Rashomon and Seventeen Other Stories (5 page)

“Rash
ō
mon” 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” (“Rash
ō
mon”), 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.
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“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.”
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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,
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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.

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 Ry
ō
sai: 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.

“Horse Legs” is one of the funniest and wildest (and least well-known) pieces Akutagawa ever wrote. Reminiscent in its surrealistic twists of Gogol or Kafka, it is a nearly perfect—and perfectly hilarious—fictional portrayal of the universal human fear of having one's true nature revealed to others. Akutagawa performs a comic reversal of the commonly-used Sino-Japanese expression for an embarrassing self-betrayal, “Bakyaku o arawasu”—literally, “to reveal the horse's legs,” as when the human legs of a stage horse are inadvertently exposed. The theme is pursued relentlessly (though with rich comic surprises at every turn), down to the final ironic two-line illustration of a moralist whose death leads to the revelation of his hypocrisy. No one is safe. My text incorporates the revisions that Akutagawa made after the story first appeared in a literary journal.
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“Green Onions” shows Akutagawa at his most technically playful. It is an unabashedly self-referential piece, a comic tour de force, a simultaneous send-up of romanticism and skepticism, and an unsparing look at the art and business of writing fiction. Akutagawa performs an amazing balancing act here by creating a heroine about whom we can truly care while
reminding us repeatedly that she is an entirely artificial creation made to satisfy a magazine deadline. At one point, the author curses himself for becoming emotionally involved in her romanticized world, and at the end he bemoans the inevitable loss of her virginity while suggesting that she is going to be vanquished not only by her lover but by the critics.

The protagonists of these stories may be very much like Akutagawa, but fidelity to the facts of the author's life is less important than the consistency and intensity of the portrait of a hypersensitive individual trapped by the demands of family and profession and society. Like Akutagawa, this persona was adopted as an infant when his birth mother lost her mind, felt torn between his biological and adoptive fathers, and had a strong-willed aunt on the scene trying to control his life and the life of his wife. He yearned for liberation from family responsibilities but continued to live in the household of his adoptive parents with his wife and children. He was ambivalent about fatherhood, and he suffered the pangs of guilt when he strayed from his marriage. He became a writer, but writing at a time in Japan when only unadorned confession was deemed worthwhile, he became obsessed with the idea that the “manmade wings” (“The Life of a Stupid Man,” “Spinning Gears”)
of his highly wrought art would lead him to disaster. He suffered, too, with the irrepressible fear that he had inherited from his mother a tendency to madness that would eventually reach out to claim him.

Ever since Akutagawa's suicide, it has been impossible to read this character's story in retrospect without knowing that Akutagawa could endure the strain of being himself no longer than thirty-five years. “His own works were unlikely to appeal to people who were not like him and had not lived a life like his,” writes the narrator in Section 49 of “The Life of a Stupid Man.” Had he lived longer, Akutagawa might have come to realize that he was far from alone.

“Daid
ō
ji Shinsuke: The Early Years” gives us the fullest account of Akutagawa's childhood and student years. He originally intended to extend the narrative with sequels, but when he subsequently wrote about his later life, he used other forms and other names for his protagonist. Even at his most autobiographical, Akutagawa is always consciously shaping his material for effect. He may well have believed, like the young Shinsuke, that his personality owed much to his having been raised on cow's milk; he may have been ashamed of his parents' petty-bourgeois behavior; and he certainly was a ferocious bookworm. But behind the startling images he relates to us we see a young man haunted by the virtually universal question, “Why am I different from everybody else?”

After graduating from the prestigious Tokyo Imperial University, Akutagawa taught at the Naval Engineering School from 1916 to 1919. Between 1922 and 1925, he wrote ten stories based on this phase of his life using a protagonist named Horikawa Yasukichi. “The Writer's Craft” is the most fully realized story of the series.

“The Baby's Sickness,” which shows Akutagawa as a family man, has been included as an example of the kind of thing he most often chose
not
to write—an “I-novel” peek at the private life of an author—but which he could imbue with an intensity and focus not often seen in the form. The story opens with the dream of a dead man, which is never a good omen, and it resolves into a struggle between intellect and superstition, but
for the most part it is set firmly in the world of reality. The writer's workaday world, described by Akutagawa with the kind of high-strung precision he brought to the world of the painter in “Hell Screen,” offers the writer only interruptions, outrageous demands, and a sense of guilt for exploiting his family in the service of his art—yet another echo of “Hell Screen.” “The Baby's Sickness,” it might be noted, is the nextto-last story Akutagawa wrote before the deadly Kant
ō
earthquake of 1 September 1923. Though he wrote some factual descriptions of the death and destruction wrought by the earthquake, surprisingly little of this horrific experience is directly reflected in the fiction (Section 31 of “The Life of a Stupid Man” is the one vivid exception). Thus we can only speculate as to what influence it might have had on the dark later works.

“Death Register,” “The Life of a Stupid Man,” and “Spinning Gears” all show Akutagawa probing the meaning of the life he has led to that point, and moving ever closer to the voluntary end of it. “Death Register” is the most lyrical and the most simply touching of the three, a sad look back at his estranged, insane mother, the elder sister he never knew, and the father who gave him up as an infant and tried unsuccessfully to win him back. The piece is more a contemplative essay than a story, and it reveals its traditional poetic roots by ending with a haiku. The ostensible subject of “Death Register” is three dead members of his family, but the haiku suggests that the difference between the living and the dead is something barely perceptible—a mere shimmer of heat in the summer air.

“The Life of a Stupid Man” reduces the entire life of the protagonist to a series of poetic moments of intense self-awareness, and it contains some of Akutagawa's most unforgettable imagery. Here more concrete treatment is given to his involvement with several women, an important factor in “Spinning Gears.” The story opens in a bookstore and at many points shows the gradually aging protagonist experiencing life more through books than directly, always aware of his literary “master,” the novelist Natsume S
ō
seki. Akutagawa's protagonist, like one of S
ō
seki's, sees his only options as faith, madness, or death.

If “Hell Screen” is Akutagawa's early masterpiece, “Spinning Gears” is undoubtedly the late one. Instead of the fragmented story of the entire “Life of a Stupid Man,” here the whole life is boiled down to a few intense days of suffering. Like “Hell Screen,” “Spinning Gears” conveys a sense of doom, but it replaces melodrama with inexhaustible paranoia in a phantasmagoric “night town” sequence. The narrator knows that the world is out to destroy him, but his ragged nerves do not permit him the luxury of creating the perfectly researched and recreated world of “Hell Screen.” This is Hell itself.
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There could easily have been more categories than the above four to represent Akutagawa's broad interests, including Meiji Period settings, Chinese settings, and children's stories.