Rashomon and Seventeen Other Stories (39 page)

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.

3
.
house in the suburbs
: Akutagawa was eighteen years old in 1910 when he, his adoptive parents, and Aunt Fuki moved into a house owned by his biological father near the latter's pastureland.

4
.
Muk
ō
jima… since the Edo Period
: Before the Meiji Restoration and the renaming of the city of Edo as Tokyo in 1868, Edo had been the capital of the Tokugawa Sh
ō
guns. The eastern bank of the Sumida River, known as Muk
ō
jima, was one of Edo's prime spots for viewing cherry blossoms.

5
.
elder colleague
: The writer Tanizaki Jun'ichir
ō
(1886–1965), best known in the West for such novels as
The Key
(1956) and
The Makioka Sisters
(1943–8), attended Tokyo Imperial University from 1908 until he was expelled in 1911 following his widely heralded debut on the literary scene. In 1914 Akutagawa and some friends revived the short-lived literary magazine (see Section 8) that Tanizaki had used to attract critical attention to his own work.

6
.
a world of which he knew nothing
: Automobiles were still in development and far beyond the reach of ordinary people during Akutagawa's lifetime. Having left home, Tanizaki was a far more free-spirited individual than Akutagawa, especially after the successful launching of his writing career in 1910, some three or
four years before the presumed setting of this episode, and Akutagawa is inordinately impressed at his elder's ability to fritter away several hours in such a luxurious way.

7
.
phlegm
: In May 1915 Akutagawa seems to have been coughing up phlegm, perhaps mixed with blood, and feared he might have tuberculosis, but tests proved otherwise.

8
.
a piece set against a Heian Period background
: This probably refers to “Rash
ō
mon” (see its headnote).

9
.
The Master
: Natsume S
ō
seki: see “The Writer's Craft,” “The Baby's Sickness,” and “Spinning Gears.”

10
.
he first met the Master
: Akutagawa was probably first honored by an invitation to attend a “Thursday Evening” literary gathering in S
ō
seki's home on 18 November 1915 with his friend and fellow S
ō
seki “disciple” Kume (see ARSJ, p. 163).

11
.
the Kong
ō
: The name of an actual cruiser in the Japanese navy. Akutagawa was treated to a cruise on it in 1917.

12
.
The Master's Death
: When S
ō
seki died on 9 December 1916, Akutagawa was in Kamakura, and finally got back to Tokyo on the 11th and manned the reception table at the Aoyama Funeral Hall service (see IARZ 24:94–5; ARSJ, pp. 224–5).

13
.
his aunt, who had ordered him to deliver it
: Akutagawa married Tsukamoto Fumi on 2February 1918, and Aunt Fuki lived with them at first and took the traditional role of overbearing mother-in-law. She returned to Tokyo in mid-April, which undoubtedly accounts for the serenity of Section 15.

14
.
bash
ō
leaves
: Akutagawa wrote to a friend that their house was “a little too big for us” but that “the surroundings, with a lotus pond and bash
ō
plants, are rather elegant” (NKBT 38:248 n. 5). On the poetic
bash
ō
plant, see “Spinning Gears” (and note 20).

15
.
Butterfly
: Besides his wife, four women of interest appear in this story: (1) the woman in this section, who is thought to be the same as the “crazy girl” in Sections 21, 26 and 38, with an indirect reference via her husband in 28; (2) the unidentified woman whose face seems to be bathed in moonlight in sections 18, 23, 27, and 30; (3) the “Woman of Hokuriku” in Section 37; and (4) the “Platonic suicide” woman in Sections 47 and 48.

16
.
went to work for a newspaper
: Akutagawa offered to join the Tokyo branch of the
Osaka Mainichi Shinbun
newspaper in March 1919 and moved to Tokyo the following month; in return for writing “several” stories a year for the paper, this contract gave him a regular income of 130 yen per month but no manu
script fees. He had been an “associate” of the paper since 1918, an arrangement that left him free to publish stories in any magazines he liked but prohibited him from writing for any other newspaper (see NKBT 38:250 nn. 5, 6).

17
.
Crazy Girl… failed to capture her heart
: In a last letter to his artist friend Oana Ry
Å«
ichi (see next note), Akutagawa mentioned his affair with the poet Hide Shigeko (1890–1973; early pen name Tomone Shigeko), when he was twenty-nine, as one source of the suffering that was impelling him to suicide: it was not a matter of conscience, he said, but regret at what his involvement with such a headstrong, lustful woman had done to his life. He had spotted her at a literary gathering in June 1919 and pursued her aggressively, only to be repelled by her greater aggressiveness. (At the time, Fumi was pregnant with their first child: see Section 24.) The “crazy girl” (he calls her a “girl” despite her being two years his senior and married, with a five-year-old son) also appears in Sections 26and 38, and in “Spinning Gears” as “my Fury… my goddess of vengeance” (p. 222). Her husband (thought also to be the man in Section 28) was an electrical engineer who had studied modern theatrical lighting abroad before they married in 1912. She would have a second son with him in January 1921and tell Akutagawa the child was his. See IARZ 23:84–5; Kikuchi Hiroshi et al. (eds.),
Akutagawa Ry
Å«
nosuke jiten
(Meiji shoin, 1985), p. 419; ARSJ, pp. 344–50; Sekiguchi Yasuyoshi (ed.),
Akutagawa Ry
Å«
nosuke shin-jiten
(Kanrin shob
ō
, 2003), pp. 397, 505–6.

18
.
the painter
: Thus, in 1919, began Akutagawa's close friendship with the Western painter Oana Ry
Å«
ichi (1894–1966), who did the cover art for most of Akutagawa's books after 1921. Akutagawa dedicated “The Baby's Sickness” to him.

19
.
The Great Earthquake
: The writer Kawabata Yasunari (1899–1972) has recorded his impressions of his trek with Akutagawa and another friend through the devastation of the Great Kant
ō
Earthquake. The pond was located in the Yoshiwara pleasure district.

20
.
“Those whom the gods love die young”
: In Greek mythology, after the brothers Trophonius and Agamedes had built the temple of Apollo at Delphi, they were rewarded by the gods with death as the fulfillment of their greatest wish (Micha F. Lindemans,
Encyclopedia Mythica
(online)).

21
.
His sister's husband… perjury
: Akutagawa's brother-in-law, lawyer Nishikawa Yutaka (1885–1927), the second husband of
his sister Hisa, had been disbarred and jailed in 1923 for inciting a client to commit perjury. He was under suspicion of arson when he killed himself in January 1927 after his over-insured house burned down (hence the reference to Akutagawa's sister having lost her house to fire). Hisa had two children with each husband and remarried the first husband, a veterinarian, after the second's death. Akutagawa never got along well with her or with his half-brother, Tokuji, “but his position as first son gave him a lifelong responsibility for their welfare” (Howard S. Hibbett, “Akutagawa Ry
Å«
nosuke,” in Jay Rubin (ed.),
Modern Japanese Writers
(New York: Scribners, 2001), p. 20). All three appear in “Spinning Gears.”

22
.
a short Russian man
: This is thought to be an image of Lenin.

23
.
a story
: This has been thought to refer to “Noroma ningy
ō
” (“Noroma puppets”), an early story (1916) in which a nearly defunct form of traditional Japanese comic puppetry provokes the narrator to thoughts of universality vs. cultural determination in the arts. If there is any hint of self-reproach in the story regarding his inability to be fully liberated, it is very subtle. Other scholars have noted thematic ties with “Loyalty” (see IARZ 16:338, n. 57.2).

24
. “
Woman of Hokuriku”
: Akutagawa stated that he had no affairs after the age of thirty and that writing lyric poetry helped him avoid the complications of an affair when he did feel love for a married woman one last time. “Woman of Hokuriku” (“Koshibito”) was a series of twenty-five poems in the archaic
sed
ō
ka
form (5-7-7, 5-7-7 syllables), though the piece he quotes is one of three archaic four-line “Love Letter Poems” (
s
ō
mon
)(7-5, 7-5, 7-5, 7-5) that were also prompted by the near affair. Akutagawa no doubt chose the old forms because the fear of compromised reputations was a theme in Japanese love poetry from the earliest times. Katayama Hiroko (1878–1957), wife of a prominent bureaucrat, wrote poetry and achieved fame as a translator of Irish literature under the name Matsumura Mineko. She was not actually from Hokuriku, but Akutagawa's close call with her occurred in the resort town of Karuizawa (see “Spinning Gears,” note 8), near the old route to Hokuriku, in the summer of 1924(CARZ 6:207, 214; 8:117; NKBT 38:258, nn. 3–7).

25
.
Punishment
: Here, “
fukush
Å«
” (normally “vengeance”) is thought to mean the punishment that later events can wreak for earlier actions (NKBT 38:258, n. 8).

26
.
Divan
: Goethe's
West-östlicher Divan
(
West-Eastern Divan
(1819)), a volume of poetry inspired in part by his reading of the Persian poet Hafiz in German translation.

27
.
T
ō
son's New Life
: Shimazaki T
ō
son (1872–1943) has often been criticized for exploiting his family to create his autobiographical novels. In
Shinsei
(
New Life
(1918–19)), he exposed his affair with a niece.

28
.
the tree Swift saw
: While barely fifty, Jonathan Swift (1667–1745) is reported to have pointed to a withered tree and predicted, with unsettling accuracy, “I shall be like that tree. I shall die from the top.” See Robert Wyse Jackson,
Jonathan Swift: Dean and Pastor
(London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1939), p. 94.

29
.
fond of her
: Hiramatsu Masuko, a close friend of Fumi, had been ill in her youth, and never married.

30
.
a shii tree
:
Shii
can designate either
Castanopsis cuspidata
or
Castanopsis sieboldi
. The “Japanese chinquapin” is related to the Giant Evergreen-chinkapin of the northwestern United States.

31
.
“Poetry and Truth”
:
Dichtung und Wahrheit
is the subtitle of Goethe's autobiography
Aus meinem Leben
(1811–33).

32
.
One of his friends went mad
: Akutagawa's good friend, the novelist Uno K
ō
ji, was suffering from mental illness and was treated (first with a rest cure at a hot-spring resort, later with actual hospitalization) by Sait
ō
Mokichi, who also treated Akutagawa (see “Spinning Gears,” note 19). The rose-eating episode was simply one example of Uno's odd behavior at the time (ARSJ, pp. 605–10).

33
.
“God's soldiers are coming to get me”
: Given as, “Listen to something terrible. In three days I am going to be shot by God's soldiers,” in “Foreword” by Jean Cocteau, in Raymond Radiguet,
Count d'Orgel's Ball
(1924), tr. Annapaola Cancogni (Hygiene, Colorado: Eridanos Press, 1989), p. xii.

1
.
T
ō
kaid
ō
Line
: The 320-mile-long T
ō
kaid
ō
(Eastern Sea Road) has been the main route between Kyoto and Tokyo since the seventeenth century, traveled at first on foot and horseback (nowadays on the Shinkansen “Bullet” train). In late April 1926, Akutagawa, suffering from a host of ills including insomnia and nervous exhaustion, left his two older sons at home and took his wife Fumi and infant son Yasushi for the first of several lengthy
stays through the end of that year in Kugenuma, off the T
ō
kaid
ō
main rail-line, to which he would connect by car for the thirty-mile trip to Tokyo (see ARSJ, p. 350). For further autobiographical details, see the Chronology.

2
.
natsume
: This round fruit comes from a jujube or Chinese date tree. The word also echoes the name of Natsume S
ō
seki, whose presence as Akutagawa's erstwhile literary “Master” (Sensei) can be felt on many levels in this reconsideration of the role of the writer and the man-made wings that bring him too close to the sun. See also note 20.

3
.
Oyako-donburi
: Literally, “parent-child bowl,” a bowl of rice topped with a moist concoction of chicken cooked in eggs.