To Masao Kume: |
June 20, 1927 |
I leave entirely in your hands the questions of whether, when, and where to publish this manuscript. You know most of those who appear in it, but should it see the public light, I would ask you not to provide an index. Strangely enough, though I am presently living in the unhappiest of happy circumstances, I regret nothing. My great sorrow is only for those who have suffered the bad husband, the bad son, and the bad parent that I have been. Here I have not sought—at least not consciously—to defend myself.
Finally, I am entrusting this manuscript to you because I think you know me better than anyone else—at least with my feigned urbanity peeled away. Please laugh at my foolishness.
Akutagawa Ryūnosuke
He was twenty years old and on the second floor of a bookstore, having climbed the Western-style ladder set against a tier containing new works. Here were Maupassant, Baudelaire, Strindberg, Ibsen, Shaw, and Tolstoy . . .
Though the end of the day was looming, he went on avidly reading the lettering of the backs. On display was less a collection of books than the embodiment of la fin de siècle: Nietzsche, Verlaine, the Gon-court brothers, Dostoyevsky, Hauptmann, Flaubert . . .
Resisting the darkness, he recited their names, but quite on their own they were sinking in the melancholic gloom. Finally, his stamina exhausted, he started to descend the ladder when an unshaded electric bulb just above was suddenly illuminated. He stood still, looking down on the customers and clerks passing between the rows of books. They looked strangely small—and so shabby as well.
“A single line of Baudelaire is worth more than all of life.”
From his perch, he lingered for a moment, still staring down at those below.
The lunatics were all dressed in the same gray uniforms. That gave the large room an all the more depressing appearance. One of them sat at the organ and fervently went on playing a hymn. At the same time, in the exact middle of the room, another was dancing or, more precisely, was hopping about.
He was observing this scene in the company of a ruddy-faced physician. His own mother of ten years before was in no way different from these inmates. In no way at all . . . He sensed that even the odor was the same.
“Shall we go then?”
The doctor led the way through the corridor to another room. In the corner were huge jars filled with alcohol, in which a number of brains were submerged. On one of these he saw something white, looking quite as though it had been dabbed with egg albumen. As he stood talking with the doctor, he thought again about his mother.
“The owner of this brain was an engineer at X Electric Company. He always thought of himself as an enormous, black-luster dynamo.”
To avoid the doctor’s eyes, he stared out the glass window. Outside there was only a brick wall, on top of which bottle shards had been embedded. Thin patches of moss lent a vaguely white appearance to the façade.
He rose and slept in a room on the second floor of a suburban house. The instability of the ground made for a strange tilt.
In this room on the second floor he would sometimes quarrel with his mother’s elder sister, his foster parents sometimes interceding. He nonetheless had an unrivaled affection for his aunt. Never married, she was at the time close to sixty, while he was still twenty.
There on the second floor of that suburban house, he often pondered how it is that those who love one another can engage in mutual torment, even as the tilt of the house gave him a feeling of unease and foreboding . . .
The Sumida River was a dull, leaden gray. He was gazing out of a window on a small steamboat at the cherry trees of Mukōjima. The blossoms, now at their peak, were no less dispiriting to his eyes than had they been rows of rags. Yet in those blossoms—renowned since Edo times—he had come to see himself.
He sat at a table in a café with one who had preceded him at the university.1 Smoking one cigarette after another, he barely spoke, listening intently.
“I spent half the day in a taxi.”
“Did you have matters to attend to?”
Resting his chin in his hand, the other replied in a quite offhand manner:
“Oh, no, I merely wished to enjoy the ride.”
These words opened a window in his mind to an unknown world—the world of self so akin to that of the gods. He felt pain—and, at the same time, joy.
The café was quite small, but under a portrait of Pan was a gum tree in a red pot, its thick, fleshy leaves drooping.
The wind was blowing steadily from the sea as he opened an English dictionary and searched the entries with his fingertip:
Talaria: winged shoes or sandals
Tale: a story
Talipot: A palm tree native to the East Indies, attaining a height of fifty to one hundred feet, its leaves used for umbrellas, fans, and hats, blooming once in seventy years . . .
In his mind he could clearly picture the flowers of the palms. He felt a tickling in his throat he had never known before. He found himself spitting into the dictionary. Was it sputum? No. He contemplated the brevity of life and once again imagined the palm flowers, high aloft the trees, far across the ocean.
Suddenly—indeed suddenly . . . He was standing in front of a bookstore, looking at a collection of Van Gogh paintings, when he suddenly understood what a painting is. They were, of course, a photographic edition, but from them he felt Nature springing forth in all her splendor.
His passion for the paintings renewed and altered his vision. He began to hone in on the sway and bend of branches and the sensual plumpness of female cheeks.
At the end of a rainy afternoon in autumn, he was walking through a suburban railway underpass. Beneath an embankment on the other side stood a horse-drawn wagon. As he passed it, he felt the presence of someone who had walked the same path. Someone? He had no need to ask himself twice. In his twenty-three-year-old mind he saw a Dutchman with an amputated ear, a long pipe in his mouth, looking out with a penetrating gaze at the bleak landscape . . .
Drenched by the rain, he walked the asphalt street. It was raining rather heavily. In the pervasive dampness, he noticed the rubbery smell of his mackintosh.
From an overhead trolley cable in front of him came a burst of violet sparks. He felt strangely moved. In his coat pocket he had tucked away a manuscript intended for a literary coterie. As he went on through the rain, he looked up again at the cable behind him: it was sparkling as ever.
He had taken a survey of life and found nothing in particular that he wanted or desired. But now those violet sparks . . . To seize those stupendous sparks exploding in space, he would happily have forfeited his life.
On a big toe of each cadaver hung an identifying tag, including name and age. A friend of his was bent over, skillfully wielding a scalpel as he began to peel away the facial skin of one. Underneath lay a beautiful layer of yellow fat.
He looked carefully at the cadaver: he needed background for a short story set in the Heian period. He was, however, made uneasy by the smell—suggesting rotting apricots—that emanated from the body. With knitted eyebrows, his friend calmly carried on his work.
“We’ve recently had quite a shortage,” his friend remarked.
To this he had a ready answer: If I were faced with that problem, I suppose I’d resort to murder—without any sort of animosity, he thought.
Needless to say, he kept this comment to himself.
Sitting under a large oak, he was reading one of Sensei’s books. Not a leaf was stirring in the autumn light. In distant space, a crystal balance scale was maintaining perfect equilibrium. This was the scene he saw in his mind’s eye as he read . . .
The day gradually dawned. At a corner of a street, he looked out on a vast market. The crowds and their vehicles were bathed in rose light. He lit a cigarette and calmly strolled on through. A scrawny black dog suddenly began barking at him, but he was neither surprised nor dismayed; indeed, he felt some affection for the dog.
In the middle of the market was a plane tree, spreading its branches all around. He stood at the base of the trunk and looked up through those branches at the distant sky, in which a star was twinkling directly above his head.
He was in his twenty-fifth year. It had been three months since he had made the acquaintance of his mentor.
The interior of the submarine was dimly lit. Crouched down among the machines on all sides, he peered through a small telescope. He could see reflected in the bright light the military port.
“There you’ll be able to see the Kongō,” an officer told him. Looking at the reduced image of the battle cruiser through the square lens, he was somehow reminded of Dutch parsley, its scent lingering even when mounted on a portion of thirty-sen beefsteak.
In the wind that followed a lull in the rain, he was walking the platform of a new railway station. The sky was still overcast. On the other side, a few workers were chanting robustly as they swung their picks up and down in unison.
Both their song and his sentiments were scattered by the wind. Leaving his cigarette unlit, he felt an anguish bordering on joy. “Sensei critically ill” read the telegram that he had thrust into his pocket.
The 6 AM Tōkyō-bound train came curving round the pine-covered slope and pulled in, trailing a wisp of smoke.
“You know, we can’t have you already wasting money,” he complained to his wife the day after their wedding. It was less his complaint than one his maternal aunt had ordered him to deliver on her behalf. His wife had, of course, apologized not only to him but also to the aunt—as they sat in front of the pot of jonquils she had bought for him . . .
They led a tranquil life in the shade of a broad-leafed banana tree, for their house was situated in a coastal town a good hour away by train from Tōkyō.
He read a book by Anatole France, his head propped up by a pillow of skepticism exuding a rosy fragrance; the presence in that same pillow of a centaur quite escaped his notice.
A butterfly fluttered in the seaweed-scented breeze. For an instant, he felt its wings touch his parched lips. Even many years later, the powder on those wings that brushed his lips still glistened.
On the stairs of a hotel, he met her, quite by accident. Even in the daytime, her face seemed bathed in moonlight. As his gaze followed her (they were not in the least acquainted), he experienced a sadness he had not seen before . . .
He shifted from Anatole France to the eighteenth-century philosophers, though skipping over Rousseau, perhaps because in one respect, being prone to be carried away by passion, he resembled him. Leaning toward another side of himself, the coldly rational, he went to Candide’s philosopher.
He was twenty-nine years old, and already all was gloom. Yet in this way Voltaire provided him, such as he was, with artificial wings. He spread those wings and rose easily into the air, the joys and sorrows of human life, flooded with the light of reason, now sinking below his gaze. Unimpeded on his course toward the sun, he rained down his smiles and smirks on the miserable towns below, as though having forgotten the Greek of long ago who, with his own artificial wings scorched by Helios, went plunging into the sea and drowned . . .
Having joined a newspaper company, he found himself and his wife sharing a house with his foster parents. He entrusted himself to a contract he had signed. It was written on a yellow piece of paper. Yet on rereading it, he realized that all duties and obligations rested with him, none with the company.
Two rickshaws were running along a deserted country road on an overcast day, heading, it was clear from the briny breeze, toward the sea. He was sitting in the one behind, wondering what had induced him to embark on this rendezvous in which he had utterly no interest. It was certainly not love that had brought him here. If it was not love . . . To avoid responding to that question, he could not help thinking that at least they were on the same footing.
Riding in the rickshaw ahead of him was the daughter of a lunatic. Jealousy had driven her younger sister to suicide.
There is no longer any alternative.
Toward this girl, this lunatic’s daughter, driven by base animal instincts, he felt a certain abhorrence.
The rickshaws were now passing along a cemetery that smelled of the sea. Dark gravestones stood beyond the brushwood fence covered with oyster shells. Through the gravestones he gazed out on the faintly glittering waves. Suddenly he felt contempt for her husband, unable to win her heart.
It was a magazine illustration, an India-ink drawing of a rooster, striking in its individuality. He asked a friend about the artist.
A week later the artist paid him a visit. It was one of the most memorable events of his life. In the painter he discovered a poem that no one knew and in so doing his own soul, which likewise he never had known.
On a chilly autumn evening, an ear of maize reminded him instantly of the artist. Armed with its rough leaves, the tall plant spread its thin, nervelike roots over the soil; in its revelation of vulnerability, it was, of course, none other than his own self-portrait. Yet the discovery only dispirited him.
It is already too late. Yet if the die is cast . . .
Standing in front of a public square as dusk was falling . . . Feeling somewhat feverish, he started to cross it, the electric lights in the multistoried buildings twinkling against a faintly silver sky.
He stopped along the way, resolved to wait for her arrival. Five minutes later she was coming toward him, looking somehow haggard. As soon as she saw his face, she smiled and said: “I’m tired.” They walked side by side through the darkening square—for the first time together. He sensed that to be with her, he would abandon everything.
They were riding in a taxi when she gazed earnestly into his face and asked: “Have you any regrets?”
“I regret nothing,” he said firmly.
“Nor I,” she replied, pressing his hand. At that moment too, her face appeared to be bathed in moonlight.
Standing in front of the sliding door, he gazed down at the midwife, dressed in her white surgical gown, as she washed the newborn. It grimaced pitifully whenever the soap stung its eyes, crying at the top of its voice. He noticed that the infant had a rodentlike odor and thought in all earnestness:
Why have you too come into this world so full of vain desire and suffering? And why is this your burden of fate: to have the likes of me as a father?
This was the first son that his wife had borne to him.
He stood in the doorway of the room and watched some grimy Chinese playing mahjong in the light of the moon, the pomegranates in bloom. Stepping inside again, he sat down at a low-hanging lamp and read Strindberg’s Confessions of a Fool. Two pages were enough to bring a wry smile to his lips . . . The lies Strindberg was telling in writing letters to the countess, his lover, were hardly different from those he himself was writing.
The faded Buddhas, the gods, the horses, the lotus flowers . . . The weight they bore down on him was all but crushing. He looked up at them and forgot everything, even his own happiness at having shaken free of the lunatic’s daughter.
He was walking the backstreets with a friend. A canopied rickshaw came racing directly toward them. To his amazement, the passenger was the woman he had seen the previous evening. Even in the full light of day, her face seemed bathed in moonlight. In the presence of his friend, needless to say, they did not exchange greetings . . .
“What a beautiful woman!” his friend exclaimed.
He responded without hesitation, even as he stared straight ahead to the verdant hill at the end of the road.
“Yes, quite a beauty indeed!”
The odor of cow dung drifted across the sunlit countryside. He walked up the slope, wiping away perspiration. The fields on both sides of the road were wafting forth the rich smell of ripened barley.
“Kill! Kill!” He was mumbling the words again and again. Whom should he kill? He knew only too well, as he remembered an utterly contemptible man with short-cropped hair. Suddenly beyond the fields of golden barley the dome of a Roman Catholic church came into view . . .
It was an iron sake flask. The fine lines engraved in it had at some point impressed upon him the beauty of form.
On the large bed he talked with her about this and that. Beyond the windows of the room it was raining. The crinum blossoms, it appeared, had begun to rot. Just as before, her face seemed to be bathed in the light of the moon, and yet he could not help finding their conversation tedious. Lying on his stomach, he quietly lit a cigarette. It occurred to him that he had been living with her for seven years. He asked himself: Do I still love her? For all his habitual self-reflection, he was surprised at the answer: Yes, I do.
It resembled the odor of overripe apricots. He vaguely sensed it as he walked about the burned-out ruins. It occurred to him that the smell of corpses rotting under a burning sun is not as unpleasant as one might think. Yet as he stood in front of a pond heaped with bodies, he discovered that gruesome2 is not too strong a word. He was particularly moved by the remains of a young girl of twelve or thirteen. He gazed at her and felt something close to envy, as he remembered: Those whom the gods love die young. His elder sister and younger half brother had lost their homes to fire. But his sister’s husband had been found guilty of false testimony and given a suspended sentence.
Death to one and all! he could not help ruminating to himself, as he stood amidst the ashes.
He scuffled with his younger half brother. While the latter doubtlessly felt constrained by his presence, it was equally true he had lost his freedom because of that brother. Their relatives constantly urged the younger: “Learn from the example of your elder brother!” Yet the very advice only served to bind that same elder brother hand and foot. In their struggle, they rolled out onto the veranda. He still remembered that in the garden, under the rain-threatening sky, stood a crape myrtle, its bright-red blossoms in full bloom.
In the house of Voltaire, he was gazing out from a window at the high mountains. Above the glaciers there was not so much as the shadow of a vulture. A short Russian nonetheless continued persistently up the mountain path.
When night had fallen on the house of Voltaire, he wrote a tendentious poem as he remembered the figure of the Russian on the sloping trail:
You who more than any other kept the Ten Commandments
You who more than any other broke them
You who more than any other loved the people
You who more than any other despised them
You who more than any other burned with idealism
You who more than any other knew reality
You are the flower-scented electric locomotive
To which we of Asia have given birth
At the age of thirty he discovered that he had a great fondness for an empty plot of land. Scattered about on the moss-covered ground were numerous bricks and tile shards. Yet in his eyes it was a veritable Cézanne.
He happened to remember his passion of seven or eight years before. At the same time, he realized that at the time he had not known a thing about color.
He intended to live with such intensity that he would have no regrets at his death. He nonetheless continued to spend his days in diffident deference to his foster parents and his aunt, thereby creating for himself a life divided between light and darkness. One day he saw standing in an Occidental clothing shop a Pierrot puppet and wondered how much like one he was himself. But his unconscious, that is, his second self, had long since included this intuition in a short story.
He was walking with a university student through a field of pampas grass.
“You and your classmates must still possess a lust for life.”
“Yes, but surely you do as well . . .”
“As a matter of fact, I do not. All I have is my desire to produce.”
That was his honest feeling. Somewhere along the way he had lost interest in life.
“But the creative urge is really the same thing, is it not?”
He gave no reply. Now taking distinct shape over the red spikes of the pampas grass was an active volcano, for which he experienced a feeling close to envy, though he himself did not know why . . .
He met a woman who even in sheer mental prowess was his match. By composing lyrical poems such as Koshibito,3 he narrowly escaped danger. The twinge of regret he felt was as when one removes dazzling snow frozen to a tree trunk.
The sedge hat dancing in the wind
Will fall in time into the road.
What care have I for my good name
When thine alone is dear to me?
He sat on the balcony of a hotel surrounded by trees in bud, drawing pictures to amuse a young boy, the only son of the lunatic’s daughter, with whom he had broken all ties seven years earlier.
She lit a cigarette and watched them. Despite his despondency, he went on drawing trains and airplanes. Fortunately, the child was not his, though it pained him terribly to be addressed as Ojisan.
When the boy had momentarily left them, she continued to smoke her cigarette, asking him coquettishly:
“Don’t you think he resembles you?”
“Not at all. In the first place . . .”
“Well, there is such a thing as ‘prenatal influence,’ is there not?”
He turned his eyes without replying. Yet in the depths of his heart he could not help feeling a cruel urge to strangle the woman.
In the corner of a café he was conversing with a friend. The friend was talking about the recent cold, while munching on a baked apple. He suddenly sensed a contradiction in what was being said.
“You’re still single, aren’t you?”
“Well, actually, I’m to be married next month.”
He fell silent despite himself. Coldly, somehow menacingly, the mirrors attached to the walls reflected multiple images of his face.
Why do you attack the present social system?
Because I see the evils born of capitalism.
The evils? I thought you did not distinguish between Good and Evil? Then what about your life?
He was engaged in dialogue with an angel—an angel who, incidentally, was wearing a silk hat and would have blushed before no one.
He began to suffer from insomnia and from a loss of stamina as well. Each of various physicians offered multiple diagnoses, all of these including: gastric hyperacidity, gastric atony, dry pleurisy, neurasthenia, chronic conjunctivitis, brain fatigue . . .
But he knew the source of the malady: his shame of himself and his fear of them—the society he despised.
One afternoon, the sky darkened with snow clouds, he sat in the corner of a café, a lighted cigar in his mouth, his ear inclined to music coming from a gramophone on the other side of the room. It worked an uncanny effect on his spirits. When the record had come to a stop, he walked over and looked at the label: The Magic Flute—Mozart.
Suddenly he understood. Mozart, who had violated the Ten Commandments, had surely suffered—yet perhaps not as he had . . . Bowing his head, he quietly returned to his table.
He was thirty-five years old. Walking through a pine forest, spring sunlight falling on the trees, he recalled the words he had written two or three years before: much to their misfortune, the gods, unlike us mortals, cannot kill themselves . . .
Once more dusk was falling. The storming sea relentlessly threw its spray against the twilight shore. Under such a sky he celebrated with his wife a second marriage. In this they felt both joy and sorrow. Together with their three children, they gazed at the lightning flashes in the offing. His wife was holding one of them in her arms, apparently holding back her tears.
“I think I see a ship out there.”
“Yes.”
“A ship whose mast is split in two.”
Taking advantage of being alone in his room, he set about to hang himself with a sash tied to the bars of the window. Yet when he put his head in the noose, he was suddenly struck by the fear of death, though he was not afraid of the momentary pain that such would entail. He took out his pocket watch the second time and by way of experiment measured how long it might take for him to be strangled. After a few uncomfortable moments, all became quite muddled. Once beyond that stage, he would surely enter the realm of death. He consulted his watch and saw that his distress had lasted one minute and some twenty seconds. Beyond the window all was pitch-black, but in that darkness could be heard the raucous crowing of a rooster.
A rereading of the Divan was giving his spirits a new vitality. This “Oriental Goethe” had previously been unknown to him. Seeing Goethe standing serenely in the realm of enlightenment, beyond all good and evil, he felt an envy bordering on despair. In his eyes, the poet Goethe was greater than the poet Christ; in his heart bloomed the roses not only of the Acropolis and of Golgotha but also of Arabia. If only he had possessed the strength to follow in his footsteps . . . Even when he had completed his reading of the Divan and stilled his terrifying emotion, he could not help feeling all the more keenly his self-loathing at having allowed his life to become that of a Chinese imperial eunuch.
He was suddenly felled face downward by the suicide of his elder sister’s husband. He was now further obliged to take care of her and her family. At least to him, his own future seemed as dark as impending nightfall. He viewed his mental ruin with a feeling close to derision, being thoroughly aware of all his vices and weaknesses, even as he continued to read volume after volume. Yet even Rousseau’s Confessions were filled with heroic falsehoods. And as for Shinsei, he had never encountered as wily an old hypocrite as the protagonist of that particular work. Only François Villon was able to touch the depths of his soul. In some of his poems, he discovered “a beautiful male.”
The figure of Villon awaiting the gallows haunted him even in his dreams. Numerous times he had attempted to fall to the utter depths of human life, as had Villon, but neither his social circumstances nor his limited physical energy would permit it. He steadily grew weaker, much like the tree that Swift saw long ago—withering at the top.4
She had a radiant face. It was quite as though one were seeing the light of dawn reflected in a thin sheet of ice. He felt affection for her but not love; not one finger of his had ever touched her body.
“You have said that you wish to die, have you not?” she asked.
“Hmm . . . It is not so much that I wish to die as that I am weary of living.”
After this exchange, they joined in a suicide pact.
“A platonic suicide, I suppose,” she remarked.
“Yes, a double platonic suicide.”
He himself could not help being surprised at how calm he was.
He did not carry through with the pact. For some reason he felt satisfaction at not having touched her. She sometimes talked with him, acting as if nothing had happened. She also handed over to him her small bottle of cyanide, saying:
“This should make us both feel stronger.”
In doing so, she did, in fact, bolster his spirits. Sitting alone in his rattan chair, he gazed at the young leaves of the chinquapins and found that despite himself he would often think of what peace death would bring him.
Mustering his last strength, he set about to write his autobiography, only to find that his amour propre, his skepticism, and his keen awareness of his own self-interest made the task surprisingly difficult. He could not help despising himself, even as he was equally compelled to think that when we peel back the skin we are indeed all the same. The title of Goethe’s Dichtung und Wahrheit seemed to suggest the essence of autobiography. He also knew perfectly well that not everyone is moved by a literary work. His own writings could only appeal to likeminded individuals who lived lives similar to his own. It was with and for this feeling moving within him that he attempted to write his own brief blend of reverie and reality.
On completing “The Life of a Fool,” he happened to pass by a secondhand shop, in which he saw a stuffed swan. It stood with its neck stretched upward, but its yellowed feathers had been eaten away by vermin. Smiling wryly through his tears, he thought about his life. Before him lay only madness or suicide. He walked alone through the streets in the twilight, resolved to await the slow but steady approach of a destiny bent on his obliteration.
A friend of his became mentally ill. He had always felt very close to him. He knew better than anyone his loneliness, the loneliness that lay beneath the cheery mask. He visited him several times after his breakdown.
“We are both haunted by demons,” his friend remarked, lowering his voice, “the so-called fin-de-siècle demons.”
He heard that two or three days later, while on his way to a hot-springs resort, the friend had even been eating roses. After his friend’s hospitalization he remembered the terra-cotta bust that he had given him. It was of the author of a work that he had loved: The Inspector General. He remembered that Gogol too had gone mad and was thus reminded of the power that ruled them all.
He was at the point of exhaustion when once again he heard the laughter of the gods. He had just read the last words of Raymond Radiguet: “The soldiers of God are coming for me.”5 He tried to resist his own superstition and sentimentality, but he was physically incapable of any sort of struggle.
There could be no doubt: he was being tormented by the fin-desiècle demons. He envied the people of medieval times, who could entrust themselves to the power of God. But belief in God . . . Belief in the love of God was for him utterly impossible—a belief that even Cocteau possessed.
Even the hand holding his pen began to tremble; he also started to drool. Except when he had taken a 0.8 gram dose of Veronal, his mind was never completely clear, and those moments of relative lucidity lasted no longer than thirty minutes to an hour. He spent his days in spiritual twilight, as though, so to speak, leaning on a thin sword whose blade had been chipped.