Rashōmon and Seventeen Other Stories

by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, Jay Rubin (Translator), Haruki Murakami (Introduction)

This collection features a brilliant new translation of the Japanese master's stories, from the source for the movie Rashōmon to his later, more autobiographical writings.

Ryūnosuke Akutagawa (1892-1927) is one of Japan’s foremost stylists - a modernist master whose short stories are marked by highly original imagery, cynicism, beauty and wild humour. ‘Rashōmon’ and ‘In a Bamboo Grove’ inspired Kurosawa’s magnificent film and depict a past in which morality is turned upside down, while tales such as ‘The Nose’, ‘O-Gin’ and ‘Loyalty’ paint a rich and imaginative picture of a medieval Japan peopled by Shoguns and priests, vagrants and peasants. And in later works such as ‘Death Register’, ‘The Life of a Stupid Man’ and ‘Spinning Gears’, Akutagawa drew from his own life to devastating effect, revealing his intense melancholy and terror of madness in exquisitely moving impressionistic stories.

A WORLD IN DECAY
- Rashōmon (Sep 1915)
- In a Bamboo Grove (Dec 1921)
- The Nose (Jan 1916)
- Dragon: The Old Potter's Tale (May 1919)
- The Spider Thread (Apr 1918)
- Hell Screen (1918)
UNDER THE SWORD
- Dr. Ogata Ryōsai: Memorandum (Dec 7th 1916)
- O-Gin (Aug 1922)
- Loyalty (Feb 1917)
MODERN TRAGICOMEDY
- The Story of a Head That Fell Off (Dec 1917)
- Green Onions (Dec 1919)
- Horse Legs (Jan 1925)
AKUTAGAWA'S OWN STORY
- Daidōji Shinsuke: The Early Years (Dec 9th 1924)
- The Writer's Craft (Mar 1924)
- The Baby's Sickness (Jul 1923)
- Death Register (Sep 1926)
- The Life of a Stupid Man (Jun 1927 posthumous)
- Spinning Gears (Jun 1927 posthumous)

Cover illustration by Yoshihiro Tatsumi

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, Japan, Classics, Japanese Literature, Literature, Historical Fiction

268 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1927

About the author

Akutagawa Ryūnosuke (芥川 龍之介) was one of the first prewar Japanese writers to achieve a wide foreign readership, partly because of his technical virtuosity, partly because his work seemed to represent imaginative fiction as opposed to the mundane accounts of the I-novelists of the time, partly because of his brilliant joining of traditional material to a modern sensibility, and partly because of film director Kurosawa Akira's masterful adaptation of two of his short stories for the screen.

Akutagawa was born in the Kyōbashi district Tokyo as the eldest son of a dairy operator named Shinbara Toshizō and his wife Fuku. He was named "Ryūnosuke" ("Dragon Offshoot") because he was born in the Year of the Dragon, in the Month of the Dragon, on the Day of the Dragon, and at the Hour of the Dragon (8 a.m.). Seven months after Akutagawa's birth, his mother went insane and he was adopted by her older brother, taking the Akutagawa family name. Despite the shadow this experience cast over Akutagawa's life, he benefited from the traditional literary atmosphere of his uncle's home, located in what had been the "downtown" section of Edo.

At school Akutagawa was an outstanding student, excelling in the Chinese classics. He entered the First High School in 1910, striking up relationships with such classmates as Kikuchi Kan, Kume Masao, Yamamoto Yūzō, and Tsuchiya Bunmei. Immersing himself in Western literature, he increasingly came to look for meaning in art rather than in life. In 1913, he entered Tokyo Imperial University, majoring in English literature. The next year, Akutagawa and his former high school friends revived the journal Shinshichō (New Currents of Thought), publishing translations of William Butler Yeats and Anatole France along with original works of their own. Akutagawa published the story Rashōmon in the magazine Teikoku bungaku (Imperial Literature) in 1915. The story, which went largely unnoticed, grew out of the egoism Akutagawa confronted after experiencing disappointment in love. The same year, Akutagawa started going to the meetings held every Thursday at the house of Natsume Sōseki, and thereafter considered himself Sōseki's disciple.

The lapsed Shinshichō was revived yet again in 1916, and Sōseki lavished praise on Akutagawa's story Hana (The Nose) when it appeared in the first issue of that magazine. After graduating from Tokyo University, Akutagawa earned a reputation as a highly skilled stylist whose stories reinterpreted classical works and historical incidents from a distinctly modern standpoint. His overriding themes became the ugliness of human egoism and the value of art, themes that received expression in a number of brilliant, tightly organized short stories conventionally categorized as Edo-mono (stories set in the Edo period), ōchō-mono (stories set in the Heian period), Kirishitan-mono (stories dealing with premodern Christians in Japan), and kaika-mono (stories of the early Meiji period). The Edo-mono include Gesaku zanmai (A Life Devoted to Gesaku, 1917) and Kareno-shō (Gleanings from a Withered Field, 1918); the ōchō-mono are perhaps best represented by Jigoku hen (Hell Screen, 1918); the Kirishitan-mono include Hokōnin no shi (The Death of a Christian, 1918), and kaika-mono include Butōkai(The Ball, 1920).

Akutagawa married Tsukamoto Fumiko in 1918 and the following year left his post as English instructor at the naval academy in Yokosuka, becoming an employee of the Mainichi Shinbun. This period was a productive one, as has already been noted, and the success of stories like Mikan (Mandarin Oranges, 1919) and Aki (Autumn, 1920) prompted him to turn his attention increasingly to modern materials. This, along with the introspection occasioned by growing health and nervous problems, resulted in a series of autobiographically-based stories known as Yasukichi-mono, after the name of the main character. Works such as Daidōji Shinsuke no hansei(The Early Life of

Reviews

[Violet wells · Rating 5 out of 5]

If I had to describe this book in one sentence - little stories that magically contain big and excitingly complex ideas.

Writers aren't evaluated in the context of history as stringently as artists are. There are artists alive now who can paint with the technical bravura of the likes of Tintoretto or Titian but no one, understandably, is interested in their work. I suppose this conundrum was most famously demonstrated by the Dutch forger Van Meegeren who resented the fact that the art world showed no interest in his dated derivative work and so forged Vermeer paintings as if it's technical skill alone that distinguishes genius. Recently I read some of the books by William Trevor and you could say he too, like Van Meegeren was a forger. He appropriated the distinctive style of past masters - and yet, as if the past had never happened, he receives the acclaim no painter doing the same thing would get. What I'm getting at is that if you put Akutagawa in the context of history it's remarkable how innovative and pioneering these stories are, especially considering many were written before Calvino was even born (the writer Akutagawa most reminds me of some ways) and before Katherine Mansfield was being credited for evolving the possibilities of the short story. (How I wish she had read him!) Put him in the context of history and Akutagawa is a marvel. Not that he isn't a marvel whatever way you look at him.

Stand outs are his unreliable narrators in Rashomon where eye witnesses to a mysterious death all give conflicting accounts of what happened. Dragon: The Old Potter's Tale where a ridiculed monk with a big nose as revenge posts a notice declaring the dragon of the lake will ascend to heaven on the third day of the third month. Much to his amazement a massive crowd gathers on that day. Here, as DeLillo would be years later, Akutagawa is fascinated by the pull and power of the crowd. Red Onions where a young girl living from hand to mouth in a bedsit goes out on her first date and is suitably lit up by romantic expectation but discovers the highlight of the evening are the cheap red onions she stumbles upon (Akutagawa doesn't hold romantic aspiration in high esteem!) And finally the last autobiographical story where the narrator is plagued by a concatenation of disarming synchronicities which gives you an idea why Akutagawa was to kill himself soon after.

Brilliantly fresh and compelling from start to finish.

[Katia N · Rating 5 out of 5]

It is probably not very rare when an extremely gifted person emerges on this planet. But it is rare when this person manages to absorb the influences of many cultures and produce a very original innovative syntheses in his short life. The whole body of work that transcends the national boundaries and would influence a way of writing for decades and even centuries. I know only three names in the 20th century Kafka, Borges and now, Akutagawa. Notably he was the first. What unites all these three, they were born either into the culture without long established national literary tradition or in the time of dramatic changes of the society and literature. I would leave Kafka aside. But both Borges and Akutagawa were immersed in many different languages and cultures since their childhood. Borges has read even Don Quixote in English. Akutagawa was reading both Japanese and Chinese traditional literature as child but also hungrily absorbed almost 200 years of the Western literature by the age of 18.

My first encounter with Akutagawa was unsuccessful. While at university, I’ve picked up his collection of short stories and found them too stylised and boring. Now many years after, my view has changed almost to the opposite extreme. I can read him many times and never get bored. In fact, I absolutely admire the versatility of his gift. His variety of styles is exceptionally wide. And he was always experimenting with his method and searching for new techniques through his short life. He never was totally satisfied it seems. He changed the decorations and styles. But there is one thing which always present in his tales. It is authenticity of human feelings. It is also amazing how many writers he anticipated, including Kafka and Borges but even Knausgaard though it might sound incredible to start with.

I’ve read much bigger volume of his stories in Russian. Not that big part of his work has been translated into English. But I think this collection contains many of his best tales with a few notable exceptions. I would just pause on a few to underscore the versatility of his gift:

“Rashomon” and “In a Bamboo grove”. Those two are the most famous as they were the base of the movie by Kurosawa. But purely from the perspective of the literature, the second one stands out. Apparently it is the first time ever when a bunch of unreliable narrators are describing the same story from the different perspective, contradicting each other. And the single “truth” is never revealed. Robert Browning apparently did something similar in The Ring and the Book but Akutagawa raised it to the totally different level with the open ending. Now we are so much get used to this tool. But even from the perspective of our century, this is the one of the most elegant and economically told stories of this type.

“Hell Screen” - this is not a medieval tale. This is a philosophic investigation about the dominance of the high art over reality. Apparently Akutagawa visited an anatomy morgue to write this story.

“The story of head fell off” - it is included here in a comical section, but there is nothing comical about this story. And the image of a deep blue sky getting closer and closer would stay with me for a long time.

“Green onions” - this story I would not be surprised to find between early Chekhov tales. How our high expectations from life often end with the prose of the aforementioned vegetable.

“Horse legs” - purely from the land of Kafka.

There are a few of the notable omissions in this collection:

“The Yam Gruel” is translated into English. It is included into Rashomon and Other Stories. It is a tale about the feeling of a “little” person modelled on Gogol’s Overcoat. As far as I remember, Gogol’s character dies from the shock of loosing the overcoat. But Akutagawa has twisted the tale asking very different question: what if he would get what he dreams about? And there is no Akaki Akakievich. He has been replaced by a samurai.

“Handkerchief” - It is available in English as well. It is included into Mandarins: Stories by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa. The collection of the recently translated stories by Archipelago press. What a clever short story this is! On the surface it is about East-West and its mutual accommodation. But this is not a simple story. It is one of those tales like a matreshka doll. You’ve opened one not expecting to find another, but it is in there. And then - one more. And the smallest one does not look anything like the initial one and leaves you puzzled what was the story about really.

Now the section called “Akutagawa own story”. While reading the introduction in my Russian collection, I’ve learned a lot about the state of the Japanese literature at the time. Due to the Meji reformation and opening to the West, they tried to build up their modern literature by absorbing around 200 years of the Western Canon. Obviously they were loosing themselves in the process. Apparently they did not have a concept of a novel per se. So in 1885 Tsubouchi Shōyō (1859-1935) a literary critic, translator of Western literature, and novelist formulated the principle for the Japanese fiction in his work Shōsetsu Shinzui (The Essence of the Novel). He came to the conclusion that the descriptive realism should be the way to go. This has apparently helped to focus the minds of the Japanese writers.

Many of them has taken the idea even a step further following the theory that only object a person could know truthfully is her/himself. As a result they developed something called "I-novel" (私小説, Shishōsetsu, Watakushi Shōsetsu) where a writer would describe both his mental and physical life in its daily details with the varied level of psychological depth. So the fashionable 21th century auto-fiction was in fact born in Japan about a century earlier. I was amazed to find that out. But why i am talking about it? Akutagawa initially considered it more or less as lazy and limiting exercise. But then, at some stage, in his last decade he has started to experiment with the method. At the same time he kept experimenting with the style, used huge range of framing devices from the letters to the dialogues and the sketchs of unwritten novels (the device later successfully used by Borges who loved Akutagawa's work). He also kept his psychological complexity in these stories. And his very last tales before his suicide are read more like impressionistic pieces full of terrible beauty rather than the confessional tales.

One serious omission form this part of this collection is “Dialogue in darkness”, the story that is written as a conversation between Akutagawa and the angel or maybe he is the fallen angel who has become a devil. I’ve searched whether the story exists in English. But did not find anything conclusive. The story was published posthumously. And I wanted to finish with the quote from there:

D. You will very likely die soon.
Akutagawa: But that thing which has created me at the first place will create the second me.

And the “second him” is the powerful and omnipresent influence in the world literature since.

[Jr Bacdayan · Rating 4 out of 5]

“In fulfillment of his longstanding dream, he became the author of several books. But what he got in return was a desolate loneliness.”

This collection offers a piercing insight into the stunning yet troubled mind of Ryūnosuke Akutagawa. A writer brought to the world by a madwoman, he was a well-known insomniac, a drug addict, a guilt-plagued sinner, yet he produced such beautiful works while hounded by the looming shadows of his inevitable insanity.

This masterwork can be adequately divided into three parts: the first part (A World in Decay & Under the Sword) are vivid myth-like stories set during the Heian, Kamakura, and other pre-war eras of Japan. From the titular story of an encounter under the Rashōmon (a gate built as a monument in the southern entrance of Kyoto) to the story of a painter who perfectly depicted the fury of hell into a screen, the first few stories present such beautiful and breath-taking pictures of early Japan in all its splendor with its unique culture and oriental beliefs in full display.

The second part (Modern Tragicomedy) are surrealistic stories set during Akutagawa’s lifetime towards the dusk of the Meija era and the early smoldering of the Taisho. These haunting yet humorous stories reflect the slowly decaying psyche of Akutagawa as his fears and nerves start to take hold of his pen.

And the last part (Akutagawa’s Own Story) are his final manuscripts towards the end of his life when all he could muster to craft were words formed by his horrors and his painful loneliness. In one of its few bright spots he writes, “In my savage joy, I felt as if I had no parents, no wife, no children, just the life that flowed forth from my pen.” But these last few remnants of thought from this gifted storyteller evoke mostly the sorrowful darkness of a mind in despair whose only solace was literature. The different eras of Japan were his canvas, his brushstrokes his blood, wrung out unbearably, drop by drop, till he had none more to bleed.

“I don’t have the strength to keep writing this. To go on living with this feeling is painful beyond description. Isn’t there someone kind enough to strangle me in my sleep?”

What initially was a beautiful and elegant collection morphed into an outpouring of literary agony towards the end. In this regard it is like a Chimera, a two-fold beast, formed by the fictional beauty of Akutagawa’s tales and the painful terrors of his grotesque reality.

[Jan-Maat]

One night, I woke in the dark hours no longer able to sleep. After a while I accepted my semi-wakeful state and found my way to the sofa. There I settled under a blanket and flicked ideally through the TV channels, eventually I happened upon a film Ghost Dog, not apparently to be confused with Moondog although to my mind ghost dogs and moondogs must be much of a muchness, no? , anyway the film seemed to be pleasing pretentious and about right for being neither asleep nor awake but watching moving pictures on a screen. Two of the stories in this collection were made in to a film, but the powers of the night which decide our sleeping have so far not decreed that I must see that film in the early hours of a star lit morning so I haven't.

As it happened the film made mention of the story collection Rashomon which seemed to be of some importance to the title character and his philosophical stance and so when it came to pass that I was gripped, not by midnight wakefulness but by mid-afternoon book madness, I ordered it from the library and in time it came to me from Gravesend, so if you are in Gravesend it will be a couple of days before it is back with you - patience!

Akutagawa chronologically is approximately a contemporary of Katherine Mansfield, he also died young and was much concerned in his fiction with death and psychology, but unlike her at least based on the stories I've read, he has a broader range of story settings and is somewhat less interested in gender and romantic relationships. In this volume the stories range from the title story set in medieval Japan to the recent past to his own days in inter-war Japan. Both Mansfield and Akutagawa were fellow travellers in their modernism, attempting to capture the fleeting contact of human awareness of the moment and the fractured, unreliable perception of an individual.

Really these are stories one could read repeatedly and I recommend them warmly, despite the grimness of the autobiographical ones which twist around fears of madness and thoughts of suicide which ultimately led to the end of the author's own life.

Yes, Modernism, madness and death - everybody's favourites, I am plainly really going out of my way to encourage you to try these. So what can I say that is a bit more tempting? Dare I mention the wide range of styles, the sometimes uneasy mixture of the Japanese and the European? Akutagawa was a big fan of Dostoevsky and the fin de Siecle writers, indeed one story here may be a Japanesed version of Grushenka's Story of an Onion from The Brothers Karamazov, then again it could be, I suppose, a Buddhist folktale. There's also a lot of humour, in different registers, in one story a man in Manchuria suddenly finds he has horse's legs and we find that eventually nature is stronger than nurture, in another a waitress struggling to get by on romantic dreams and a low wage, might be about to be seduced by a man when she spots spring onions on sale at a bargain price.

So great variety and a glimpse into the troubled soul of another person, quite a lot in just over two hundred pages of extremely short short-stories. And there's more... an introduction by Haruki Murikami assesses Akutagawa in the context of a Japanese writer attempting to find his own voice while drawing upon both Japanese and European literary heritages; 'I love Dostoevsky and Strindberg and Flaubert and I am a discipline of Natsume Soseki'. Murikami holds that Akutagawa's literary dead end in trying to marry the traditions in himself led to his physically premature dead-end, in which case the introduction is a kind of meta-fiction and we can read all eighteen stories in the collection as nestled within it the multiple attempts of a prisoner to escape their unique cell. He tries historical settings, Chinese settings, contemporary settings, he draws on his life experience, his personal history as a adopted child is reflected in his divided literary heritage, so we are treated to a fireworks display of creativity, it has to stop of course, as all fireworks' displays must, but it is spectacular while it lasts.

The perfect example of Murikami's point is the story On a Bamboo Grove which places the reader in the position of an examining magistrate of early medieval Japan - we read a collection of testimonies relating to the discovery of a dead body in said bamboo grove. Are any of them true? Even taking the testimonies together and mentally reconstructing events is that the truth of what happens? Is there an objective truth beyond that a man who was once alive is now dead? For practical reasons in daily life in order to have a functioning legal system we pretend that this is so, but as a writer appealing to readers Akutagawa makes a different point, the same one maybe as he makes throughout all these stories even or particularly in the fictionalised ones based on his own life.

[Nandakishore Mridula · Rating 4 out of 5]

For a person drunk on the film society culture prevalent in Kerala during the Seventies and Eighties, "Rashomon" is a magic word.

Akira Kurasowa’s film enjoys cult status among movie buffs. It is rivetting in its presentation of “truth” in many layers, presented as a conversation among three people: a woodcutter, a priest and a commoner who take shelter under the ramshackle Rashomon city gates to escape a downpour. The story is the death (murder?) of a man, the rape (?) of a woman and the capture of a bandit responsible (?) for both: as the story unfolds, the differences in the widely varying testimonies of the people involved force us to have a rethink on what “truth” means.

I had heard about this movie a lot before actually seeing it; and it lived up to its hype and more when I finally got around to seeing it. But this review is not about the movie. It is about the magical short story which was its inspiration – and other stories like it, penned by one of the great figures of Japanese literatures, the turn-of-the-century novelist Ryunosuke Akutagawa.

When I first saw the movie, I was so taken up by the sheer visual beauty of Kurasowa’s storytelling that I did not ruminate much on what this movie was based on, even though I saw the “based on…” title in the beginning. It was only after joining Goodreads that I came to know about this book, and was immediately hungry for it. Having read it, it has left me hungry for more by the same author, and Japanese literature in general. It is so shattering in its impact on the intellect, even in translation; I cannot imagine how powerful it must be in the original Japanaese – for, as Haruki Murakami says in the introduction, the translation can never capture the power of the original.

Akutagawa is a tragic figure. His mother went mad shortly after his birth, and he was raised by his childless maternal uncle and aunt. Even though they were a highly cultured family and young Ryunosuke was lucky to have a childhood exposed to a lot of intellectual pleasures, he was constantly plagued by ill-health and bullying in school. His ill-health continued into youth: he suffered from chronic insomnia and fears of madness. The misfortunes of family and country also distressed his oversensitive soul to an inordinate extent. Until finally, on 24 July 1927, Ryunosuke Akutagawa committed suicide by an overdose of Veronal.

The author’s gifted and tortured soul is visible throughout this amazing collection of stories. It is divided into four sections: (1) A World in Decay, (2) Under the Sword, (3) Modern Tragicomedy and (4) Akutagawa’s Own Story. These sections correspond to four periods of Japanese history as well as four creative styles which took birth from Akutagawa’s fertile imagination.

In the first section, stories (most of them retelling of old legends) set in the Heian Period (A.C.E. 794 – 1185) are included. This was Japan’s classical era; a time of peace, prosperity and opulence when art and culture flourished. But as is common with most ancient kingdoms, it declined and power slipped from the hands of the aristocrats into the hands of the warlords. It is this twilight period that Akutagawa uses as a backdrop for his stories of degeneration and decay. The title story of the collection, Rashomon, encapsulates the entire misery of the country in the symbol of the gate of the capital city of Kyoto. The city having been struck by one calamity after another, the author says:

With the whole city in such turmoil, no one bothered to maintain the Rashomon. Foxes and badgers came to live in the dilapidated structure, and they were soon joined by thieves. Finally, it became the custom to abandon unclaimed corpses in the upper storey of the gate, which made the neighbourhood an eerie place that everyone avoided after the sun went down.


The stage is thus perfectly set for a set of disturbing stories. Rashomon narrates the story of a jobless servant who is sheltering from the rain inside the gate and an old woman, who steals hair from the corpses lying there to sell to wig-makers, justifying it by pointing out that the dead people were also thieves and cheaters. Ultimately, she inspires the servant to become a thief himself who starts off on his new career by stealing her clothes!

In a Bamboo Grove, one of the most extraordinary stories ever written (this was the inspiration for Kurasowa’s film, even though he used the Rashomon gate as a symbol of the decay he was portraying) narrates story of a dead warrior, a thief and a raped woman from the viewpoint of each of the protagonists. Each of the stories is different and equally believable from the evidence available at the scene of the crime and the statements of the witnesses. Who we believe will depend a lot on who we are.

But the story which impressed me most in the whole volume is Hell Screen. This gem of a novelette gives us a taste of horror, Japanese style – I could understand how movies like Dark Water, The Ring and The Grudge came into being. The tale of the deformed artist Yoshihide (nicknamed “Monkeyhide” because of his deformity), the tapestry of hell he paints for the Lord Horikawa, the artist’s daughter who is a serving girl at the Lord’s mansion and the pet monkey has all the elements of a medieval ghost story and a gothic romance. However, it is Akutagawa’s narrative style (whereby he leaves a lot unsaid) and his choice of the narrative voice (that of an unnamed member of the Lord’s retinue) that are masterful. The story is a one way ride into darkness.

In the second section, we move forward to the Tokugawa Shogunate (A.C.E. 1600 – 1868). This was the last feudal military government of Japan. During this period, the shogun elders of the Tokugawa clan ruled from Edo Castle. As Jay Rubin, the translator, says, the Tokugawa centralised feudalism “imposed the principle of joint responsibility on all parts of society, punishing whole families, entire villages, or professional guilds for the infractions of individual members. This fostered a culture based on mutual spying, which promoted a mentality of constant vigilance and self-censorship.”

In the story Loyalty, the disastrous effects of the madness of a samurai on an entire dynasty is described: in this merciless world, it does not mean just the destruction of a person, but of a whole bloodline. The other two stories included describe the clash between Christianity and Japan’s traditional religions. These distressing tales are rendered with much empathy and wit.

In the third section we find a sarcastic Akutagawa, full of black humour. The Story of the Head that Fell Off and Horse Legs use the trappings of fantasy to create a sort of darkly comic tale. In Green Onions, we can see an author smiling at himself and his fellow-scribes, in a pastiche of a romantic tale.

There is a whole tradition of autobiographical writing in Japan, called “I-Novels”, where the author’s life itself is fictionalised. Even though Akutagawa initially stayed away from this genre, he finally succumbed to peer and critic pressure and started writing such stories. It is here that one can see a fine mind finally unravelling. There are hints of this in the first three stories, especially in The Writer’s Craft where an author is forced write an elegy for somebody whom he barely knows; just on the strength of his writing talent. This sense of unease is increased in Death Register where he tabulates the demise of friends and relatives: and in The Diary of a Stupid Man and Spinning Gears (where Akutagawa keeps on hallucinating spinning gears on one side of his vision), we sense that we are standing on the edge of a minefield. (Spinning Gears was published posthumously.)

This is a well-chosen set of stories, with a fantastic introduction by Haruki Murakami. There are explanations about the historical periods, and background information on each story. The timeline of Akutagawa’s life is also provided. The book satisfies one, not only literally, but also as a window to Japanese literature.

Highly recommended.

Review also posted on my BLOG .

[Taka · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good, but...

Yes. I did it. I've committed one of the ultimate literary sacrileges of all time. I read Akutagawa Ryunosuke in translation when I could have read it in original Japanese. I am guilty as charged. I just couldn't resist a book with such a cool cover and Murakami's introduction plus his trusted Jay Rubin doing the translation.

Having said that, I did read it along with the actual Japanese text in front of me to see how well Jay Rubin has grappled with difficult early 19th-century Japanese and rendered it into English. And the result was somewhat disappointing. I think he does a good job translating Murakami's works, but here with Akutagawa, he pretty much butchers most of his early stories that take place in medieval Japan (which stories, by the way, are usually extolled as his masterpieces). The original Japanese is, of course, in medieval Japanese, and it is quite different from modern Japanese (but not as different as modern English to Chaucer's middle English). But Mr. Rubin sometimes translates conversations into highly colloquial English, and that just doesn't work with Akutagawa's early stories.

The Japanese language - still today and even more so back in the day - is a very polite language, which logically makes it a very vague language as well, where curse words don't really exist and you say things in a very roundabout way. And to render this into modern colloquial English is like equivalent to rendering Shakespeare into today's slang with an abundance of "F" and "N" and other such words. Now from a reader's point of view, Mr. Rubin's translation is very readable. Very. It could have, however, been a lot more conservative on the use of colloquialism and slang without compromising its readability.

For example, in one of the scenes, a lord tells his trusted servant to kill someone, and the original reads more or less, "Kill that man, that Rin'emon," which Mr. Rubin translates as "Kill that bastard!" Alright. This does show the degree to which this guy is mad (in fact crazy), but I'm sorry, that just doesn't work. The word "bastard" is just way too much of a bad word for someone like a lord himself could utter (and I don't think there was an equivalent in medieval Japanese). I do recognize the difficulty since the Japanese here is very very subtle. The meaning is close to "bastard," but a LOT less blatant than what the English word conveys. In many many instances Mr. Rubin resorts to colloquial English that sounds too jarring to a Japanese ear when compared to the subtle nuances and beauty of the original Japanese. But that's just me, who is fortunate enough to be able to read both Japanese and English with more or less equal fluency. So as far as the translation is concerned, hats off to Mr. Rubin for making Akutagawa's stories easily available for the English-speaking public, but as an artistic work, it could have done much better by avoiding too much colloquialism and using more formal (and even a bit archaic) English to better convey the original voice of the text.

W/r/t the stories, they are really good. I'd even say he's Japan's Chekhov. In fact, you could see an exotic blend of Kafka, Gogol, Chekhov, and even Dostoevsky at work behind these stories. My personal favorites are his famous "Hell Screen" (intense and just awesome), "In the Bamboo Grove" (Kurosawa's Rashomon is based on this), and "Horse legs" (which is very Kafkaesque and just funny). "Loyalty" is also excellent in terms of it psychological insights. Though I wasn't a big fan of his later, autobiographical stories, they were strangely engaging. It's just too bad that one of his most famous stories, "Kappa," is not included in this collection. Overall, it's a good short anthology of Akutagawa's stories.

[Steven Godin · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was Compelled to read this after loving Akira Kurosawa's classic film. Most of the stories are superb, with Akutagawa's prose full of such fluidity. He really catches you out with some beautiful quirks of description, sharp bouts of humour, and many revelations in a short space of time that it's no wonder he is considered one of Japan's greatest short-story writers.

[Teresa · Rating 5 out of 5]

The title story is about a gate, an image of entry, a presaging for other stories with similar topics of poverty and despair; characters trying to survive at any cost; setting the scene of a changing world. Or at least that’s true for the first section, especially with its (gloomy) section title, 'A World in Decay.'

“In a Bamboo Grove” is a remarkable story affording the reader shifting sympathies toward the characters. Who's telling the truth? (Who knows?) You might think a ghost would be truthful, but I'm not so sure about that. They’re probably all to blame for something, especially as the story is mixed up with old notions about honor and shame when it comes to women and sex.

The evocative and icky “Hell Screen” has to be one of the darkest stories I've ever read. (I would've said the darkest, but I've read William Gay's “The Paperhanger.”) I didn't realize I'd read it before until I got to the first description of the screen and then it returned to me, though I'd forgotten the final paragraph.

Akutagawa is an excellent writer, and he accomplished it all by the age of thirty-five. His forms are often innovative, including an autobiographical story told in 'fragments,' with unusual and effective imagery. This penultimate story and the final one are “posthumous manuscripts.” I especially enjoyed, perhaps obviously, how the Akutagawa-persona of these stories felt about and was influenced by writers both Eastern and Western. I saw a Dostoyevskian influence in one of the pieces that’s explicitly stated in the last. Akutagawa’s best 'living' seems to be done inside books. Otherwise he’s a tortured soul in this I-section, haunted by numerous "signs" that point toward death, likely indicative of some kind of paranoia. He spends a significant amount of time worrying he will go "mad" like his mother. Perhaps that was self-fulfilling, but I wonder more if it's because he knew something felt 'wrong.'

The book’s extraneous materials are impressive, especially Jay Rubin’s translator note and endnotes. Haruki Murakami’s introduction comes across as a bit self-serving, in a self-deprecating way (I may be reading too much into it), but it gives a Western reader some understanding of Akutagawa’s place in the Japanese literary canon. I didn’t read the introduction first, but it’s one that safely could be.

[Mizuki · Rating 5 out of 5]

Pre-review: to tell the truth, the reason why I finally got my lazy butt up to seriously read contemporary Japanese literature (aside from the usual reads of Haruki Murakami, Yukio Mishima, Rampo Edogawa and all the other Japanese crime and mystery good stuff etc) is this: the Bungo Stray Dogs manga seriess LOL

Early this mornin', when you knocked upon my door
Early this mornin', ooh, when you knocked upon my door
And I said, "Hello, Satan, I believe it's time to go"

Me and the devil, was walkin' side by side
Me and the devil, ooh, was walkin' side by side

-Me and the Devil Blues-

Robert Johnson

Rating: 4.6 stars

(1) So far I am still in the Introduction part, but an introduction written by Haruki Murakami is definitely worth reading, for example, the part he commented as a novelist that Akutagawa's use of language is 'sharp and beautiful', the way he analysed the novelist's works, his personal history and faimly history and the historical background! And it doesn't surprise me that he compares Akutagawa with Fitzgerald! (the short essay Murakami had written about Fitzgerald is beautiful as well).

(2) The Nose is an interesting case study of human emotions of shame, pity, self-image and malice.

(3) the fact that Rashomon is among Akutagawa's first short stories is quite impressive, and in Chinese, we still use the term 'Rashomon effect' a lot. LOL

(4) When I was re-reading The Spider Spread and Hell Screen , I feel a sense of despair: Heaven is too far away but Hell and its darkness is hot on everyone's heels.

(5) But somehow I think the movie adaptation of 'Rashomon' (actually the movie is the mixture of the short stories 'Rashomon' and 'In a Bamboo Grove' ) is a bit more impressive than its novel counterpart.

(6) In the later part of the book, the stories change from historical fables into modern moral tales. The author mentioned his personal slice-of-life stories and his rather complicated family history: Ryūnosuke Akutagawa's father was married to a woman and then also to her younger sister afterward, and Akutagawa was adopted by his mother's older brother as a baby after his mother went mad. I quite like the part when the author mentioned his mentally ill mother and his estranged birth father, and the other deaths in the family.

(7) Plus the book cover is just awesome!!!

(8) Reminder: Akutagawa's best stories are usually about, well, Hell.

(9) In some short stories, the author talked about Christianity and how Christians had been prosecuted in the past, the questions about belief and blind faith has been asked, that is interesting!

(10) I have to read plenty of footnotes to know more about the stories and their historical/cultural context. LOL

(11) Interesting to see how the author wrote about city-young women of his time!

(12) My goodness......with stories such as The Life of a Stupid Man and Spinning Gears , just how can someone keep writing about the growing threat of madness and depression and the general unhappiness of life itself and I still want to read it no matter what!?

(13) By the way, the book cover is soooooooo lovely!!!

(14) I like it a lot when the writing shows a certain level of insight into the Japanese society of Akutagawa's time, how the people of that time were like (at least the educated class) and the other novelists and artists, how these people tried to adjust to the rapidly changing society, the conflicts between tradition and modernization, ideals and the harsh reality, etc.

[E. G. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Note on Japanese Name Order and Pronunciation
Acknowledgments
Chronology & Notes
Introduction: Akutagawa Ryūnosuke: Downfall of the Chosen, by Murakami Haruki
Further Reading
Translator's Note

A World in Decay

--Rashōmon
--In a Bamboo Grove
--The Nose
--Dragon: The Old Potter's Tale
--The Spider Thread
--Hell Screen

Under the Sword

--Dr. Ogata Ryōsai: Memorandum
--O-Gin
--Loyalty

Modern Tragicomedy

--The Story of a Head That Fell Off
--Green Onions
--Horse Legs

Akutagawa's Own Story

--Daidōji Shinsuke: The Early Years
--The Writer's Craft
--The Baby's Sickness
--Death Register
--The Life of a Stupid Man
--Spinning Gears

Notes

[Kimley · Rating 4 out of 5]

Obviously the difficulty of rating collections of stories is the fact that they don't necessarily all rate equally. About a third of these stories are easily knock-out 5-star fantastic. The other two-thirds I'd rate mostly 4 stars with a few 3 stars. All worth reading and in general I think this is probably a good intro to Akutagawa's work in that it contains a nice cross-section of his work from the earliest historical stories to his later primarily autobiographical stories.

I personally preferred the earlier stories which ranged from tales of Samurai warriors and Shoguns and stories of religious persecution when Christianity was making inroads in Japan to satyrical stories about unfortunates with big noses.* While the settings are completely foreign to me, the characters are people I know all too well. My favorite story being "Hell Screen" in which an egotistical painter is commissioned to paint a screen depicting the horrors of hell. In order to sketch the scenes, he puts his assistants through a myriad of tortures and all I'll add in an effort to not give too much away is that karma is a bitch! These early stories have an almost Victorian gothic creepiness to them but it's a bit more subtle and far more insidious in that it seems infinitely more real. And Akutagawa has a nice dollop of humor running throughout these early stories as well.

The later autobiographical stories in which he writes of his mother who went mad, of his infidelities and his fear of going mad himself and his increasing depression that led to his eventual suicide are painful to read in how human and easy to relate to they are. But having read Dazai's similarly themed autobiographical stories not too long ago, Akutagawa didn't have quite the gut punch that Dazai had for me. Akutagawa's story "The Spinning Gears" was the best of the autobiographical bunch for me. Throughout, he continues to have visions of gears that nearly block out his vision. Those of us who have the luxury to think about life beyond just worrying about food and shelter can probably all relate to this nightmare of the cogs of life just taking over. The horror element of his earlier stories definitely comes into play here.

There's a slightly strange intro to this collection by Haruki Murakami which is far more critical of Akutagawa's work than I might have expected though it did seem like a relatively fair critique. I'm glad I read it after reading the stories though.

-----------------------
*When I studied Chinese, my teachers were all native Chinese, mostly on exchange and when we learned the word for "nose" we also learned that Americans are frequently called "big nose" so I had a good chuckle seeing that the Japanese are equally amused by big noses.

[nastya · Rating 4 out of 5]

I always think I don't enjoy short story collections. There're sometimes one or two short stories that I find interesting but others often merge into the formless forgettable mass (unless it's Alice Munro and then there are none). Then I encounter a collection like this and start doubting my preconceived ideas about my relationship with the form.

This was a fascinating collection. Starting with Akutagawa's take on the old stories and ending with closely autobiographical confessions of the paranoid depressed macabre mind.

Akutagawa is very well-versed in the western literature, he's particularly attracted to the psychological novels of the 19th century. I can see Poe's eerie influence in "Hell screen" story (one of my favorite retellings of the old tales), I also see Gogol in "Horse legs". And then there's the heartbreaking cycle of autobiographical stories of unravelling mind. He is lonely, perturbed, obsessed with death, self-doubting and struggling with inferiority complex regarding his skills, continually calling himself an idiot. This is an anxious, ill mind you're uncomfortable to spend time in, not gonna lie. (the last two stories are published posthumously after he killed himself, the second story was left unfinished, his brain just gave up on concentration needed to finish a story)

All in all, a very interesting collection I recommend to everybody: first stories to lovers of myths and fables; and the last stories to lovers of psychological.

[Sasha · Rating 5 out of 5]

What I love about Rashomon is that it signifies pretentious snobbery so perfectly. Like, if you want to impress someone at a cocktail party, "I didn't understand truth until I saw Rashomon," you might say. Did I say impress? I meant impress upon them that you would be super boring to go on a date with. You can win any argument by nominating Rashomon because no real people have actually seen it.

Anyway, I haven't seen it.



I read the book though! Here it is! No, not the one called Rashomon. That's actually about something totally different. Rashomon the movie was mostly based on a different story by this same guy, called "In a Bamboo Grove." I know this from reading the introduction. Would you like to go on a date with me and I'll tell you about a pretentious movie I haven't even seen.

What book do you think is the Rashomon of books? Like, how could you instantly signify that you're pretentious? Is it Proust?

Things You Can Signify With Books
On The Road: I will not be good in bed.
Jane Austen: I haven't read a classic since high school.
Ulysses: oh, this is probably the pretentious one.

What's your idea? Tell me - YOU RIGHT THERE, I demand that you tell me a book and what it signifies when a person claims to be a big fan of it.

Whatever, here's the thing, those are both wonderful stories but who cares when you've got something called HELL SCREEN coming your way.

HELL SCREEN



*heavy metal music*

Hell Screen is so fucking great, it's this Poe / Wilde / Faust thing where an artist can only paint from life and then he's asked to paint hell and you can pretty much see where this is going. There's a monkey.

Akutagawa is one of Japan's most famous writers. He wrote mostly short stories like these here. He committed suicide in 1927 when he was 35, overdosing on sleeping meds across the room from his wife and kids. All of the stories I read in this collection were perfect. Look, it's not that HELL SCREEN is the best name for anything ever and any story not called HELL SCREEN is stupid, but...it's not not that, either.

[Praj · Rating 4 out of 5]

Akutagawa known as the “Father of Japanese short stories” stays true to his designation with this collection of metaphysically refined stories. The rendered stories: - The Grove, Yam Gruel, Rashomon, Martyr to name a few; highlights Akutagawa’s preference for macabre themes of immortality, depression, virtue, chaos and death. These stories encompass a constant battle of skepticism prevailing over virtue of morality v/s existence of evil.

In Rashomon, the act of the ghoulish old woman picking out long hairs from the skulls of the corpses to make wigs and sell them to buy scraps of food delineate a desperate act to fulfill the demonic perils of life. Similarly, 'Martyr' highlights the thriving soul of hypocrisy in religion and the susceptibility to strong gossip.

Akutagawa’s affinity for such themes brings out his real tumultuous relation with mental anxiety and clinical neurotic dwelling of his personal life. (He committed suicide at the age of 35 due to an overdose of Vernol). Furthermore, his description of kimonos/garbs adorning his protagonists illustrates a high usage of the color blue which in Japanese culture is the color of naivety,immaturity and youth.

[Noel · Rating 5 out of 5]

“The cable was still sending sharp sparks into the air. He could think of nothing in life that he especially desired, but those purple sparks—those wildly-blooming flowers of fire—he would trade his life for the chance to hold them in his hands.”

Another review compares Akutagawa’s writing to “shoots of flame visible through the snow” (quoting a Mishima story), which is very apt. Akutagawa’s prose spits and sizzles, and burns with an incandescent glow—well suited to his macabre sense of humor. Less so in the later stories in this collection, what with his fear of madness, his thoughts of suicide (which he eventually committed), and his terrible misgivings about a life of literature.

[Zanna · Rating 4 out of 5]

First read in 2007

In his characteristically measured, conversational introduction to this book, Murakami Haruki tells us that Akutagawa is his third favourite author in the modern (post 1868) Japanese canon (after Soseki and Tanizaki). Rather than giddily enthusing about the author, Murakami carefully contextualises him in Japanese literature and culture. Akutagawa lived during a brief period of prosperity and political liberalism between WWI and the Depression in 1929, and combined appreciative immersion in Japanese cultural life with passion for Western literature. He called Soseki 'The Master', and worked as an editor as well as writing; the autobiographical stories in this collection demonstrate the literariness of his short life.

As well as drawing on his own daily experience and mental anguish for source material (a form related to the 'I-novel' style of some of his contemporaries in Japanese literature), Akutagawa wrote stories set in the Edo period when Japan was governed by military overlords. Many of these have interesting historical content. He also wrote stories of his own time, with an amusing self-awareness. The writer is always a presence, even if only in the pleasurable excess of musical names.

His style is clear, lyrical and pierced here and there by vivid images, like the purple sparks made by the tram on the overhead wires that the narrator wants to hold in his hands. Murakami says 'the flow of his language... moves along like a living thing', and this translation by Jay Rubin certainly preserves this natural, dynamic, unforced quality.

One technique that I particularly liked and that is original or at least unusual is the one he employs in 'Hell Screen' as well as other pieces, that of using a disapproving narrator to tell the hero's story. This device not only actively engages the reader's sympathy with the protagonists, but also creates a deep and nuanced impression of social exclusion and isolation.

[BrokenTune · Rating 2 out of 5]

DNF @ 39%

These stories are not bad but I just can't muster any real enthusiasm for them.

It is not helped by the stories being unconneced and by themselves not being great examples of the short story format.

Of course, they were not written as short stories in the Western literary sense. It's just that the way they are written is boring me stiff.

Maybe I'll pick this up again at a later date, but right now, this is not working for me.

[L.S. Popovich · Rating 5 out of 5]

Akutagawa is one of my favorite writers. He took his own life with barbiturates at age 35 and left behind some 300 stories, sketches, articles and literary experiments. In English he has appeared in over a dozen collections of the same 20-30 most famous stories retranslated a dozen times. This latest collection, translated by the consummate Jay Rubin, has a lovingly detailed introduction by the inimitable Haruki Murakami. It is a mere sampling of 18 stories from his impossibly good body of work. Unlike Toson, Soseki and Tanizaki, Akutagawa did not embark on massive literary projects. Instead, he honed his craft with precision and an appreciation for classic storytelling. I have read some of his stories ten times, and they always elicit a strong response from me.

In a lot of ways, he resembles Gogol, and even composed an homage with his story "The Nose." Though different in content, the tone is reminiscent of the Russian master. This is one of the masterpieces contained in this treasury. The others include: "Rashomon, In a Bamboo Grove, Hell Screen, Spinning Gears, Death Register, and the Life of a Stupid Man." Even the ones that are not masterworks per se, are extremely entertaining. "Green Onions, The Story of the Head that Fell Off, Horse Legs, and Loyalty" fall into this category. If you are new to this author, you may not enjoy all of his tales, but I believe you will appreciate many aspects of his singular talent.

He writes a few different types of stories: 1). retellings of classic tales from Chinese and other sources. These read a little like fables. 2.) Autobiographical tales: these are often depressing, taking details of his haunted life and casting them bleakly against the backdrop of his times. 3). Religious tales like "Christ of Nanking" (not included in the collection) and others. Historical tales, taking place well before the author's time but possessing uncanny verisimilitude.

In his stories you will find traces of his influences: Anatole France, Strindberg, Merimee, Goethe, Nagoya Shiga, Soseki, Toson, Tanizaki, Basho, Doppo, Ogai, Pu Songling and dozens of other European and Chinese authors. He has rewritten stories from Pu Songling's collections as well as retold many from the seminal Japanese proto-mythologies.

Akutagawa draws from Buddhism, Shintoism, Christianity and Myth. I think he is one of the most interesting writers I have ever encountered because he processes other literary worlds into new forms. Even when he waxes esoteric, he is charming and insightful. He explores human nature with deep characters and memorable comedy and tragedy.

This brilliant edition includes thorough notes by Rubin explaining the finer points of the stories. There is enough material in this singular Penguin edition to write a dissertation on Akutagawa. Jay Rubin has put in an astounding effort toward accuracy and illumination. I only wish he would continue with further volumes of stories.

If you appreciate the stories of Chekhov, Gogol, Maupassant, and Dostoyevsky, you will find a lot to love about this author. Typically, you can expect tortured artists, explorations of morality and death, futility and hope, love and loss. Very classic themes. "Green Onions" and "O-gin" were odd but welcome selections for this book. Overall, it is the most well-rounded collection of the author's writings in English.

I have so far discovered 107 Akutagawa tales in English. I've read every anthology of Japanese literature, every collection of his tales and tracked down out of print Japanese-American periodicals through JSTOR. I want to thank Ryan C. K. Choi and N. A. Feathers for publishing new translations of his work on their websites. This incredible author has not gotten a full treatment in English and I implore translators to get to work on making his complete works available. So far we have only about 900 pages of stories, when obscure, ancient masters like Pu Songling have been translated more comprehensively. Along with this collection you will want to read two more collections: Mandarins, translated by Charles de Wolf, and The Beautiful and Grotesque, which includes "Kappa," his novella.

Though Akutagawa's accomplishment is profoundly important (far more so, I would argue, than Murakami claims in his indicting introduction), one wonders what heights Akutagawa might have reached had he endured the agonies of his intellectual rigors for decades longer. Was he capable of writing novels? Were the demons he wrote about in "Spinning Gears" exaggerated or as sincerely recorded as in Strindberg's Inferno? These questions will never be answered. But part of his appeal is how digestible and varied his work is.

This is undoubtedly one of the greatest short story collections by any Japanese or non-Western author.

[mahtiel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Throughout my life I've been experiencing the strangest tendency when reading a really great literary work: after finishing a particularly brilliant passage/story/poem, I just have to put the book down for while, to stop reading it altogether as if I was afraid that this was the peak and nothing better will follow. Sometimes this takes days of sweet pondering upon the writer's craft. I like savouring these moments, they occur rarely, bringing me much pleasure and gently nudging me into thinking about beauty. Many Akutagawa's short stories gave me this feeling, especially those that were about medieval Japan and the samurai (especially In a Bamboo Grove, Hell Screen or Loyalty). I find it extremely hard to comment on such brilliantly crafted small literary worlds. It's always difficult to describe perfection, you just have to experience it and then you know: this is it. I feel the compliments are also in order for Jay Rubin, the translator, who rendered these stories so beautifully into English.

On the other hand, this book seemed utterly depressing to me. Akutagawa is preoccupied with death and suicide in quite an unhealthy manner, which is surely due to his mental illness. Naturally, this issue is a fact of life, not a bad thing in itself, but the way this volume is compiled and filled with incredibly elaborate commentary on the autobiographical element of his writing, one sort of feels like sinking into that utter darkness with the author (the most dismal posthumously published stories are ordered in the end of this compilation). Thus, Akutagawa would be one of those artists that I put into a special category of mine - the writers that I consider truly gifted (if not even genius), but for various reasons I can't relate to them personally. His own works were unlikely to appeal to people who were not like him and had not lived a life like this ...as Akutagawa wrote himself. He tells us later that he is the one that believes in the existence of darkness only, not in the light. It leaves me just wondering how much of this is the result his depression or unhappy personal circumstances and how much the influence of fin-de-siècle literature he was devouring, an influence on his life that is duly acknowledged.

So, there he is - a master of words, a strange man... I guess this is the black and the white of this reading experience. A damn intense reading experience.

[Sam Quixote · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Rashomon" tells the story of a "lowly servant" sheltering from the rain on the steps of a rashomon (outer castle gate). He has recently been laid off and sits pondering his future. He hears a sound and ventures inside the rashomon to see what it was. Inside are heaps of dead bodies from the recent plague and a strange old woman wandering about, going through the corpses' clothes. The servant attacks the old woman, strips her of her clothing, throws her onto the heap, and runs off.

"In a Bamboo Grove" features a married couple and a robber. The story is told from the perspective of all witnesses and it emerges that the husband was murdered but who did it and why is the mystery.

These are the two most famous Akutagawa stories and are an excellent start to the collection. However, afterwards they become quite mediocre and even a bit tedious. The forced gothic of "Hell Screen" plods along until a near hysterical ending that undermines the seriousness of the story, that of obssession and the artistic mind. "The Nose" is a very odd story about a priest with a very big nose, has it shortened, and it grows back again. It's one of those "be grateful for what you have, accept who you are" type tales and not nearly as brilliant as Gogol's "The Nose" (Gogol being one of Akutagawa's influences and, frankly, a better short story writer).

As the title suggests there are 18 stories here but those are the only ones I can remember. The last couple in the section called "Akutagawa's Own Story" are interesting, with "Life of a Stupid Man" playing with form and presenting an interesting take on autobiography through small snippets of a life glimpsed in passing. "Spinning Gears" is the final story he wrote before his suicide (pills) and is about the slowly disintegrating mind of Akutagawa. The desperation and mounting paranoia give the reader an insight into Akutagawa's fragile and fractured mindset. The strange imagery is also fascinating. The spinning gears he sees around his eyes confuse and scare him while at every turn he sees signs of death - a decaying animal corpse, dying people in hospitals, and above all his morbid fear of going insane like his mother.

I won't say I didn't enjoy the book as there were some stories here that were excellent, and whether it's Jay Rubin's translation or not, the writing was always of a high standard. And students of literature will find reading "Rashomon" and "In a Bamboo Grove" very rewarding as will film students who are interested in the work of Kurasawa who based his film "Rashomon" on those stories. But compared to other short story writers and other Japanese writers, Akutagawa isn't nearly on their level.

[library ghost (farheen) · Rating 5 out of 5]

genius doesn't even begin to cover akutagawa actually. he's simply on another level from every short story writer i have ever read. would be surprising to find someone who can even compete with him (though i have high hopes from chekhov)

[Bella Azam · Rating 4 out of 5]

Delving into Japanese classics had always been a goal of mine since I started reading more frequently. Akutagawa Ryunosuke was the first Japanese author I've read of with his work Life of a Stupid Man, an incredible piece of literature in my opinion. So here I am delving into his more of his works.

Instead of talking about this book in general, I will make a weekly discussion to dissect each short stories in depth on my Instagram @agathachristiebells. I will try not to be spoilery but if you have read it or maybe wanted to know more, there are amazing reviews and analysis online that talked about the stories in more details.

CW: suicide
Akutagwa Ryunosuke was known as Japanese Father of Short Stories. His sharp literary style and usage of language were never stagnant: "it moves along like a living thing". He published Rashomon in 1916 at the age of 23-years-old and was praised by the legendary writer Natsume Soseki. Akutagawa brilliantly crafted a story from classical works into a contemporary modernist literature that transcend generation. Unfortunately, he commited suicide at the age of 35, in which he wrote actively for only twelve years in his career.

1.Rashomon (1915)
Rashōmon in Kyoto was the grander of the two city gates built during the Heian period (794–1185). In this story, calamity had struck the city of Kyoto caused a decline to the capital. Set in Heian Period, it is a tale of an ex-servant who in a precarious situation of being left homeless after he was fired from a job. In order to survive the night of a stormy weather, he decided to take cover in the abandoned gates filled with corpses. He then encountered an old woman suspiciously prodding around the corpses.
This was fairly short with 7 pages long of we looking at the unnamed character and his actions and decisions in the moment. There is an internal struggle of choices between surviving but with a price to pay or died alongside the corpses. There is symbolism in here that subtly present though not obvious and I found it on a reread, they are much clearer. This one was a good introduction in this book and sets the pace of the book well.

2. Hell Screen
Yoshihide was known to be the best painter but with an ugly face and not an ounce of compassion to others with an exception of his daughter. When he is tasked to create a painting of Hell Screen by Lord Horikawa, a powerful authority whom coveted his talent but despised Yoshihide's unseemingly arrogant behaviour who thinks he is above others and his disrespect towards culture and religion, Yoshihide fell into the dark abyss of hell on earth.

This story depicted artistic obsession and dilemma similarly Akutagawa was towards his writing. Yoshihide is obssesed with his art and the only emotion of love he had was for his adolescent daughter, a compassionate and mild mannered girl. Yoshihide's passion towards art border into madness as he painted from observation and gained the picture by real life depiction rather than imagination such as rotting corpses and dreams of his encounter with the Hell Wardens.

His tendencies to paint real life depictions gave the authentic feeling to his painting but he sacrificed many things in order to reach the state. His sacrilegious behaviour torturing his apprentices indicate his manic tendencies to achieve perfection even go as far as the act of a devil. This story blew my mind. Its so briliantly written with introduction to characters, the peak of insanity, unexpected and twisted climax which ends on a depressing conclusion. A well crafted story that showed human's greed and jealousy can burns the world as if hell exists even in the real life.

3. In a Bamboo Grove
A reread. I have read this short story three times and it still remains vague and ambiguous on the actual truth.
The story questioned on how our memory can be unreliable and each persons had their own subjective experiences on seeing the same things thus giving different answers to one question.

It started with the testimony of a woodcutter then a travelling priest, a policeman and an old woman on the killing of a 26-year-old Kanazawa no Takehiro who found stabbed in a bamboo grove. We then get a confession from the killer, the wife of Takehiro Masago and in the end, the spirit's confession himself through a medium. What really interest me was the fact all 3 people involved in this incident had different stories showed that they either embelish or exaggerate their stories according to their own principles. One in anger, another for honour and lastly to subdue the shamefullness because of lust. Its an interesting take on how we convey our words in order to make it look differently from others.

In the end, we don't know the absolute truth as we can only relies on the statements and confession given by the witnesses and suspect as each person gave their words according to their own advantage either to save honour or cover for others. It was left to our own interpretation.

TW: sexual assault, physical assault, animal cruelty, arson, suicide

The second section of the book titled Under the Sword comprised of 3 stories: Dr Ogata Ryosai's Memorandum, O-gin and Loyalty.
In this section, the stories mostly based during the period of rules by Tokugawa shogun. Tokugawa ruled the country with power and force in fear of any rebellion and being overthrown. This time, the fear or threat from Christianity religion which is starting to make an impact on the people, Tokugawa was afraid of this thus there are punishment and execution for those who practiced the faith.

4. Dr Ogata Ryosai's memorandum ( 1916)
Following the memorandum of Doctor Ogata, this reports on a widow named Shino who has a young daugther that fallen ill. She was a practising Kirishitan or Christian thus causing her to be abhored and pushed away from the neighbours. In desperate need for help, she seeks Dr Ogata to see her daughter's sickly state but due to her religion, the doctor refused unless she abandoned the faith.
Interestingly, this story pit religion and family together. Its a story that shows the choice between keeping your religion or choose your flesh and blood. Certainly, its a notion that is cruel but soon we will see what fate arrived to Shino as she decided on her own as she was pushed to commit an unwilling act for her daughter. In the end, there is a twist of fate and it may seems unbelievable but a miracle do occur.

5. O-gin
Opposite to the miracle in the earlier story, this one questioned the choice make by the character. O-gin is an orphan girl who lost both of her parents at young age and she was adopted by a couple who are Christian though not many people know about it. They however were caught by the Satan and brought to the magistrate for cruel punishment and forced to denounce their faith. At the time of execution, O-gin decision to back away from Christian crumbles down as she realized she can never go to Heaven and abandon her birth parents whom she believed are in the depths of Hell.

This story made me think a lot on the choice of religion and family again. Being loyal to the religion in here meaning you are abandoning your family but O-gin decided to not be selfish and instead chose her parents. Its a debate of choice and weighing the importance of these two things in life. This will make an interesting discussion.


TW: murder, decapitation, graphic violence
6. Loyalty
This is fascinating as the terms loyalty coined to the person served to a bloodline. In here, we see a head of a household, a samurai started to have fits and nervous breakdown that ultimately led him being out of boundary and potentially harming the family's name. The Elder of the House decided that the master should refrain himself from attending any events that take place in the castle in fear of him embarassing or bring disgrace to the family. The elder is more loyal to serve the house than his own master thus lead to him being almost killed but instead he left the house, no longer want to serve the family. The next elder appointed is more accustomed or acquaintard with the house master as he seen him grew up and here, he is more loyal to the master than the house itself. So you see there is a different loyalty in the same household. There is a disatrous event occured after the master decision to go to the castle for last time before he retired causing the destruction of his whole bloodline.

Around this time, Akutagawa himself seems to be having his own nervous breakdown. This story may reflected his own mental state as the main character seems to fear almost everything and lashed out whenever something ticks him.

7. The story of the head that fell off
Set in the backdrop of Sino-Japanese War where tension is rising between China and Japan, war destroyed many people. Xiao-er, a chinese man went to a fight with Japanese cavalrymen and as he clash swords with them, he felt a sword hit his neck and then he ran away atop of his horse to flee from the dire situation. He fell from the horse, on the verge of his death, his past life started to passed by him in shapes of the clouds, his mother's apron, the field of his home, the foot of a woman he loved and the festival he attended. Slowly, he startdd to regret his past actions and want to live a better life. Soon after, a newspaper stated an accident of a human head falls off after a brawl in a diner.

This story was sort of a dark comedy/humor because there is a twisted ending of the man. Regrets came too late for him despite many things. In a way, this story showed that humans somehow will always make bad decision even though they always said they will do better next time.

7/9/2021
8. Green Onions
Interestingly, in here Akutagawa breaks the fourth wall and was present in the story by saying he need to complete this story in order to meet a deadline. It gave a slight humor although as always, there is something to be taken from the story itself.
O-Kimi, a beautiful young waitress in a cafe had fallen in love with a young charming Tanaka. O-Kimi had this childlike or romantic notion of love , potraying the ideal image of Tanaka but she also knows that he could not possibly be perfect. However, when someone is in love, they tend to put a rose tinted glasses on and admire the person so much, they will look past their lacking. When both of them are on a date, Tanaka harbours an ill intent that may occur if not for O-Kimi's attention diverted to green onions on display in the street neighbourhood. What exactly is the significance?
Simple as it is, she was awaken to the reality of economic and financial situation she was in after seeing the green onions' price. She was worried about her rents, next meal payments, and obligations in her life other than romantic relationship with Tanaka. There is a potential danger when Tanaka invited O-Kimi to a house they are supposed to go but this was stopped by his sight of her with the green onions on her arms. As if all intent vanished the moment he sees her that way.

9. Horse Legs
This is fascinating. Hanzaburo suddenly passed away but turns out, this was a mistake by the grim reapers and they eventually returned him back to the living world. However, here's the problem, Hanzaburo had died three days ago, his legs had start to become rotten and in order to cover this mistake, the grim reapers replaced his legs with horse legs. Hanzaburo was devastated and in order to conceal this hideous facts, he kept his legs in boots all the time and never let other people see his legs.

Content warning: Death, suicide, attempted suicide, affairs

10. Life of a Stupid Man
"I am living now in the unhappiest happiness imaginable. Yet, strangely I have no regrets"

"I may wear the skin of an urbane sophisticate, but in this manuscript I invite you to strip it off and laugh at my stupidity"

I almost cried just by reading these words.
This was my 3rd time reading this stories. Its an autobiographical stories comprised of 51 short anthologies or rather I would call it Akutagawa's musings on his life and principles. It was published posthumously after his death by his close friend. Attached to the manuscript was his letter to him which said he is entitled to release this stories but must not identify or put a names to the people he spoke about.

Cadavers
"If I needed a corpse, I'd kill someone without the slightest malice. Of course, the reply stated where it was - inside his heart"

Man-made wings
"At twenty nine, life no ponger held any brightness for him, but Voltaire supplied him with man made wings.

"The higher he flew, the farther below him sank joyd and sorrows of a lifr bathed in the light of intellect"

We started with his descriptions of his mother whom he described as lunatic and whom he barely have any affection for but also afraid he becomes like her as he lives each days with fear. Then, we moved slowly as he grow to become a writer but pressured to concur with the writing industry, married to a woman he loves but end up in affairs, growing passion for arts and philosophy but also contradict most of them, become a father but felt he is useless and unsuitable and each time he muses on death and what does it mean to live.

The Birth
"Why did this one have to be born - to come into the worls like all the others, this world so full of suffering?"

Comic Puppet
"He wanted to live life so intensely that he could die at any moment without regrets"

Stuffed Swan (this particularly hits me the hardest)
"As he thought about his life, he felt both tears and mockery welling up inside him. All that lay before him was madness or suicide"

I couldn't put into words or make a proper dissection on this one because its personal and raw and basically him telling his own stories in the most vulnerable state he was in, secrets being unburied, darkest desires and emotions being poured out, philosophy shared and contradicted and generally him saying he is unable to be a man worth enough to live. Its quite painful in a away but subtly conveyed in each short passages he wrote.

Interestingly enough, he wrote these using third point of view as if it was another person but it was actually him. Maybe he tries to separate the creation he wrote about from his life but he knows so well it is him and will always be him.

11. Death Register
In here, we see his life in full lights with him describing the death of his insane mother, an elder sister he barely knew, and the father who left him when he was an infant but always tried to reconcile with him somehow. Akutagawa doesnt get love from his real parents but he was given plenty by his adoptive parents. This was poetic and lyrical piece of essay he wrotes on each of his family members and ones that I felt most attached to was his recall of his father's dying on his deathbed. Such a sad moment. The story ended with a haiku as went to visit the graves of his beloved, his thoughts of them dying as if they are fortunate enough to die rather than live.

12. Dragon: The Old Potter's Tale (1919)
- Similar to The Nose, this story also points out on appearance and religion where the Buddhist monk named E'in had a giant nose and this caused him to be the centre of jokes by many. In order to divert the attention from his looks, he concoct a revenge by putting a signboard saying that a dragon will ascend to heaven on the third month. The words spread around like wildfire, even if people had doubts, majority believed the news and soon anticipate the event. Eventually, the day come and thousand of people gather to see the dragon but does this dragon even exist?
The theme of religion and physical appearance were themes that Akutagawa explored most in his work and this one spark more interest in the question of whether the prank could actually be true. Jay Rubin mentioned "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 question whether the dragon does ascend remain vague as we are unsure whether it exist or the people in the midst of waiting for hours too invested in the notion of wanting and believing the dragon, conjure up the image of dragon. Its fascinating but as always the ending remain inconclusive.

13. The Spider Thread (1918)
Its a very short story but concise in conveying the message. Talked about sinner's and how one act of compassion lead to a help from the lord above but a greed will cause the downfall. Kandata, a vicious murderer was punished in the lowest of Hells but his action of letting a spider live ultimately gave him a help to climb to heaven by the spider thread. There are depiction of gruesome hell and its a terrifying scene. For someone as selfish as Kandata who won't share his help from above with others eventually lead to his eternal damnation in Hell
An interesting twist of fate is that I was surprised that an anime Erased I just finished watching had a connection with this story I read yesterday. The anime talked about this short story and it was so twisted in the mind of a person and I was pleasantly surprised by the coincidence.
It was published for children based on Taisho fairy tales

14. Spinning Gears

[Inderjit Sanghera · Rating 5 out of 5]

Verdant vignettes vibrate across the reader’s eyes, as the are drawn into the splendiferous similes which dance across the page, shimmering like the pale reflection of sun-light on pebbles in a Japanese garden. Akutagawa fused he aesthetics of haiku with the psychology of Dostoevsky and other Western writers; style and form are as central to his stories as structure, psychology and characters, yet few short story writers are able to match the sheer diversity of Akutagawa’s ouvre; whether it be Gogolian fantasy in ‘The Nose’, discourses on the power of art in ‘Hell Screen’ or proto magical realism in ‘Horse Legs’, the breadth of Akutagawa’s stories in immense.

The highlight of these stories is undoubtedly ‘Hell Screen’, a macabre exploration of the darker elements of artistic inspiration, as the titular character, the morose and morbid painter Yoshide, tortures others to gain inspiration for his depiction of hell. Other highlights include, ‘In a Budding Grove’ which explores the nature of narrative perspective and was the inspiration for Kurosawa’s ‘Rashomon’ and ‘Spinning Gears’ a playful and poetic l pieces which reminders the reader of the jejunish experimental fiction of Oulipo.

Interspersed within the short stories are some strikingly pretty images, such as;

“Pine boughs stretched across the empty sky, and in them hung a copper-coloured moon devoid or radiance.”

“A butterfly fluttered it’s wings in a wind thick with the smell of seaweed. His dry lips felt the touch of the butterfly for the briefest instant, yet the wisp of a wing dust still shone on his lips years later.”

“I left the hotel and hurried towards my sister’s house along streets reflecting blue skys in pools of snow-melt”

Loneliness and alienation are the central themes which run through these stories, as the characters struggle to articulate their euphoria-whether it be religious in the exploration of incipient Christianity in ‘O-Gin’ (“O-Gin’s heart was not, like her parents, a desert swept by searing winds. It was an abundant field of ripened wheat sprinkled with wild roses”) or of the aspiring artist, Yasukichi, whose cloyingly clichéd funeral orations are held in higher regards than his art. More than this, his stories are about love and disillusions and jjoys there is something quintessentially modern the urban romance in ‘Green Onions’. Akutagawa is, along with Chekhov and Katherine Mansfield, one of the greatest short story writers.

[Rural Soul · Rating 5 out of 5]

I would highly recommend this edition which has introductions by Haruki Murakami and translator Jay Rubin. Additional commentary and notes by Jay Rubin help you to understand background of stories. Akutagawa basically created many of his stories from ancient Japanese fables. However His autobiographical stories rely on theme of loneliness and death. I have found this theme in all other Japanese literature which I read. If you want to read Japanese literature then I think Akutagawa's name should be at top of your list. Japan's highest litaeture award is named after Him.

I got to know Ryūnosuke Akutagawa in 2014 because of art movie Ghost Dog : Way of The Samurai. Jim Jarmusch is one of my most favourite filmmaker and I absolutely devour His movies. The film borrows a lot of elements from French movie Le Samouraï, Seijun Suzuki's Branded to Kill.
Just like central character of Le Samouraï, Ghost Dog lives his criminal life with Samurai code. He is seen oftenly reading Hagakure by Yamamoto Tsunetomo and shows liking to Ryūnosuke Akutagawa's rashomon and recommends it to a minor character.

[aPriL does feral sometimes · Rating 4 out of 5]

The stories included in this collection reflect an author who is intelligent, well-read, perceptive and deeply aware of human foibles. Half of the short stories are very entertaining and revealing, written in the cadences of ancient Eastern folk tales.

The author wrote these stories in the book in the years 1915 to 1925, in Japan, using Chinese and Japanese literary and cultural themes. But they not only educate the reader in the themes of Eastern literature, they also demonstrate that humanity is the same whether living in the East or West, no matter what century. The way people feel about the mysteries of their lives is the same whatever the setting. At the same time, the different, distinctly Eastern cultural prism through which our commonalities present themselves reflect a Japanese view in these stories that is a bit mystifying, and very interesting.

This collection includes two very famous stories, ‘Rashomon’ and ‘In a Bamboo Grove’, which were combined together into the plot of a famous Japanese movie, which in turn Hollywood has not so aptly attempted to imitate in several variations. A character’s character in point of view is certainly shown to be important in deciding veracity of a tale!

For the record, in the story Rashomon I believe the ghost, Tekehiro, is the most truthful. I believe he incorrectly reads his wife's actions and motivations, but he was the most truthful as he understood what happened.

Tekehiro’s wife, Masago, saw in Tekehiro what she interpreted as contempt in his face after she was raped. I believe she misread her husband's emotion. She saw what she feared most. She continuously lost consciousness and was extremely stressed. She had been raped, after all. Tajomaru, the rapist, was also a braggart and a criminal. He probably did not feel he would be let go or considered innocent after his capture by authorities. He would be most interested in inflating his actions, so I don't believe him in that there was a fight between him and Tekehiro.

After raping her, Tajomaru, I think, added insult to injury and tormented Masago, only increasing her distress and her certainty that her husband would despise her. In reality (?!?), the thief only wanted to rape, torment and rob the couple. Masago would have been wild with shame and fear of rejection by her husband, as well as feeling hopeless in having been degraded.

Tekehiro would have been dishonored and shamed by his impotence, greed, dupability and perhaps his suspicion that his wife lost respect for him. This would lead him to believe she could easily want him dead for that, and thus he would be blind to how she might be hiding her own shameful acts of wanting to save her life and honor by going with the thief, whom she believed wanted to take her with him (I think that's what he whispered to her in the short story).

The thief forced her to publicize her choice of living over loyalty, so, by his trick, she shamed herself twice over by her choice of deserting her husband. When the thief revealed his trick, she was triply humiliated - first the rape, and then her choice of deserting her husband, then in being fooled and rejected. After the thief left (why would he untie the husband, realistically?) I think, unable to face her wretched self-betrayal and afraid of her husband's supposed need for revenge and rage, she did try to stab him, but perhaps incompetently. She was 19, a young girl. After she ran away, her husband killed himself in self-loathing. The girl's mom said he was kind at heart, and he was a man of honor. At least that's how it makes sense to me, given what I know of human nature.

Of course, uncertain narrators abound, so what all of us judges can go by is what we know of human nature along with the testimony. Akutagawa has made the reader one of the characters in the story, has he not? As judges, truth must be assigned as a probability instead of a certainty. Although I believe in my above synopsis as the closest truth, Tajomaru confessed. I believe he raped and robbed and played a horrible spiteful trick on the couple which doomed the marriage, but as a judge, I don't believe he dueled or killed the husband physically. Tajomaru committed soul murders on the couple, perhaps. But Tajomuro has confessed out of misplaced pride and braggedo, and I'm happy to condemn him for the murder, given no other physical evidence.

The author is so clever. Now WE know the uncertainty of determining truth of phenomena which is dependent on human interpretations of reality. I have become an unreliable narrator.

I completely disbelieve the Woodcutter. Despite appearances of being disinterested, his story does not make any sense unless you accept the complete dissonance of a young wife being more like a hardened psychopathic prostitute moments after being abducted, imprisoned, and raped, by an armed man threatening death and humiliation.

Later stories included in the book, from 1925 to 1927 are more autobiographical or personal, and while revealing how similar that people feel about fear, stress, anxiety, and how we live within communal society, sadly, these somewhat autobiographical stories show how the author is losing his equilibrium and peace of mind. It is difficult to parse out if it is the fear of going insane or if it is actual instability precipitating the author’s emotional frailty.

[richa ⋆.˚★ · Rating 4 out of 5]

Took me three road trips to finish but Akutagawa-san (I know he hates when someone addresses him as sensei) has left a terrific impression on me. He grasps the truth and balances his craft while he endures the pain of being an artist. A madman but he is a weaver of tales that will live through the test of time. Definitely, one of the books I will reread.

[David · Rating 3 out of 5]

In his (undated ... perhaps 2006?) introduction, Haruki Murakami gives us what he thinks would be Japan's 10 most important "writers of national stature". They are writers that "left us works of the first rank that vividly reflect the mentality of the Japanese people ... [the works] must have the power to survive at least a quarter century after the writer's death. ... The important thing is whether each of them as an individual human being embraced an awareness of the great questions of the age, accepted his or her social responsibility as an artist on the front line, and made an honest effort to shape his or her life accordingly."

Haruki believes the top 10 to be:
#1. Sōseki Natsume. Equal #2 are: 2.Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, 2.Ōgai Mori, 4.Shimazaki To son, 5.Shiga Naoya, 6.Jun'ichirō Tanizaki, 7.Yasunari Kawabata. Equal #8 are: 8.Osamu Dazai, 8.Yukio Mishima.

He can't think of a tenth name for the list(!). Which is cute if you are a fan of Kenzaburō Ōe. Haruki is such a bitch. He goes on to say that "Kawabata's works, to be honest, have always been a problem for me. ... I have never been able to identify very closely with his fictional world." And "With reagrd to Shimazaki and Shiga, I can only say that I have no particular interest in them ... what I have read has left little trace in my memory."

So old Kenzaburo has been excluded from Haruki's list of 10 ... which only includes 9 ... and of which, 3 he really doesn't have time for? Ouch.

But Haruki's obviously mad. He seems to say that Botchan can be "memorized whole by most school children". What?

On to Akutagawa ... I liked the "I" stuff the best.

[Joselito Honestly and Brilliantly · Rating 4 out of 5]

When I read my first Murakami, a compilation of short stories called "After the Quake," I was amazed by his refreshing originality. Some of his stories, indeed, had the effect of an earthquake to me. There were jolting, sudden and unexpected turns. In one, a man and a woman, after a brief introduction, make love. Then, out of nowhere, the man felt a sudden impulse to kill her. In another story, the characters were on a beach. Tears suddenly flow down from the eyes of one character, then they talk of killing themselves. Developments like these come without warning as they were not even hinted in the previous narration.

Now, it can be told. This style of storytelling is not at all original. Murakami, I think, copied it from this great Japanese writer who killed himself in 1927 at the age of 35--Ryunosuke Akutagawa (in the list of the 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die he's under letter "R"--a mistake, because his surname is Akutagawa, not Ryunosuke). By his own confession, Murakami has been reading Akutagawa since he was a teenager.

I bet that if one includes Rashomon in that compilation "After the Quake" an uninitiated reader will not find any difference between it and the rest of the stories there except that the latter have modern settings while "Rashomon" is set in 12th century Japan.

"Rashomon" ("Mon" being the Japanese for gate) was an outer castle gate, specifically the great southern main entrance to Kyoto during the Heian Period. It had massive pillars, towering archways and several chambers. The whole city of Kyoto, at the time of the story, was under civil unrest. People were hungry, even the Rashomon itself had become dilapidated for lack of proper maintenance. In the upper chamber thereof was dumped the city's dead, the victims of the prevailing hunger and violence.

In the lower chamber sits a servant who had just lost his job. He is said to be waiting for the rain to stop but he knows that even if the rain stops he really has nowhere to go and nothing to do. He had come to the dreadful conclusion that he would either die of starvation or survive by being a thief.

The mood is somber, the descriptive prose is elegant, fluid and spontaneous. Just like Murakami (in his short stories). Then the servant sees something...Thereafter comes one event after another which felt like Murakami's earthquakes, with a similar ending that leaves unanswered questions.

In the Introduction to the life and works of Akutagawa a Japanese literary critic, in 1917, described him (Akutagawa) as "a writer who can't write without props." I was amused by this because elsewhere in goodreads before, discussing Kafka on the Shore with a Murakami fanatic K.D., I wrote that Murakami had used a lot of juvenile, ineffective props here (like talking cats, mother and son fucking, eels falling down from the sky, etc.) which were not even original as you can see parallels from Greek mythology and even in works of Lewis Carroll.

The Introduction also declared:

"Sheer technique...though skillfully applied, does not necessarily translate into original literature. A fictional world that was not truly (the author's) own and that used borrowed containers would eventually reach and impasse and come to stand in his way like a high wall. Further pursuit of fictional method could only yield technical polish. And not surprisingly, the novelty would wear thin and readers would tire of seeing the same devices."

Wow, I myself could have said this after reading Kafka on the Shore! Now, guess who wrote this introduction? Close your eyes and bang your head on the wall--Haruki Murakami himself.

LOL!

[adya · Rating 3 out of 5]

[3.25 stars]

Akutagawa's short stories are so engaging, and his use of words is very thoughtful. Some of them are very humorous, and the others havs poignant social messages.
Haruki Murakami, who wrote an introduction for this book, says, "The flow of his language is the best feature of Akutagawa's style. Never stagnant, it moves along like a living thing. His choice of words is intuitive, natural-and beautiful."

The titular story, Rashōmon, is an exquisite work which shows how morality could be at odds with the need for survival. It is very profound.

Other stories which I liked include:
•"The Bamboo Grove" (which I'd read and reviewed separately much earlier)
•"The Nose", a satire on public perception of one's appearance
•"The Hell Screen", a shocking story about a painter who goes insane in the process of finishing his magnum opus (a piece showcasing what hell would be like) and allows his innocent daughter to be set on flames in order to further the realistic nature of his art. "I could have sworn that the man's eyes were no longer watching his daughter dying in agony, that instead the gorgeous colors of flames and the sight of a woman suffering in them were giving him joy beyond measure."
•"Dr. Ogata Ryōsai: Memorandum" and "O-Gin" showed the early days of Christianity in Japan, and how followers of that sect were at odds with the other people around them and with the hostile government, as their faith is challenged at every turn. These were very interesting to read.
•"The Story of a Head That Fell Off" is a Chinese story depicting the horrors of war, and the people who fight those wars. "Xiao-er was overcome by a mysterious loneliness such as he had never experienced before. The vast blue sky hung above him in silence. People had no choice but to go on living their pitiful lives beneath that sky, buffeted by the winds that blow down from above. What loneliness! And how strange, he thought, that he had never known this loneliness until now."
•"Horse Legs" is arguably the most humorous story in this collection. It has a sardonic and tongue-in-cheek tone throughout. A newspaper article that comes out after the protagonist goes mad and runs away from home states, " What we would like to ask, however, is not "What is the name of Mr. Oshino's malady?" but rather "What is Mr. Oshino's responsibility to his wife?" Like an unblemished golden jar, our glorious National Essence stands upon a foundation of belief in the family. We need not ask, then, how grave the responsibilities of the head of any one family might be. Does the head of a family have the right to go mad any time he feels like it? To this question we must offer a resounding "No!"
Imagine what would happen if the husbands of the world suddenly acquired the right to go mad. All, without exception, would leave their families behind for a happy life of song on the road, or wandering over hill and dale, or being kept well fed and clothed in an insane asylum. Then our 1,000-year-old belief in the family — our very pride in the eyes of the world — could not fail to collapse. We are not, of course, urging that Mr. Oshino be treated harshly. We must, however, loudly beat the drum to condemn his rash crime of having gone mad. No, let this not be limited to Mr. Oshino's crime alone. We must also condemn the utter misfeasance of successive administrations for having neglected our urgent need for a law prohibiting insanity."

I did not enjoy the supposed autobiographical section called "Akutagawa's Own Story" as much as I did his fiction. They had their moments, but were overall quite tedious to read.
Daidoji Shinsuke explores his childhood and school, with the narrator being a self-proclaimed intellectual. "Death Register" talks about his estranged, insane mother, an elder sister he never got to know, and his father who relinquished him as a baby. "The Life of a Stupid Man," and "Spinning Gears" both show Akutagawa probing the meaning of the life he has led to that point, and moving ever closer to death.





*

Notes for myself

• Akutagawa's mental illnesses and their impact on his work
"We will never know for certain whether the neuroses from which he suffered later in life were caused by hereditary factors, mental instability, or his latent fears, but sickness of mind casts a heavy shadow on the late stories and would end up taking his life. Surely it would be no exaggeration to say that writing these late works effectively shortened his life, but it is also true that he was unable to find a way to go on living as a writer without writing works of this nature-and once he could no longer live as a writer, his life would cease to have meaning. It well could be that Akutagawa had to turn to the world of storytelling and technique in order to find refuge from his dark heredity. Rather than face the real world, so full of terror and pain, he might have transported himself mind and body into another world in hopes of finding a kind of salvation in its fictionality."

•Akutagawa's position in Japanese literary history, as given by Murakami
"Perhaps the true reason that Akutagawa Ryunosuke continues to be read and admired today as a "national writer" lies in this in the realization and determination that effectively pushed him into a dead end. He started out as one of the chosen few: a Japanese intellectual with a consciousness torn between the West and Japan's traditional culture, in the border regions of which he succeeded in erecting a uniquely vigorous world of story. As he matured, he attempted to fuse the two different cultures inside himself at a higher level. He attempted structurally to combine the distinctively Japanese style of the I-novel with his own elegant fictional method. He hoped, in other words, to pioneer a newer, more uniquely Japanese form of serious literature. But this would have required a strenuous, long-term effort that his hypersensitive nerves and delicate con- stitution could not sustain. Pursued by the dark visions that crawled out of the gloom, he would finally despair and cut his life short. Akutagawa's terrible suicide administered a great shock to the minds of his contemporaries. It signaled both the defeat of a member of the intellectual elite and a major turning point in history.
Many Japanese would see in the death of this one writer the triumph, the aestheticism, the anguish, and the unavoidable downfall of the Taishō Period's cultivated elite. His individual declaration of defeat also became a signpost on the road of history leading to the tragedy of the Second World War. In the period just before and after his death, the flower of democracy that had bloomed with such promise in the Taisho Period simply shriveled and died. Soon the boots of the military would resound everywhere. The writer Akutagawa Ryunosuke stands as an illuminating presence in the history of Japanese literature, a symbol of his age's brief glory and quiet defeat."

•The role of a writer in the contemporary globalized world
"Today, when the world is growing ever smaller through the spectacular development of the Internet and the increasingly rapid flow of economic interchange, we find ourselves in a pressing situation whereby, like it or not, our very survival depends on our ability to exchange cultural methodologies on an equivalent basis. To turn toward a stance of national exclusivity, regionalism, or fundamentalism in which nations become isolated politically, economically, culturally, or religiously could bring about unimaginable dangers on a worldwide scale. If only in that sense, we novelists and other creative individuals must simultaneously broadcast our cultural messages outward and be flexible receptors of what comes to us from abroad. Even as we unwaveringly preserve our own identity, we must exchange that which can be exchanged and understand that which can be mutually understood. Our role is perfectly clear."

[Madhulika Liddle · Rating 5 out of 5]

It’s hard to review something like Ryūnosuke Akutagawa’s Rashōmon and Seventeen Other Stories: it’s too complex, too often inducing a “What was that I read?”, too deep, and yet approachable, very readable.

I found this book by chance while surfing Goodreads, and was immediately attracted by Rashōmon, since I am a fan of Kurosawa’s, and am all admiration for that particular film (the plot of which, ironically, draws more from Akutagawa’s In the Bamboo Grove than it does from Rashōmon itself). I bought the book and told myself that I’d read it slowly, one short story at a time—and found myself caught like a fly in a spider’s web. I ended up reading most of this book in long stretches, until my eyes hurt.

The eighteen stories are very diverse in nature: there are ghosts here, and dragons. There is hell, both somewhat distant, seen through the benevolent eyes of the Sakyamuni in The Spider Thread, and close, horrifying, macabre—as in Hell Screen. There are tales of a Japan torn between tradition and modernity, of battles between Christianity and older, local beliefs. There are battles, too, between man and man, and—most forcibly, most searingly, the stories of man’s battles with himself. The latter are brought most vividly (and disturbingly) to life in the last section of the book, which brings together six autobiographical stories by Akutagawa.

As I progressed through this book, I went through a range of emotions. I laughed at the quirky humour in The Nose, Dragon: The Old Potter’s Tale and Green Onions. I shivered at the cruelty of Hell Screen. And I couldn’t help but wonder how much of Spinning Gears (which was published posthumously, after Akutagawa killed himself in 1927) was real, and how much was not.

This is a brilliant book. It’s rich, textured, detailed. The imagery is often breathtaking (“She had a radiant face, like the morning sun on a thin sheet of ice”), and the layers are fascinating, peeling away from the mundane, even comical, to the wryly profound. As an example: ”He put a cigarette in his mouth and was striking a match when he collapsed face-down on his desk and died. It was a truly disappointing way to die. Fortunately, however, society rarely offers critical comment regarding the way a person dies. The way a person lives is what evokes criticism.”

The translator, Jay Rubin, also provides useful notes on stories and their elements, which help in a better understanding of the story (especially for someone not familiar with Japan and its culture). In addition, there’s a brief but good biography of Akutagawa, and a superb introduction by Haruki Murakami. I would advise reading all of these, besides the stories that comprise the book: they help get a better insight into the author, and so add to the experience.

I ended this book feeling both oddly deflated and inspired. As a writer, I can’t help but be inspired by writing of such stature. As a writer, too, I can’t help but feel that I cannot possibly ever write as brilliantly as this. Not a book I am going to forget in a hurry, if ever.