Ryunosuke Akutagawa 1892-1927
biography
Ryunosuke Akutagawa was born in 1892 in Toyko, whose spirit and whose traditions he evokes with the magic of Baudelaire's Paris or Kafka's Prague. His mother died insane when he was a child. His father, toward whom he felt a great resentment, was a failure who gave him up to relatives for adoption. A brilliant student of literature at Tokyo Imperial University, he had already published his first stories before graduating in 1916. Married two years later, he fathered three sons and taught English to support his family. Later he traveled to China and Russia. In 1915, he published his arresting psychological novella Rashomon, which was to gain international recognition and eventually become a hugely successful film by Kurosawa. After a period of severe depression, the increasingly unstable Akutagawa took his own life with an overdose of pills in 1927, at age thirty five. His suicide letter, A Note to a Certain Old Friend, is contained below. His nearly ten volumes of literary essays, short stories, and novellas are a masterful reinterpretation of Asian tradition and legend, marked by a profound infusion of Western thought and literary technique.
selected works in translation
A Fool's Life translated by Will Petersen (Eridanos Press, 1987)
Cogswheels translated by Cid Corman and Susumu Kamaike (Eridanos Press, 1987)
Hell Screen translated by Takashi Kojima (Eridanos Press, 1987)
Mandarins translated by Charles de Wolf (Archipelago Books, 2007)
writing
excerpt from -a fool's life
7. painting
All at once he was struck. Standing in front of a bookshop looking at a collection of paintings by Van Gogh, it hit him. This was painting. Of course, these Van Goghs were merely photo reproductions. But even so, he could feel in them a self rising intensely to the surface.
The passion of these paintings renewed his vision. He saw now the undulations of a tree's branching, the curve of a woman's cheek.
One overcast autumn dusk outside the city he had walked through an underpass. There at the far side of the embankment stood a cart. As he walked by he had the feeling that somebody had passed this way before him. Who? - There was for him no longer need to question. In his twenty-three year old mind, an ear lopped off, a Dutchman, in his mouth a long stemmed pipe, on the sullen landscape set piercing eyes.
8. sparks
Rain drenched, treading asphalt. The rain ferocious. In the downpour he breathed in the rubber coat odor.
Before his eyes an aerial power line released sparks of violet. Strangely he was moved. Tucked away in his jacket pocket, meant for publication in the group magazine, was his manuscript. Walking on in the rain, once more he looked back at the line.
Unremittingly it emitted its prickly sparks. Though he considered all of human existence, there was nothing special worth having. But those violet blossoms of fire, -- those awesome fire works in the sky, to hold them, he would give his life.
17. butterfly
In wind reeking of duckweed, a butterfly flashed. Only for an instant, on his dry lips he felt the touch of the butterfly wings. But years afterward, on his lips, the wings' imprinted dust still glittered.
30. rain
On a big bed with her, talking of this and that. Outside the bedroom window rain was falling. The blossoms of crinum in this rain must be rotting away. Her face still seemed to linger in moonlight. But, talking with her was no longer not tiresome. Lying on his stomach, quietly lighting a cigarette he realized the days he had spent with her had already amounted to seven years.
"Am I in love with this woman?"
He wondered. Even to his self scrutinizing self the answer came as a surprise.
"I still am."
47. fire-play
Her face gleamed. It was like the light of morning sun on thin ice. He liked her. But it was not love. He never even touched her body, not even a finger.
"You're trying to die, aren't you?"
"Yes - No. Not trying to die. But sick of living."
Out of this conversation came a resolution to die together.
"We'll call it Platonic Suicide."
"Double Platonic Suicide."
Even to himself his composure seemed marvellous.
a note to a certain old friend
Probably no one who attempts suicide, as Regnier shows in one of his short stories, is fully aware of all his motives, which are usually too complex. At least in my case it is prompted by a vague sense of anxiety, a vague sense of anxiety about my own future.
Over the last two years or so I have thought only of death, and with special interest read a remarkable account of the process of death. While the author did this in abstract terms, I will be as concrete as I can, even to the point of sounding inhuman. At this point I am duty bound to be honest. As for my vague sense of anxiety about my own future, I think I analyzed it all in A Fool's Life, except for a social factor, namely the shadow of feudalism cast over my life. This I omitted purposely, not at all certain that I could really clarify the social context in which I lived.
Once deciding on suicide (I do not regard it as a sin, as Westerners do), I worked out the least painful means of carrying it out. Thus I precluded hanging, shooting, leaping, and other manners of suicide for aesthetic and practical reasons. Use of a drug seemed to be perhaps the most satisfactory way. As for place, it had to be my own house, whatever inconvenience to my surviving family. As a sort of springboard I, as Kleist and Racine had done, thought of some company, for instance, a lover or friend, but, having soon grown confident of myself, I decided to go ahead alone. And the last thing I had to weigh was to insure perfect execution without the knowledge of my family. After several months' preparation I have at last become certain of its possibility.
We humans, being human animals, do have an animal fear of death. The so-called vitality is but another name for animal strength. I myself am one of these human animals. And this animal strength, it seems, has gradually drained out of my system, judging by the fact that I am left with little appetite for food and women. The world I am now in is one of diseased nerves, lucid as ice. Such voluntary death must give us peace, if not happiness. Now that I am ready, I find nature more beautiful than ever, paradoxical as this may sound. I have seen, loved, and understood more than others. In this at least I have a measure of satisfaction, despite all the pain I have thus far had to endure.
P.S. Reading a life of Empedocles, I felt how old is this desire to make a god of oneself. This letter, so far as I am conscious, never attempts this. On the contrary, I consider myself one of the most common humans. You may recall those days of twenty years ago when we discussed "Empedocles on Etna" - under the linden trees. In those days I was one who wished to make a god of myself.
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