Rashomon and Seventeen Other Stories (40 page)

4
.
elementary-school girls
: Under the revised school system of 1907, six years of compulsory elementary education could be followed by another four years of “higher elementary school.” The girls mentioned here would be of middle-school age today.

5
.
infection
: Literally he senses she has empyema (
chikun
ō
sh
ō
)in her nose. The term was used loosely, with none of its dire clinical overtones, to describe a nasal voice when there were no obvious cold symptoms.

6
.
cooperatives
: Farmers' cooperative societies were an increasingly important feature of the Chinese economy at the time, and the friend's overseas venture may have been doomed by a failure to obtain credit with such organizations.

7
.
Mme. Caillaux's shooting
: In 1914, Henriette, the wife of the French Minister of Finance, Joseph Caillaux, killed the newspaper's owner for attacks on her husband's reputation. Joseph resigned to participate in her successful defense.

8
.
Karuizawa
: A fashionable summer resort with a large foreign contingent.

9
.
modern whatchamacallems
: He is trying to recall “
modan g
ã
ru
” (modern girl), Japan's equivalent of “flapper.”

10
.
kirin… h
ō
ō
: Japanese pronunciations of the Chinese mythical beasts
qilin
(or
kylin
) and
fenghuang
. The
kirin
, which is said to appear on auspicious occasions such as prior to the birth of a sage, is a composite of several animals but is overall deerlike and does indeed have a single horn like a unicorn's. (The word has been borrowed to mean “giraffe” in modern Japanese.) See also note 36. The equally auspicious
h
ō
ō
is often compared with the Western phoenix.

11
.
Yao and Shun
…
Han period
: Yao and Shun were model emperors from the misty legendary era of Chinese history. Also
known as the
Chronicles of Lu
, the
Spring and Autumn Annals
is a simple chronology of the Chinese state of Lu, covering the years 722–481
BC
. As with the other classics discussed by Confucius in the sixth century
BC
, its authorship is unknown, but it certainly predated the Han dynasty (206
BC
–220
AD
).

12
.
“Worm”
…
a legendary creature
: Akutagawa is probably relating this to the Old English “wyrm,” meaning “serpent,” and also to a part of his own name meaning “dragon.”

13
.
one sandal
: Jason's single sandal marked him as an enemy of the wicked king Pelias and led to his being sent on the quest for the golden fleece.

14
.
volcanic stone
: The stone referred to here is tufa, or Neocene quartz, a greenish-gray rock formed of heat-fused volcanic detritus, and this architectural detail leaves little doubt that “Spinning Gears” is set in Frank Lloyd Wright's fashionable, expensive Imperial Hotel, a Tokyo landmark. Wright's liberal use of the soft, easily-carved stone was a mark of his architecture in Japan. He found his supply in the town of
Ō
ya-machi, where it was popularly called
Ō
ya stone, but Akutagawa repeatedly refers to it by the more general term
gy
ō
kaigan
(fused ash stone), perhaps recalling its volcanic (= hellish?) origin. Hiramatsu Masuko's father (see Sections 47 and 48 of “The Life of a Stupid Man” and note 29), a lawyer connected with the hotel, probably was able to make affordable arrangements for the famous author (see ARSJ, pp. 566–79).

15
.
arson
…
perjury
: See “The Life of a Stupid Man,” Section 31 (and note 21).

16
.
Die, damn you
:“
Kutabatte shimae
!” This was the curse hurled at the young Hasegawa Tatsunosuke (1864–1909) when he told his father he wanted to be a novelist, and from which he created his pen name, Futabatei Shimei. Akutagawa is probably echoing Futabatei's well-known misgivings about the writing of fiction as a profession.

17
.
“Oh, Lord
…
soon perish”
: This “prayer,” which begs the deity of the Bible both for punishment and for a withholding of wrath, bears some resemblance to Psalm 38, in which David begs God to ease off on his anger, which is causing him a laundry list of physical and mental afflictions: “O Lord, rebuke me not in thy wrath: neither chasten me in thy hot displeasure. For thine arrows stick fast in me, and thy hand presseth me sore” (verses 1–2; King James Version).

18
.
nerves
: Akutagawa wrote similar aphorisms several times. E.g.
in
Words of a Dwarf
(
Shuju no kotoba
), an aphoristic essay series, which was serialized in 1923: see also note 25 below (see IARZ 16:82).

19
.
Aoyama
…
Numal
: Akutagawa was obtaining drugs from the head of the Aoyama Hospital, Sait
ō
Mokichi, who was shocked to hear that Akutagawa had killed himself, perhaps with the very drugs that he had given him (“Introduction,” Mokichi Sait
ō
,
Red Lights
, tr. and introduction by Seishi Shinoda and Sanford Goldstein (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue Research Foundation, 1989), p. 59). (See also note 41.) Veronal (a white crystalline British product known also as Diethylmalonyl urea, diethylbarbituric acid, and Barbital) was a brand-name barbiturate that Virginia Woolf had used in an early suicide attempt. Akutagawa succeeded in ending his life with it. The other drugs have not been identified.

20
.
bash
ō
plants at the S
ō
seki Retreat
:
S
ō
seki Sanb
ō
(“retreat”) was the poetic name for S
ō
seki's study (and, more generally, his home), especially in connection with the Thursday gatherings. See also “The Life of a Stupid Man,” notes 10 and 12. The large but fragile leaves of the
bash
ō
(banana or plantain) are a traditional symbol of evanescence, as employed in the pen name of Bash
ō
; see also Section 13 of “The Life of a Stupid Man” (and note 14).

21
.
Legends
: Akutagawa uses a Japanese translation of the title of August Strindberg's
Legender
(1898). Maruzen is the bookstore mentioned in Section 1 of “The Life of a Stupid Man.” It remains the premier retailer of foreign books in Japan.

22
.
Chinese story
…
Handan style
: Akutagawa mistakenly attributes this anecdote by Zuangzi (or Chuang Tzu, fourth-century
BC
Daoist philosopher) to Han Fei (280?–233?
BC
). For an English translation, see Zuangzi,
The Complete Works of Chuang Tzu
, tr. Burton Watson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1968), 2. p. 187.

23
.
art of slaughtering dragons
: A metaphor for a useless skill. Again the anecdote comes from Zuangzi. For an English translation, see
The Complete Works of Chuang Tzu
, tr. Watson, p. 355.

24
.
inkstone
: A flat, usually rectangular, carved stone slab used for grinding sticks of dried India ink with a few drops of water to make black ink for use in calligraphy, ink painting, etc.

25
.
“Life is
…
hell itself”
: The quotation appears in the section titled “Hell” (“Jigoku”) (IARZ 13:52 and CARZ 5:80).

26
.
Suiko
…
embodiment of loyalty
: Suiko was an empress who
reigned from 592 to 628. Akutagawa never wrote this piece. The (bronze) statue of Kusunoki Masashige (1294–1336) was of a general known for his absolute loyalty to the emperor. Though considered a rebel by many of his contemporaries, Masashige was honored after 1868 in support of the modern myth of imperial divinity.

27
.
A Dark Night's Passing
:
An'ya k
ō
ro
(1921; 1922–37) by Shiga Naoya (1883–1971), tr. by Edwin McClellan (Kodansha International, 1976). The anguished hero was still far from attaining his final calm when Akutagawa read the parts of the novel available in his day.

28
.
crazy girl
: See “The Life of a Stupid Man,” Sections 21, 26 and 38(and notes 15and 17).

29
.
Anatole France
…
Prosper Mérimée
: Akutagawa gives the titles in Japanese. He is known to have owned Nicolas Ségur's C
onversations avec Anatole France
(1925) and Paul Gsell's
Propos recueillis d'Anatole France
(1921). Several editions of Mérimée's letters would have been available to Akutagawa: see also note 40.

30
.
Shu Shunsui stone
: Zhu Shun-Shui (1600–1682) was a late-Ming Chinese Confucianist whose politics led him to seek asylum in Japan in 1659, where he won official patronage and flourished as the scholar Shu Shunsui. Akutagawa obviously feels this Japanese pronunciation of his name to be a fully naturalized part of the language. A stone memorial was erected on the campus of the First Higher School, Akutagawa's alma mater, on 2June 1912.

31
.
“insomnia”
: More precisely, the narrator feels he will not be able to pronounce the syllable “sh
ō
” in the word for insomnia, “
fuminsh
ō
.” The fact that he is having trouble with words containing “sh” (or, in the translation, with four-syllable words) seems less significant than that he is obsessively perceiving this as a psychological problem. Hence his subsequent remark.

32
.
The wife
…
American film actor
: Kamiyama S
ō
jin (1884–1954; actual name Mita Tadashi) and his wife, the actress Yamakawa Uraji (1884–1947), were the primary founders in 1912of the Modern Theater Society (Kindaigeki ky
ō
kai), which performed such major productions as
Hedda Gabler
in 1912, with Uraji in the title role, and Mori
Ō
gai's translations of
Faust
and
Macbeth
at the Imperial Theatre in 1913. The Society survived until 1919, when the couple left for America. With her superior English, Uraji became S
ō
jin's agent. He acted in many Western-made films, mainly as an “Oriental villain,” and in a number of Japan
ese films. He played the Mongol Prince opposite Douglas Fairbanks in
The Thief of Bagdad
(1924) and the blind lute-playing priest in Kurosawa's
Seven Samurai
(1954). See Nihon Kindai Bungakkan (ed.),
Nihon kindai bungaku daijiten
, 6 vols. (Tokyo: K
ō
dansha, 1977–8), 4:53–4.

33
.
the unfinished play… burned in that faraway pinewood
: Akutagawa wrote only a handful of armchair dramas. In a letter of 24 May 1926, written while he was living among the pines at the Kugenuma shore, Akutagawa mentions an attempt to write a play. Since no such work has survived, it may well have been consigned to flames. (See IARZ 15:311, 20:234.)

34
.
his big toe
: Hippolyte Taine (1828–93) described Ben Jonson as “often morose, and prone to strange splenetic imaginations. He told Drummond that for a whole night he imagined ‘that he saw the Carthaginians and Romans fighting on his great toe,'” commenting in a footnote that “There is a similar hallucination to be met with in the life of Lord Castlereagh, who afterwards committed suicide,” in
History of English Literature
(1863), Book II, Chapter Third, Section I.

35
.
a certain old man
: Muroga Fumitake (1869–1949) had been employed as a milk deliveryman in the Niiharas' dairy, after which he became a door-to-door peddler, and later worked for the American Bible Society on the Ginza. In a letter of 5 March 1926, Akutagawa thanks him for a Bible and says he has been reading the Sermon on the Mount with a new sense of its meaning (IARZ 20:227).

36
.
kirin child of the 1910s
: A child prodigy, a “whiz kid” of the sort that Akutagawa would have been in the mid-1910s when he made his spectacular debut. The “1910s” given here assumes that the “910s” in the original text is either a misprint or a deliberate abbreviation. See also note 10.

37
.
coils over her ears
: This look was one of the Western hair styles popular in the early 1920s.

38
.
Bien
…
d'enfer
: Good… very bad… why? / Why?… the devil's dead! / Yes, yes… from Hell…

39
.
burned by the sun
: Akutagawa says Icarus' wings were “burned” rather than melted.

40
.
author had become a Protestant
: A lifelong skeptic to the point of being rabidly anticlerical, Prosper Mérimée (1803–70)was nonetheless upset enough by the lack of ceremony at Stendhal's funeral to declare himself an adherent of “the Augsburg confession” and have himself buried in a Protestant cemetery. His
funeral was cut short when an atheist admirer caused an uproar in response to anti-Catholic remarks by the Protestant minister (A. W. Raitt,
Prosper Mérimée
(New York: Scribner's, 1979), pp. 19, 23, 354, 359). Akutagawa may have been familiar with Sainte-Beuve's comment that “Mérimée does not believe that God exists, but he is not altogether sure that the Devil does not” (ibid., p. 24).