Rashōmon and Seventeen Other Stories Read online

  RASHŌMON AND SEVENTEEN OTHER STORIES

  RYŪNOSUKE AKUTAGAWA (or, in the Japanese order, Akutagawa Ryūnosuke) continues to be read and admired today by virtually all Japanese as one of the country’s foremost stylists, a master of the modern idiom enriched by a deep knowledge of both the classics and the contemporary literature of Japan, China, and the West. Born in Tokyo in 1892, he was raised in a family steeped in traditional Japanese culture, learned English at an early age, and proved himself a brilliant student in Japan’s foremost educational institutions. He began setting up and writing for student publications at the age of ten, and even before he graduated from Tokyo Imperial University (now University of Tokyo) in 1916 with a degree in English literature, his contributions to university magazines were recognized for their accomplished style. He supported himself as a teacher of English for a little over two years, but the great demand for his stories and essays enabled him to resign his post in 1919 and concentrate on his writing. Soon he began to have doubts about his reliance on Japanese and Chinese classical materials in his fiction, and he responded to requests for more autobiographical work by revealing his own anguish as the child of a madwoman, a frail youth torn between his adoptive and biological fathers, a compulsive reader frightened by real life, a conscientious family head oppressed by his responsibilities, a devoted husband and father wracked by guilt for his extramarital affairs, a relentless intellect unable to find peace in religion, and a paranoid personality afraid of being overwhelmed by the insanity he was sure he had inherited from his mother. When he ended his own life in 1927 at the age of thirty-five, he left behind a unique body of stories marked by imagistic brilliance, cynicism, horror, beauty, wild humor, and icy clarity.

  JAY RUBIN has translated Sōseki Natsume’s novels Sanshirō and The Miner and Haruki Murakami’s Norwegian Wood, The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, and after the quake. He is the author of Injurious to Public Morals: Writers and the Meiji State and Haruki Murakami and the Music of Words, and the editor of Modern Japanese Writers. He began his study of Japanese at the University of Chicago, where he received his Ph.D. in 1970, and has been a professor of Japanese literature at the University of Washington and at Harvard University.

  HARUKI MURAKAMI (in Western order) has written eleven novels, ten volumes of short stories, and more than thirty books of nonfiction while also translating well over thirty volumes of American fiction, poetry, and nonfiction since his prizewinning debut in 1979 at the age of thirty. Known in the English-speaking world primarily for his novels A Wild Sheep Chase, Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, Norwegian Wood, Dance Dance Dance, The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, and Kafka on the Shore, Murakami has also published commentary on the 1995 Tokyo subway sarin-gas attack in Underground, and edited a book of American, British, and Irish fiction, Birthday Stories. His works have been translated into thirty-four languages.

  RYŪNOSUKE AKUTAGAWA

  Rashōmon and Seventeen Other Stories

  Selected and Translated with Notes by JAY RUBIN

  With an Introduction by HARUKI MURAKAMI

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  PENGUIN CLASSICS

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  This selection first published in Penguin Classics 2006

  1

  Stories and editorial material copyright © Jay Rubin, 2006

  Introduction copyright © Haruki Murakami, 2006

  All rights reserved

  The moral right of the translator and the introducer has been asserted

  This book has been selected by the Japanese Literature Publishing

  Project (JLPP) which is run by the Japanese Literature Publishing and

  Promotion Center (J-Lit Center) on behalf of the Agency for Cultural

  Affairs of Japan.

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject

  to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent,

  re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s

  prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in

  which it is published and without a similar condition including this

  condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  EISBN: 978–0–141–90287–6

  Contents

  Note on Japanese Name Order and Pronunciation

  Acknowledgments

  Chronology

  Introduction: Akutagawa Ryūnosuke: Downfall of the Chosen

  Further Reading

  Translator’s Note

  Rashōmon and Seventeen Other Stories

  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

  Note on Japanese Name Order and Pronunciation

  All Japanese names hereafter are written in the Japanese order, with family name first. The author is known in Japan as Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, and the writer of the Introduction as Murakami Haruki. These have been given in the Western order on the cover and title-page because of their greater familiarity in the West and as standard in library cataloging and book lists.

  Some Japanese names and terms have become so familiar in recent years that an elaborate guide to pronunciation hardly seems necessary. Specific cases where there might be confusion have been annotated. Unfortunately, one specific—and especially convoluted—example is the name of the author himself, so here are some guidelines:

  All a’s are long as in “father,” and u’s tend to disappear between unvoiced consonants. Thus, “Akutagawa” sounds more like “Ak-ta-ga-wa” (four syllables) with a slight stress on the “Ak.”

  Japanese “r” is a light tongue flap, almost a “d” as in a British “very.” “Ryū” is only one syllable long, which can be approximated by using that tongue flap to pronounce the middle part of “incre(du)lous.” The “u” between unvoiced consonants (“suke”) gets lost here, too, and e’s are short as in “Kevin.” So
we have what sounds like three syllables: “Dyūnoss-ke,” with equal stress on the “Dyū” and the “noss” but slightly less on the “ke.”

  Macrons have been included to indicate long syllables but have been eliminated from the place names Toōkyō, Kyōto, ōsaka, and Kyūshū.

  Acknowledgments

  These translations have benefited greatly from the advice and/or close reading of a wide variety of friends and colleagues.

  My wife Rakuko, my adviser of first resort in all things, made it possible for me to continue the day-to-day wrestling with difficult texts, as she has since 1966, and it is to her that this book is dedicated.

  Fortunately for me, Shibata Motoyuki, the renowned translator of American literature into Japanese, is just as fascinated by the process of translating from Japanese into English; he went over every line with unflagging enthusiasm and marvelous insight. He also introduced me to Mutō Yasushi and Ueki Tomoko, who generously shared their scholarly expertise in modern and pre-modern Japanese literature with me and guided me to the indispensable Akutagawa studies of Sekiguchi Yasuyoshi. Ichiba Shinji read everything line-by-line under the auspices of the Japanese Literature Publication Project (JLPP), sponsored by the Agency for Cultural Affairs of Japan. JLPP also made it possible for Linda Asher to apply her supernatural editorial skills to the manuscript. Hirose Keiko and Hoshino Kiyo kept the JLPP wheels turning efficiently, and at Penguin, Lindeth Vasey provoked a whole new set of thoughts about the text and notes.

  Other friends and scholars whose help and interest added to the considerable pleasure I derived from this project are Ted Goossen, Ted Mack, Harold Bolitho, David Knechtges, Kathy Lu, Mark Woolsey, Ryuichi Abe, Paul Rouzer, Rachel DiNitto, Royall Tyler, Mikael Adolphson, Shigehisa Kuriyama, Howard Hibbett, Davinder Bhowmik, Philip Kuhn, Carole Cavanaugh, Matthew Fraleigh, Kelly Flannery, and Julia Twarog.

  I would like to add one final note of thanks to Penguin Editor Simon Winder and to Murakami Haruki: Simon for suggesting the project—including the introduction by Haruki—in the first place, and Haruki for agreeing immediately to participate and for writing such a fine introduction.

  Chronology

  1868 Two and a half centuries of “centralized feudal” rule under the Tokugawa government of warrior-bureaucrats comes to an end with the “restoration” of the emperor to a position of theoretical sovereignty; the country is opened to the West; and the modernizing Meiji Period1 (1868–1912) begins. Born in the 25th year of Meiji, Akutagawa will become the quintessential writer of the liberal Taishō Period (1912–26), and his suicide in the 2nd year of the Shōwa Period (1926–89) will be widely seen as marking the defeat of “Taishō Democracy,” as the forces of repression and imperialism move toward the Second World War.

  1892 I March: Akutagawa Ryūnosuke born in Tokyo, the third child and only son of father Niihara Toshizō (1850–1919), dairy owner, and mother Niihara (née Akutagawa) Fuku (1860–1902). According to East Asian astrology, born in the hour of the dragon (7–9 a.m.) of the day of the dragon of the month of the dragon of the year of the dragon, he is named Ryūnosuke (“dragon-son”). His sisters are Hatsu (1885–91) and Hisa (1888–1956).

  Mother goes insane in October, and will be kept hidden upstairs in the Niihara house until her death. Ryūnosuke taken into the childless household of Fuku’s brother, Akutagawa Dōshō (1849–1928), a minor official in the Tokyo government’s internal affairs division, his wife Tomo (1857– 1937), and Fuku’s sister Akutagawa Fuki (1856–1938), in Tokyo’s drab industrial Honjo ward, east of the Sumida River. Aunt Fuki is primary caregiver. Family uses Akutagawa surname for the boy, though legally he is Niihara. Of minor samurai origins, the family is not wealthy but surrounds him with books and traditional arts.

  1894 Family begins regularly taking him to Kabuki and other theatrical performances.

  1894–5 Sino-Japanese War.

  1898 Enters elementary school. Outstanding student, but frail, and frequently bullied. Mother’s sister Fuyu (1862–1920) bears half-brother Tokuji (d. 1930) to his father. Over the years much close contact between the Niihara and Akutagawa families. Adoptive father retires, and enjoys traditional Itchūbushi singing, go, bonsai cultivation, and haiku.

  1899 Begins receiving private tutoring in English, Chinese, and calligraphy.

  1901 Writes first haiku, and begins reading contemporary Japanese literature.

  1902 With school friends, begins circulating literary magazine, contributing both text and art. Similar activity continues into university. Mother dies.

  1904 Formal adoption into Akutagawa family becomes final. Father and aunt Fuyu legalize their relationship.

  1904–5 Russo-Japanese War.

  1905 Enters middle school at usual age, although qualified a year earlier, but delayed by health problems and adoption difficulties. Outstanding in all subjects, especially Chinese. Active in jūdō and other physical training, unlike future fictional alter ego Daidōji Shinsuke. Japan wins Russo-Japanese War (1904–5): first victory over Caucasian nation raises widespread interest in translation of recent and contemporary Western literature.

  1907 Begins reading English books beyond class requirements, and English becomes his primary portal for world literature.

  1910 Enters elite First Higher School without examination, owing to superior record. Right-wing government crushes leftist political and literary activity. “Winter years” of socialism continue for a decade.

  1912 Meiji emperor dies; Taishō Period begins.

  1913 Enters Tokyo Imperial University, the pinnacle of the educational system; majors in English literature.

  1914 With classmates, founds student literary magazine, publishes his first story in May, “Rōnen” (“Old Age”; no English translation). Akutagawa family moves to newly constructed house in north suburban Tabata, where he will spend most of his life. Neighborhood doctor, Shimojima Isaoshi (1870–1947), becomes his physician and friend.

  1915 Fifth story, “Rashōmon,” published in university faculty’s intellectual journal, but is generally ignored. Pays first visit to the novelist Natsume Sōseki (1867–1916) at home, and becomes one of Sōseki’s2 “disciples.”

  1916 “The Nose” published in student magazine; lavishly praised by Sōseki and receives other attention. Graduates from Tokyo Imperial University with a thesis on William Morris. “Yam Gruel” is his first story in a commercial magazine; more invitations follow. Begins teaching at Naval Engineering School (see “The Writer’s Craft”), living in Kamakura, a seaside town south of Tokyo. Sōseki dies.

  1917 “Dr. Ogata Ryōsai: Memorandum” and “Loyalty” published. First anthology, Rashōmon, appears from small publisher. Commercial literary magazines eager to print his stories. Second anthology, Tobacco and the Devil, published by major company.

  1918 Marries Tsukamoto Fumi (1900–1968), and they move to new lodgings in Kamakura with aunt Fuki; tranquil time after Fuki returns to Tokyo. “The Story of a Head That Fell Off” and “The Spider Thread” published. “Hell Screen” serialized in two newspapers simultaneously. Severely stricken in Spanish flu epidemic.

  1919 Experiences second attack of Spanish flu, and father dies from it. Resigns teaching post and signs exclusive agreement with Osaka Mainichi Shinbun newspaper. Moves back with Fumi to live with adoptive parents and aunt Fuki, and never again establishes separate household. Extended family increasingly rely on his income. “Dragon: The Old Potter’s Tale” published. Travels to Nagasaki, and steeps himself in exotic culture of seventeenth-century Japanese Christian martyrdom; meets chief psychiatrist of Nagasaki Prefectural Hospital, poet Saitō Mokichi (1882–1953), who will later supply him with barbiturates for insomnia. Meets popular poet Hide Shigeko (1890–1973), who is married with one son, and begins painful affair with this “crazy girl” (“The Life of a Stupid Man,” Section 21).

  1920 Five stories (including “Green Onions”) and seven nonfiction pieces published simultaneously in various major New Year publications as editors clamor for h
is work. Birth of first son, Hiroshi.

  1921 January: Hide Shigeko gives birth to son, and tells Akutagawa the child is his. March: Partly to escape her, he leaves for China for nearly four months as special correspondent for Osaka Mainichi Shinbun. Dry pleurisy and other ills leave him weakened thereafter.

  1922 “In a Bamboo Grove” and three other stories appear in New Year issues of major magazines, but autobiographical writing increases as historical fiction is less well received. Second trip to Nagasaki; buys Edo Period “secret Christian” image of Maria-Kannon. First of the fictional alter ego Yasukichi stories and “O-Gin” published. Birth of second son, Takashi. Health dramatically worse; with desire to write fading, declines all invitations for New Year issue stories.

  1923 June: Infant Takashi hospitalized for more than ten days. “The Baby’s Sickness” published in August. 1 September: Great Kantō Earthquake strikes at 11: 58 a.m., followed by fires; over 100, 000 killed. Tabata house loses a few roof tiles and stone lantern, but houses of his half-brother and his sister burn down. No injuries to relatives, but caring for them a great financial burden. Observes death and devastation, writes scathing critiques of “upright citizens” of Tokyo who took the occasion to commit mob violence against local Koreans with Police Bureau encouragement. Much editing of English and contemporary Japanese literary collections.

  1924 Few new stories this year; much editing, reading up on socialism, but his name is still big enough for a major publisher to begin a new series of contemporary literature with a volume of his works. Sixth Yasukichi story, “The Writer’s Craft,” published. Near-affair with Katayama Hiroko (“Life,” Section 37).

  1925 Physical ills, insomnia. “Daidōji Shinsuke: The Early Years” and “Horse Legs” published in New Year issues of major magazines. Birth of third son, Yasushi. Publication of five-volume collection of contemporary Japanese literature which he has devoted much energy to editing since 1923; sales are poor, he earns little and is widely criticized by other writers for copyright problems. Insomnia, nervous exhaustion, and heavy responsibilities as head of the household.