Akutagawa's Rashōmon and 17 Other Stories - I sensed the agency of the finger of destiny and felt compelled to read that passage

The book in front of me is Rashōmon and 17 Other Stories by Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, the cute 2006 Penguin with the manga cover and Murakami Haruki introduction, translated by Jay Rubin.  I’m trying to stick to the Japanese convention where the family name comes first, but I make no promises about consistency. 

I’d never read Akutagawa before. 

I liked it a lot, enough that I immediately started another, earlier collection, Rashomon and Other Stories (Liveright, 1952, tr. Takashi Kojima), to fill in some gaps.  Murakami insisted on a story called “Yam Gruel,” not in the book he introduced.  He was right, “Yam Gruel” is good, from the title on.    Apparently yam gruel was a Heian delicacy, as unlikely as that sounds.

Akutagawa only wrote for twelve years before, physically and mentally ill, killing himself in 1927 when he was 35.  With such a short life, I was not expecting his writing to have phases, but they are pretty clear.  He had some big hits right away, famous stories like “In a Bamboo Grove” and “Hell Screen,” modernized versions of grotesque old tales, generally set, like those two, in the decadent end of the Heian period.  He also has a set of 17th and 18th century stories, often about Christian martyrs.  The attraction is clearly to the martyrdom, the tortures, another form of grotesquerie.  Many of these stories are horror stories, really, “Hell Screen” most obviously, where a lunatic painter commissioned to depict Hell tortures his assistants and worse in the name of realism:

And the kinds of torture were as numberless as the sinners themselves – flogging with an iron scourge, crushing under a gigantic rock, pecking by a monstrous bird, grinding in the jaws of a poisonous serpent…  (51, ellipses in original)

But the painter can only paint what he has seen, so the story fills in how he saw some of those horrors.  And worse.  I can see how this 1918 story, and others like it, made Akutagawa a star.

I could almost see the literal, experiential painter as some kind of parody of Naturalism, which leads to phase three (phase two is a crisis in the early 1920s).  Late in his life – what turns out to be late – Akutagawa turns to autobiographical writing, whether as fiction or memoir or unusual fragments.  The Penguin collection gives a third of its pages to “Akutagawa’s Own Story” in six varied texts, a chronicle of the author’s anguish and fear, aside from the interesting details about Tokyo and its literary scene, including the complex integration of European literature, especially French and Russian, by a generation of Japanese writers.

Bringing to mind the paper rose petals on the street, however, I decided to buy Conversations with Anatole France a d The Collected Letters of Prosper Mérimée.  (223)

But as the writer’s mental health fails he shifts from his early French influences to Dostoevsky and Strindberg.  In a curious scene, the author picks up Crime and Punishment but finds himself reading The Brothers Karamazov:

The bindery had accidentally included pages from the wrong book.  That I had, in turn, accidentally opened the book to those misbound pages: I sensed the agency of the finger of destiny and felt compelled to read that passage.  Before I had read a single page, however, my entire body began to tremble.  It was the scene in which the devil torments Ivan.  Ivan, Strindberg, and Maupassant – and, here in this room, me… (231, ellipses in original)

Another kind of horror literature, that of incipient schizophrenia.

Dolce Bellezza’s Japanese Literature Challenge, running through March, is in its 15th year!  That is impressive.  I had better go register this piece.