insane less than eight months after his birth, and he was raised by his mother's brother and sister and the brother's wife. He spent his life plagued by a fear that he himself might go mad at any moment, and the maintenance of his mental stability was complicated by his infrequent contacts with his birth parents. We will never know for certain whether the neuroses from which he suffered later in life were caused by hereditary factors, mental instability, or his latent fears, but sickness of mind casts a heavy shadow on the late stories and would end up taking his life. Surely it would be no exaggeration to say that writing these late works effectively shortened his life, but it is also true that he was unable to find a way to go on living as a writer without writing works of this nature—and once he could no longer live as a writer, his life would cease to have meaning.

It well could be that Akutagawa had to turn to the world of storytelling and technique in order to find refuge from his dark heredity. Rather than face the real world, so full of terror and pain, he might have transported himself mind and body into another world in hopes of finding a kind of salvation in its fictionality. Or perhaps in the dynamism of such a move he hoped to find that life possessed some radiance after all. In the end, however, he was compelled to return to his starting place—to a world ruled by pain and fear, a world that demanded his isolation. For, at a certain point, he came to a profound realization that he must fulfill his social responsibility as a
writer and as a leading intellectual of his age. He determined that he could not simply park himself in one comfortable spot as a kind of cultural correspondent.

Perhaps the true reason that Akutagawa Ry
Å«
nosuke continues to be read and admired today as a “national writer” lies in this—in the realization and determination that effectively pushed him into a dead end. He started out as one of the chosen few: a Japanese intellectual with a consciousness torn between the West and Japan's traditional culture, in the border regions of which he succeeded in erecting a uniquely vigorous world of story. As he matured, he attempted to fuse the two different cultures inside himself at a higher level. He attempted structurally to combine the distinctively Japanese style of the I-novel with his own elegant fictional method. He hoped, in other words, to pioneer a newer, more uniquely Japanese form of serious literature. But this would have required a strenuous, long-term effort that his hypersensitive nerves and delicate constitution could not sustain. Pursued by the dark visions that crawled out of the gloom, he would finally despair and cut his life short. Akutagawa's terrible suicide administered a great shock to the minds of his contemporaries. It signaled both the defeat of a member of the intellectual elite and a major turning point in history.