Mandarins (Mikan)
The Japanese mikan (Citrus unshui) is a small, easy-to-peel citrus fruit. Enormous quantities of mikan are eaten in Japan, particularly during the winter months. Also known as the Satsuma orange or mandarin, it has been variously translated as “mandarin orange” and “tangerine”; strictly speaking, it is neither. So representative is it of Japanese daily life, at least when in season, that English-speaking residents of Japan have come to refer to Tōkyō as the Big Mikan.
Akutagawa published this story in the May 1919 edition of Shinchō [New Tide], two months after resigning from his position as an English teacher at the Naval Engineering School in Yokosuka, four months after the opening of the Paris Peace Conference, to which the story alludes. The electrically powered trains that today travel to and from this coastal city in hilly southeastern Kanagawa Prefecture still pass through tunnels.
At the Seashore (Umi no Hotori)
Although the story was published in September 1925 (Chūō-kōron, The Central Review), well after the beginning of Akutagawa’s struggles with mental illness and depression, it is set in the years of the writer’s happier youth, with scarcely a trace of the gloomily misanthropic musings so apparent elsewhere. Here we catch a glimpse of seemingly carefree, relatively privileged, but hardly affluent, youths, balancing literary ambition with awareness of economic realities, boastfully, aggressively “male” toward one another, awkward in the presence of females, who, quite literally, swim away from them, apparently quite immune to the stinging jellyfish.
The setting of the story is Chiba Prefecture, occupying the entire Bōsō Peninsula across the bay from Tōkyō-Yokohama. In American terms, Chiba might be seen as standing in relation to Tōkyō as New Jersey does to New York City. Today, the communities that lie immediately to the east of the Edo River, including Chiba City, are culturally almost entirely indistinguishable from the capital. Yet journeying farther east, north, or south brings one at least to a landscape, if not to a way of life, that is no longer metropolitan. Needless to say, this would have been all the more so in Akutagawa’s day.
Until the end of the Edo period, the Bōsō Peninsula was divided into three provinces: roughly, Shimōsa to the north, Awa to the south, and Kazusa between them. It is the last of these that appears in Akutagawa’s autobiographical story: In the late summer of 1916, he and his friend Kume Masao (1891–1952), himself a novelist-to-be, lodged in Ichinomiya, on the eastern coast of Kazusa. In his description of the attraction felt by “M” (Kume) for the girl in the scarlet bathing suit, Akutagawa may well have been thinking of his friend’s unrequited love for the daughter of Natsume Sōseki, their common mentor, who was to die in December of that same year. (The cigarette description at the beginning of the story appears to echo a passage in Sōseki’s last—and unfinished—novel, Meian, tr. Light and Darkness). It was also in their seaside cottage that Akutagawa wrote his first love letter to his future wife, Tsukamoto Fumi.
1The Sino-Japanese term in the original (enzen) suggests the beguiling smile of a woman.
2‘Sensual face’; in Japanese universities, German was the second most commonly studied foreign language after English.
3A better-known cicada (semi) hs come to be associated in Japanese culture with the summer, while the evening cicada (higurashi) remains a symbol of early autumn. The literal meaning is “day-darkening.”
An Evening Conversation (Issekiwa)
Though the geisha is a perennially—and perhaps excessively—popular topic in Occidental descriptions and discussions of Japan, “An Evening Conversation,” which appeared in the July 1922 edition of Sandee [Sunday] Mainichi, is less about the female entertainer Koen, ‘Little Penny,’ (and even less about the plight of such women in Akutagawa’s time) than about what Dr. Wada calls tsūjin (‘sophisticates, men of the world’). The story follows in a long Japanese literary tradition of rambling conversations among males concerning life, love, and art. In a famous passage in the The Tale of Genji, four young aristocrats while away a rainy summer’s night in the Imperial Palace, waxing philosophical as they comment on their various amorous adventures. Like Wakatsuki, the consummate tsūjin, they put great store on the proper artistic training of their ideal lovers.
With its flashes of humor and cheerful rather than melancholic irony, the story may seem somewhat atypical of Akutagawa, and indeed it has been suggested that it was intended as a parody of Ame-shōshō (1922, tr. Quiet Rain, 1964) by Nagai Kafū(1879–1959), whose work lovingly focuses on the demimonde.
Wakatsuki may be seen as embodying social and cultural contradictions very much on the mind of the author. On the one hand, he is the sort of “modern man” who wears a jumper. (In the original, Akutagawa adds an exotic air by rendering the word chanpa with the same characters as those for the ancient Southeast Asian kingdom. Though janpā, ‘jumper,’ is a familiar word today, the garment would have been unknown to the great majority of Dr. Wada’s contemporaries.) On the other hand, Watasuki lives in an artistic milieu that could just as well have been that of the Edo period. Mentioned in this story are Ike no Taiga (1723–76), an Edo-period artist and calligrapher, and Katō Chikage (1735–1808), an Edo-period scholar and poet. Mushanokōji Saneatsu (1885–1976) was a writer and artist who at the time Akutagawa wrote the story had recently founded a utopian village à la Tolstoy.
1“Seigai’s Collected Poems”; Seigai literally means “blue lid.”
The Japanese have long been known for ruminating on who they are and where they are going—especially in relation to Western culture. Even if the notion of reviving bushidō (‘the way of the warrior’) is now (almost entirely) out of fashion, the concerns of Professor Hasegawa would make him feel quite at home among today’s Japan’s earnest, if self-absorbed, intellectuals. Plus ça change . . .
As would have been obvious to many of Akutagawa’s contemporaries, when the story was published in October 1916 (Chūō-kōron), Professor Hasegawa is based on Nitobe Inazō (1862–1933). Born in northern Japan, he first studied agricultural economics in Hokkaidō and then, following his conversion to Christianity, entered Tōkyō Imperial University to study English literature. He spent a total of six years abroad, in the United States and Germany, earning several doctorates and publishing books in several languages. Like Professor Hasegawa, he married an American woman and perceived himself as a “bridge” between Japan and the West. At Tōkyō Imperial University, he became a professor of colonial policy before leaving with his wife for the United States, where in 1899 he published Bushidō: The Soul of Japan, a widely read, if controversial, book. In 1918, he attended the Versailles Peace Conference and later served as the undersecretary general of the League of Nations.
Akutagawa’s portrait of Professor Hasegawa may, on the whole, seem unsympathetic. Westerners familiar with Japan may also squirm at the repeated references to the Gifu lantern, seeing in it a symbol of naïve and sentimental exoticism. Yet the story is arguably not intended as a satire on individuals but rather as a meditation on abstract intellectualism and facile multiculturalism.
1German Manier (Swedish manér) is in the original, transcribed in Japanese as maniiru. The earliest translations of Strindberg were into German and English.
2Shonanoka: the day of the death being included in the calculation.
3German Mätzchen ‘nonsense, hokum’ is apparently the translation of the Swedish choser ‘affectations’. Akutagawa uses the Japanese word kusami ‘bad odor, affectation’, glossing it phonetically as mettsuhen.
An Enlightened Husband (Kaika no Otto)
In the original title, Kaika no Otto (February 1919, Chūgai [Home and Abroad]), the Sino-Japanese term kaika ‘opening, enlightenment, progress’ forms part of a Meiji-era slogan: bunmei-kaika ‘civilization and enlightenment’. Akutagawa, who had just become an adult when that era ended in 1912, looks back on it with a characteristic mixture of nostalgia and irony, the question posed by Viscount Honda at the end of the story being very much his own. At the same time, the setting reflects Akutagawa’s enduring love for the capital’s eastern region, his childhood home, in particular the Sumida River, which he first celebrated in Ōkawa no Mizu (‘The Waters of the Great River’), published in 1914, when the writer was still a university student.
From the Meiji era until 1947, Japan had a peerage system, whereby aristocratic titles were conferred first on former samurai and later on successful entrepreneurs and distinquished civil servants. Viscount Honda also appears in Akutagawa’s Kaika no Satsujin [A Civilized Murder] (July 1918, Chūō-kōron).
Both in form and mood, “An Enlightened Husband” may remind readers of Natsume Sōseki’s Kokoro, published only five years before, in 1914. There too most of the story is taken up by a secondary narration, telling of love and shattered ideals. Yet while the beautiful woman portrayed in Sōseki’s novel is almost implausibly innocent, the women in Akutagawa’s short story have an aura of evil about them.
1In the original, the term is gonsai (‘apparent provisional wife’); this became a commonly used euphemism in the Meiji era as Japanese society adopted “modern ways,” albeit fitfully. Miura’s choice of words is the unadorned mekake (‘concubine’).
2The word in the original is kōtō, lit. ‘high grade’, a Sino-Japanese compound that came to be used to express concepts ranging from higher education to higher species. Like kaika (‘enlightened’), Akutagawa uses it with irony. By the time of this story, kōtō had also come to appear in Tokubetsu-kōtō-keisatsu, “Special Higher Police.”
3The Kabuki play by Kawatake Mokuami (1816–93) was written in 1879, shortly after the trial and execution (the last legal decapitation) of Takahashi O-den, a notorious young murderess. The play serves to extol the new civil code, including ideal male-female roles hardly consistent with the couple being described by Viscount Honda.
4Kan-tsū, a punishable offense for women until 1947.
Autumn (Aki)
“Autumn” first appeared in the April 1, 1920, edition of Chūō-kōron (The Central Review). The beginning of the story may lead the reader to expect a sad but familiar tale of quintessentially “Japanese” self-sacrifice and the crushing of a woman’s budding literary talent by a brutish, philistine husband. The actual content, however, proves to be richer and subtler—and indeed ultimately ambiguous.
Akutagawa’s grim description of the Tōkyō suburb where Teruko and her husband live may be seen as consistent with her apparent unhappiness, yet it also clearly reflects the writer’s own view of residential expansion, a development that was only accelerated by the Great Kantō Earthquake of 1923.
1The renowned swordsman Miyamoto Musashi (1584–1645) developed the two-sword fencing style. Gorin no Sho (The Book of the Five Rings), attributed to him, became something of a cult classic in the English-speaking world during the 1980s.
2Rather than Rémy de Gourmont (1858–1915), the French symbolist poet and critic, the source is more likely the English illustrator Aubrey Beardsley (1872–98).
3Jūsan’ya, the thirteenth day of the ninth month according to the lunar calendar, a traditional moon-viewing evening. (Jūsan’ya is the title of a novel by Higuchi Ichiyō [1872–96] about an unhappy marriage.)
4The price of rice rose in 1914 with the outbreak of the First World War. Newspaper coverage of the rice riots of 1918 led to press censorship.
Though “Winter” is fictional, Akutagawa was clearly thinking of his elder sister’s husband, Nishikawa Yutaka, when he completed this story in June 1927, a month before his death. Both the theme and ambience are familiar: unhappy family relations set against the background of a cold and gray society. They may also remind us, particularly in the description of the prison visit, of another writer: Franz Kafka, whose posthumous work Der Prozess (The Trial) had been published just two years before.
The narrator visits his incarcerated relative, to whom he refers as his cousin, more precisely, we may surmise, his cousin-in-law. (There are speech-level differences in the original that suggest he is not a blood relative.) He then travels to his home on the western edge of Tōkyō, in “uptown” Yamanote, which, particularly after the Great Kantō Earthquake, was becoming culturally dominant. His general hints at the social contrasts in wealth and status are reinforced by his remarks about the vicissitudes of fortune relating to his cousin.
The oppressiveness of a highly conformist society is reflected in the reference to the youth organization (seinendan) of which T is a leader. Such groups were already taking on a nationalistic, militarist character, and though the story is set in the waning years of “Taishō Democracy,” Akutagawa would have been well aware that at the end of that period, in 1925, all seinendan had come under government control in a federation known as the Dai Nippon Rengō Seinendan. That same year had seen the passage of the Peace Preservation Law, intended to introduce thought control and suppress dissent.
The nature of the charges against the narrator’s cousin-in-law are never specified, but whatever they are, Akutagawa does not need to explain to his readers the dire social consequences of T’s arrest or the significance of the narrator’s question to his cousin: “The neighborhood doesn’t know yet?”
Ichigaya is located to the northwest of the Imperial Palace in central Tōkyō. Though the inmates of the now long-since-vanished prison were for the most part the not-yet-convicted, it was also there that prominent radicals were hanged for high treason.
The ending of the story seems to echo Akutagawa’s account in “Cogwheels” of his visit to his sister following the suicide of Nishikawa Yutaka. Another autobiographical element is the fact that Akutagawa, like the narrator, was at one time a journalist, though his contributions were that of a writer, not a news reporter.
1In the original, this literally means ‘varieties of people’ but perhaps refers specifically to The Charactres by Theophrastus (372–287 BC).
2“Long live Master T!”
Fortune (Un)
The title of the original is a Sino-Japanese word that may be variously rendered into English as ‘fate’, ‘fortune’, or ‘luck’. Published in January 1917 (Bunshō-sekai), the story is among those Akutagawa adapted from the folk-tale collection Konjaku Monogatari [Tales of Times Now Past]. The setting is the imperial capital in the late Heian period. As in Akutagawa’s famous Rashōmon, inspired by the same folktale collection, there is an aura of decay. Just as the great city gate has fallen into ruin and become a refuge for outlaws, so has the Yasaka pagoda been taken over by a thief and his apparent confederate, an elderly nun.
In Konjaku Monogatari, all thirty-nine stories in Volume 16 center upon the wondrous workings of the bodhisattva Kannon (Kanzeon), known in India as Avalokiteçvara, in China as Guānyīn, and sometimes in the English-speaking world as the goddess of mercy. KJM 16:33 is consistent with the other tales of piety. A poor woman takes a pilgrimage to Kiyomizu-dera (‘temple of clear water’) to pray to Kannon, where she is told in a vision to comply with the commands of a man she is to meet. He takes her to the nearby Yasaka pagoda of Hōkanji and, in the morning, offers her both marriage and gifts of valuable cloth. He then departs, leaving her with strict instructions to remain. When she discovers his treasure horde, she concludes that he must be a thief. Waiting until the old nun attending to her has gone for water, she makes her escape, taking the gifts with her. She makes her way to a friend’s house and spies the thief in the hands of the authorities. Having profited from the sale of the cloth, she is able to marry and live in comfort.
In Akutagawa’s otherwise faithful adaptation, the waters are muddied by the moral uncertainty concerning the old nun’s death and the religious agnosticism implicit in the old potter’s role as narrator. The banter between the two men strikes a note of ironic—and irreverent—humor entirely lacking in KJM.
1An aozamurai (or aozaburai), lit. ‘blue retainer’, a low-ranking attendant.
2Foxes were regarded as quasi-supernatural creatures, capable of assuming the form of humans and of bewitching them. There are many stories concerning them in Japanese folklore.
3The bush warbler (ettia diphone), uguisu in Japanese, known for its beautiful song, is regarded as a symbol of joy and good fortune.
4One of Kyōto’s landmarks. The formal name for the temple is Hōkanji, of which only the oft-destroyed and rebuilt pagoda remains.
Kesa and Moritō (Kesa to Moritō)
Published in April 1918 (Chūō-kōron), the story is based on an incident recorded in Genpei-seisuiki [The Rise and Fall of the Genji and Heike]. First compiled in the late thirteenth or early fourteenth century, this work is an account of the colossal struggle between the Minamoto and Taira, culminating in the final defeat of the latter in 1185.
Late Heian-period Japan saw the rise of such warrior clans and their usurpation in all but name of imperial authority. The characters in the story are Kesa, a court lady married to Minamoto no Wataru, and Endō Moritō, a guard in the palace of the retired emperor.
In the original version, Kesa’s mother, Moritō’s aunt, has lived in the northeast, in the Minamoto enclave of Koromogawa, hence the name by which she is called. She returns to the the Heian capital, where she resides in straitened circumstances with her beautiful daughter. At the age of fourteen, Kesa is wed to Wataru. Three years later, at the dedication of a bridge, Moritō catches a furtive glimpse of her through the bamboo screen of her carriage and is infatuated. Moritō rebukes his aunt for not having given Kesa to him and even threatens to kill her.
Kesa, as suggested by her name, referring to a Buddhist monk’s modest surplice, is a paragon of fidelity and self-sacrifice. In order to save her mother, Kesa yields to her cousin and then, fearful for her husband’s life as well, pretends to contrive with Moritō to kill him. Wetting her long hair and tying it up into a knot to make herself resemble a man, she lies in Wataru’s bed; Moritō stealthily enters and, intending to cut off his rival’s head, slays instead his beloved. When he realizes what he has done, he is mad with grief and remorse. He wanders about with Kesa’s head until, renouncing the world, he becomes a Buddhist ascetic.
Moritō is known to history by his priestly name, Mongaku. Later a sometime associate of Minamoto no Yoritomo, the first Kamakura shogun, he is thought to have died in the early thirteenth century.
The story of Kesa’s fate has been dramatized many times, notably in Kinugasa Teinosuke’s 1953 film Jigokumon (Gate of Hell). The female role is played by Kyō Machiko, who also appears in Kurosawa’s Rashōmon.
Japanese Buddhism is replete with tales of black-hearted sinners who, seeing at last the evil of their ways, embark on the arduous path to sainthood. In his retelling of this story, Akutagawa not only alters details but also narrows the focus. Clearly, he is more interested in damnation than redemption, as he probes the complex motives not only of Moritō but also of Kesa—none of which is touched upon in the original version. Here Kesa is driven to adultery not by sacrificial love for others but rather by despair, vanity, and strangely ambivalent feelings toward Moritō. Her mother becomes, in Akutagawa’s version, an incidental aunt. The tale thus offers an ironic twist on the star-crossed lover motif, a familiar theme in Japanese lore.
The language, no less than the psychology, is modern, the story containing lexical concepts introduced only after the beginning of the Meiji era. The Sino-Japanese word ai ‘love’, for example, which Akutagawa uses with striking frequency, traditionally referred primarily to affection, attachment, or (in Buddhist terminology) carnal lust. Occurring once in Moritō’s soliloquy is the compound ren’ai, a Meiji-period coinage referring to romantic love. Moritō and Kesa’s musings about their true feelings and motives are thus couched in terms that are clearly and deliberately anachronistic.
In Romeo and Juliet, external miscommunication contributes to tragedy. In “Kesa and Moritō,” intense introspection on the part of each character is juxtaposed with a disastrous misunderstanding of the other’s thoughts and intentions. In that respect, the story may be seen as a forerunner of “In the Grove” and radical point-of-viewism.
Death of a Disciple (Hōkyōnin no Shi)
In the late sixteenth century, Nagasaki, the setting of Akutagawa’s story, the fortunes of the Christian community were dramatically shifting. In February of the following year, twenty-six believers, seventeen Japanese and nine missionaries were crucified in Nagasaki. It was only in 1873, less than twenty years before the birth of Akutagawa, that the Meiji government finally lifted its anti-Christian edicts. Akutagawa had a strong interest in the predominant faith of the West, as is reflected in many of his stories, even if his view of religion in general was ambivalent.
Despite Akutagawa’s pseudo-documentary postscript, including his reference to the eighteenth-century Chronicles of Port Nagasaki (Nagasaki-minato-gusa) The Death of a Disciple is clearly fiction. (Though, for example, the thirteenth-century Legenda Aurea is clearly a real work, there is no edition to which descriptions of Japanese Christians have been added.) In fact, it may not be too much to say that the motifs here, albeit placed in the historical context of Japan’s “Christian century,” reflect the influence of those early medieval Japanese folktales that inspired some of the writer’s most famous stories. The saintly figure of Lorenzo would be quite at home in the Buddhist tales of Konjaku Monogatari. Indeed, he is first described even by the Christians of Nagasaki as a tendō, a strictly Buddhist term, referring to fierce guardian deities disguised as boys. Akutagawa’s comments at the end of the narration may be seen as an imitation (or parody) of the moralizing didacticism with which those stories inevitably conclude. The word translated into English as ‘depravity’—bonnō—is itself the rendition of a Sanskrit Buddhist term: klesa.
In particular, the surprise ending points to a mélange of traditions. In the minds of the story’s first readers, Lorenzo would surely have evoked a non-Christian figure with a nonetheless specifically Christian association: Kannon. A well-known subterfuge of the “hidden Christians” during the centuries of persecution was to use images of this enormously popular bodhisattva (cf. “Fortune”) to represent the Virgin Mary. Kannon, as it happens, was originally male, becoming female along the journey to Japan from India via China. In a story that was surely known to Akutagawa, she is born Miào-Shàn, the daughter of a rich king in Sumatra, who seeks to thwart her in her desire to become a Buddhist nun, even to the point of setting fire to the temple in which she resides. She miraculously puts out the flames but in the end is put to death.
For this story, published in September 1918 (Mita Bungaku [Mita Literature]), Akutagawa adopts a form of late medieval Japanese appropriate to the period. Along with Greco-Latin ecclesia, there is also a generous sprinkling of Portuguese borrowings. Nearly all have a specifically Christian reference, e.g. zencho (from gentio) ‘Gentile’, and so, unlike such everyday terms as pan ‘bread’ (from pão) and kappa ‘raincoat’ (from capa), were as archaic or obsolete in Akutagawa’s day as they are today. In the Japanese title of the short story, the word for ‘disciple’ (hōkyōnin), lit. ‘one who serves the Church /the faith’, has likewise long since fallen out of ordinary use.
1This Japanese version of Guia do Peccador (Guide for Sinner) was apparently published in 1599. The Keichō era extended from 1596 to 1615.
O’er a Withered Moor (Karenoshō)
Bashō ‘banana plant’ is the sobriquet adopted by the poet born Matsuo Kinsaku in 1644. In the West, he is doubtlessly the best-known composer of the seventeen-syllable verse form (5-7-5) that has subsequently come to be called haiku. Also widely read, both in Japanese and in translation, is his travel diary of 1689, Oku no Hosomichi (The Narrow Road to the Deep North).
A native of Ueno, Iga Province (now Mie Prefecture), in central Japan, Bashō had been living in Edo for some eight years when in 1680 he moved to a hut on the outskirts of the city. Hitherto known by the nom de plume of Tōsei ‘peach blue’, he renamed himself for the banana plant that a student had given him. In the spring of 1680 or 1681, accompanied by his disciple Enomoto Kikaku, he composed his most famous, oft-cited, structurally ambiguous, and therefore barely translatable poem. About it, written when the melancholic Bashō had begun to practice Zen, enough ink has been spilled to fill more than a pond:
Furu-ike ya/ kawazu tobi-komu/ mizu no oto
An old pond: the sound of a frog jumping into the water
In the autumn of 1684, Bashō began the first of his journeys, first traveling from Edo to Ueno, then to Nara, Ogaki, and Kyōto. The following year, having returned to Edo, he published Nozarashi no kikō (tr. Records of a Weather-beaten Skeleton), from which the last verse cited by Akutagawa is drawn. Having recently lost his mother, Bashō, already forty and never in very good health, was conscious of his own mortality.
Toward the end of his journey of 1689, as he passed southward through Kanazawa on the Sea of Japan, he sought to meet a fellow poet, Isshō, whom he only knew from correspondence. On learning that he had died at the end of the previous year, Bashō visited his grave, composing another renowned verse, the second of the three cited by Akutagawa.
Bashō resided in Kyōto for two years before returning once more to Edo. Then in the summer of 1694 he set off again for the west but fell ill with dysentery in Ōsaka and died. The date according to the modern calendar is November 28, 1694. His death verse, cited at the beginning of Akutagawa’s story, is nearly as familiar to Japanese as that of the pond, the frog, and the sound of the water.
Though still a revered figure in Akutagawa’s time, Bashō had also come under attack by the poet and critic Masaoka Tsunenori (1867–1902), known by his pen name, Shiki. He in turn was a close friend of Akutagawa’s mentor, the renowned novelist Natsume Sōseki, whose premature death in 1916 at the age of forty-nine clearly contributed to the background of “O’er a Withered Moor,” published in October 1918 (Shinshōsetsu [New Fiction]). The story should thus be read not as hagiography but rather as the writer’s own intensely personal meditation.
The story makes mention of haikai and hokku. The former refers both to what would now be called haiku and to haikai no renga ‘linked verse’, the latter to the initial stanza (5-7-5) of such. As this had long been used as a poem in itself, Shiki advocated the use of a distinct term, hence haiku, which has been generalized in Japan and internationalized abroad.
1Tabi ni yande/ yume wa kareno wo / kake-meguru.
2Sometime between four and five in the afternoon.
3The Buddhist custom of wetting the lips of the dying (or sometimes of the deceased) survives to the present day. A “plumed stick” (hane-yōji) was used both for administering medicine and, by married women, for applying tooth-blackener.
4Tsuka mo ugoke/ waga naku koe wa/ aki no kaze.
5Nozarashi wo/ kokoro ni kaze no/ shimu mi kana.
6In reality, Inenbō outlived his master by nearly fifteen years.
The Garden (Niwa)
In Edo-period Japan, there were five main highways, converging in Nihonbashi, near what is now the Imperial Palace in Tōkyō. The busiest and best-known of these was the Tōkaidō (East Sea Road), celebrated in Andō Hiroshige’s woodblock prints. All were administered by the central government, whose strict and precise regulations covered everything from road maintenance to traveler accommodations. The great lords of the provinces, obliged by the shogunate to spend alternate years in the capital, journeyed to and fro with large retinues, spending their nights at the best and most prestigious inns of the post-station towns: the honjin (‘headquarters’).
In the original, Akutagawa identifies the Nakamuras’ inn as one of the honjin, and while he does not directly name the highway, numerous clues point to Nakasendō (‘Central Mountain Road’), whose semicircular route passed through what are now Saitama, Gunma, Nagano, and Shiga prefectures. First, there is the mention of Princess Kazu (1846–77), who in 1862 was betrothed to Shōgun Iemochi and sent from the old imperial capital to Edo, now Tōkyō, on a long and difficult journey along the Nakasendō, accompanied by a party of ten thousand. Then there is the mention of the mendicant poet Seigetsu, an actual historical figure. Moreover, the elements of dialogue that appear in the story are all consistent with dialects spoken in the mountainous Chūbu region, specifically what is now Nagano Prefecture. The small stream that the second son sets out to dig is, for example, called a senge, a local word. The song that the grandmother sings likewise refers to events that took place in this same region.
Akutagawa, who first published this story in July 1922 (Chūō-kōron), is writing of the great transitional era two decades before his own birth, the decline of the garden—and the fall of the Nakamura family—emblemizing the passing of Old Japan. The perspective of the writer, himself very much part of the modern era, blends a sense of sad inevitability with the subtle irony that is a consistent characteristic of his work.
The vain and irascible first son may be seen as representing the last of the old order, his younger brothers being unable either to sustain it or to adapt to the new. With the death of the eldest, the third son returns to assume his duties but apparently can do no more than fantasize about making easy money. In the entrepreneurial flurry of the early Meiji period, rice speculation was very much a reality. (In 1872, exactly a half century before the publication of this story, a modern silk-reeling mill had been established in Tomioka, Gunma, a town lying on a secondary route connected to the Nakasendō.)
The ballad sung by the old woman refers a battle in November 1864, between, on the one hand, the Suwa and Matsumoto clans, defenders of the shogunate, and, on the other, pro-imperial rebels from Mito in eastern Japan. Akutagawa’s notes suggest that it was his own adoptive father who passed on the song, having learned it from a courtesan he had engaged while traveling.
In describing the dissolute second son, Akutagawa uses the Sino-Japanese term hōtō, in his own time already familiar to his readers as the loan-translation of a word used in a well-known New Testament parable. It is perhaps not too much to suppose that here too Akutagawa is being ironic, for the prodigal, having, it is suggested, squandered his absconded portion on harlots and even contracted syphilis, returns not to a loving father but to a younger brother, who, rather than forgiving, is simply indifferent.
1Variously translated as ‘cuckoo’ and ‘nightingale,’ the hototogisu makes a frequent appearance in Japanese verse. It is said to sing until it coughs up blood and has thus often been used as a symbol for tuberculosis.
The Life of a Fool (Aru Ahō no Isshō)
In the original title, the word ahō, ‘fool, simpleton, idiot,’ originates in Western dialects. As a term of abuse (and sometimes affection), it competes with the more commonly heard baka, though the latter has the more restricted meaning of ‘stupid’.
Whatever self-deprecation there is in Akutagawa’s use of the word, he is also putting himself in the grand tradition of socially alienated, morally flawed, but nonetheless prophetic “fools”—specifically, no doubt, of Strindberg, whose Confessions of a Fool (En dåres försvarstal [1887], lit. ‘A Madman’s Defense’) is mentioned in the text. Though Akutagawa does not, for all his many other literary allusions, refer to Shakespeare, the English-speaking reader may also recall the words of Jaques in As You Like It: “Oh that I were a fool! I am ambitious for a motley coat . . . Invest me in my motley; give me leave to speak my mind, and I will through and through cleanse the foul body of the infected world.”
Though Akutagawa explicitly identifies himself with Icarus, there appears to be a more consistent, albeit implicit, suggestion of Baudelaire’s famous albatross, the gracefully soaring bird, which, when land-bound, becomes terribly awkward, its name in Japanese being, appropriately enough, ahō-dori, lit. ‘fool-bird’. The mention of “flying sickness” in “Cogwheels” suggests much the same idea.
“The Life of a Fool,” published in October 1927 (Kaizō [Reconstruction]), three months after Akutagawa’s death, is not without its painful excesses. Surely a single line of Baudelaire is not “worth more than all of life,” and even the vain Goethe might have blushed at being compared (favorably) to Christ. Yet, together with “Cogwheels,” likewise published posthumously, we may read it both for its poignant flashes of brilliance and as a chronicle, both lyrical and grim (Dichtung und Wahrheit), of the author’s relentless journey into night.
1A reference to the novelist Tanizaki Jun’ichirō (1886–1965), with whom Akutagawa often collaborated. Together with other writers, they met in June 1917, at Café Maison Ōtori-no-su in Nihonbashi. In conformity to Japanese thinking, Akutagawa regarded Tanizaki as an “upperclassman” (senpai), as he had also attended Tōkyō Imperial University. Tanizaki had, however, interrupted his studies two years before Akutagawa began his own.
2In the original, the term used derives from Classical Chinese, meaning literally ‘acid nostrils’.
3Koshibito refers to a person from northeastern Japan. Akutagawa composed (in classical form) the collection of twenty-five love poems by that title as a means of resisting the temptation to become involved with the poetess and translator Katayama Hiroko, an older woman married to a banker originally from Niigata, a prefecture in the northeast.
4Though Villon was sentenced to be hanged in 1462, at the age of 31, he was reprieved in early 1463; his subsequent life is unknown . . . The poet Edward Young reported that on a walk through Dublin, Jonathan Swift saw an elm tree with a withered crown and (prophetically) remarked: “I shall be like that tree; I shall die at the top.”
5The words attributed to the young writer Radiguet (1903–1923) before his death of typhoid fever, are, in fact: “Dans trois jours je vais être fusillé par les soldats de Dieu” (‘In three days I shall be shot by the soldiers of God.’)
The Villa of the Black Crane (Genkaku-sanbō)
In the central character of this story, published in January–February 1927 (Chūō-kōron), when his own health was failing, Akutagawa undoubtedly sees something of himself, though the story is otherwise hardly autobiographical. The biting irony with which it concludes might be seen as social commentary, particularly regarding the status of women. Yet Akutagawa is an observer, not a revolutionary, the writer of elegies, not manifestos. If Jūkichi’s cousin is reading Wilhelm Liebknecht, the father of the Sparticist Karl Liebknecht, Jūkichi himself is merely staring out the window, wearily noting the changing urban landscape and, with it, the passing of his father-inlaw’s era.
Genkaku is written with the Chinese characters meaning ‘black crane’, but there is much homophony in Japanese, so that though the inquiring student surely knows this, he asks why Genkaku has chosen the name as his nom d’artiste. Written with other characters, genkaku can variously mean not only ‘strict’ but also ‘hallucination’.
The death of the artist Genkaku suggests parallels to that of the admittedly nobler but nonetheless forlorn poet Bashō in “O’er a Withered Moor.” More distantly, the description of a selfish old man contemplating his miserable life and impending death in an isolated room surrounded by a family he has somehow contrived to alienate may be heard echoing in François Mauriac’s (1932) Le Noeud de Vipères (The Vipers’ Tangle). The difference, of course, is that while Mauriac’s Louis ultimately experiences grace, the despairing Genkaku chants familiar words from the twenty-fifth chapter of the Lotus Sutra and then thinks of a decidedly profane folk song and dance. When we last see him, he is quite unintentionally amusing his grandson with a failed attempt to strangle himself by means of his own loincloth. The reader is grimly reminded of Akutagawa’s own experiment, as recorded in “The Life of a Fool.”
1Bunka-mura: the word bunka ‘culture’ was a highly fashionable term of embellishment and thus came to be applied to newly constructed suburban settlements.
2Shoes left at the entrance are normally turned outwards to facilitate departure. The task would normally be that of the host or a servant. The fact that the woman performs it herself indicates her sense of inferiority—or her residual status as a domestic.
3A mother would normally not address her own son as “Botchan” (‘young master’); O-yoshi is presumably doing so as a sign of deference toward the child’s father and his family.
4This was the slogan of the political parties that sought to challenge the power of the bureaucratic elites. In 1913, they forced the resignation of the prime minister and in 1918 saw one of their own brought to power.
5Translated by Burton Watson as: “Wonderful sound, Perceiver of the World’s Sounds, Brahma’s sound, the sea tide sound—they surpass those sounds of the world.”
Cogwheels (Haguruma)
The first section of this story appeared under the title of Rēn-kōto (‘Raincoat’) in the June 1927 edition of Daichōwa (‘Great Harmony’). All six sections were published in Bungei-shunjū in October of the same year; the posthumous title was Haguruma, lit. ‘toothed wheel(s)’.
The image easily suggests Charlie Chaplin’s vision of Modern Times (1936), the hapless human individual caught in inhuman, industrial machinery, but, anachronism aside, the reader soon realizes that Akutagawa’s themes are, as ever, far more personal and psychological than social.
As with the previous story, there is autobiographical detail that is not so much lost in translation as obscured by time; there is also, of course, the issue—especially given the writer’s state of mind—of the boundary between fact and fiction. Moreover, Akutagawa, the voracious reader, was not a meticulous scholar. The story about the lad who went home “meandering like a reptile” is indeed from ancient China, but Akutagawa has his sources confused, for the folktale is found in Autumn Floods by the Daoist Zhuāngzĭ (fourth Century BCE), not in Hÿn Fēizĭ by the third century BCE legalist philosopher Hÿn Fēi. And the atheist Prosper Mérimée did not, in fact, convert to Protestantism but merely arranged for a Protestant burial to spare his friends scandal.
Not surprisingly, Akutagawa drops hints that are more apparent to Japanese than to non-Japanese readers. When he refers to dragons, he plays on his own name, the ryū (‘dragon’) of Ryūnosuke; black and white are funeral colors. “White” occurs so often in the story that even the “white, rectangular U” at the wedding reception becomes, at least in retrospect, a morbid symbol. The Sino-Japanese word for ‘four’ (shi) is homophonous with that for ‘death’, resulting in a superstition shared by other East Asian peoples.
1In March 1914, Henriette Caillaux, wife of Joseph Caillaux, the former prime minister and at the time the minister of finance, shot and killed the editor of Le Figaro. She was acquitted, and by the time of this story, her husband was again in the throes of directing financial policy . . . The member of the Japanese imperial family to whom reference is made is probably Prince Higashikuni (1887–1990), who had studied at the Ecole Supérieure de Guerre in Paris from 1920 to 1926. Having become accustomed to la dolce vita, he had to be ordered home by the Imperial Household Ministry.
2Clearly taken from Jeremiah 10:24, cf. Psalms 6 and 38.
3In Canto XIII of The Inferno, Virgil guides Dante to the Seventh Ring of Hell, in which they encounter gnarled, black trees, inhabited, he learns, by the souls of those who have done themselves harm, squandering their wealth or committing suicide.
4The statue is of Kusunoki Masashige, the warrior chieftain who in obedience to the reckless orders of exiled Emperor Go-Daigo went off in 1336 to certain death in battle with the turncoat Ashikaga Takauji, founder of the Muromachi shogunate. Kusunoki was idealized by both Edo period Neo-Confucianists and modern nationalists as a symbol of loyalty.