Rashomon and
17 Other Stories

Akutagawa Ryunosuke, along with Natsume Soseki and Mori Ogai, is one of "the big three" of prewar modern Japanese literature, the writers every educated Japanese knows. He is also the single most translated Japanese author there is, and the translations are in most every language of the planet, the earliest dating from the late 1920s and the most recent in this new collection by Jay Rubin. As if that were not enough, his name has passed into the lexicon of modern cinema through Kurosawa Akira's modern classic Rashomon, which is based on one of the stories included in this book, "Yabu no naka" (In a Grove).

Early translators were attracted primarily to the work of Akutagawa's youth, when he often found his plots in tales of twelfth-century Japan. As Rubin explains, Akutagawa identified this period, when Japan had slipped from an era of cultural opulence into an age of decline and unrest, with fin-de-siècle Europe. Akutagawa's juxtaposition of medieval Japan and Europe in the last years of the nineteenth century may strike a reader today as strange, even bizarre, but it is significant. Probably what made Akutagawa's reworkings of those old tales able to cross the cultural barrier so well is that within their colorful and exotic plots move characters with the same obsessive, violent, and intense personalities as those in the classical Western literature (Goethe, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, to name just a few) that Akutagawa knew so well.

But the virtue of this volume is its emphasis on Akutagawa's later stories. In the autobiographical "Daidoji Shinsuke: The Early Years," Akutagawa tells us that his alter ego Daidoji Shinsuke loved books since he was an elementary school boy. He read "with feverish energy" no matter where he was, even in the toilet, sometimes as he walked down the street. Most of the books he read were translations of Western authors, and he identified so closely with their heroes that with each book he was transformed. "Like India's Buddha, he traveled through numberless past lives—Ivan Karamazov, Hamlet, Prince Andre, Don Juan, Mephistopheles." Once, while he was declaiming on the great feats of the heroes of the Meiji Restoration (1968) to an uncle of whom he was especially fond, he suddenly felt that "this pale-faced higher-school student full of false emotion was not Daidoji Shinsuke but Julien Sorel, the hero of [Stendhal's] The Red and the Black." To Akutagawa, these "foreign" novelists were not foreign at all but his own kin, and their characters were his own alternate selves.

Akutagawa's experience negates the dreary binary of East and West, and the same spirit extended, in some measure, to the Taisho period (1912–1926) itself. When Akutagawa, a victim of schizophrenia and depression, committed suicide in 1927, at the age of thirty-five, it seemed to many to symbolize the end of an era. As Murakami Haruki puts it in his introduction to this volume, "Many Japanese would see in the death of this one writer the triumph, the aestheticism, the anguish, and the unavoidable downfall of the Taisho 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." Perhaps it was as a memorial to this moment in Japanese cultural life that the Akutagawa Prize, today the most prestigious prize for fiction in Japan, was established.

Green Onions

Jay Rubin has here translated, with great skill, eighteen of Akutagawa's stories, nine never translated before. Most of the latter are from the last years of Akutagawa's brief life, when he had given up taking his plots from old tales and turned to modern times or else his own life for material. One of the gems is the funny and poignant "Green Onions." The story begins with the narrator's barefaced announcement, " I plan to write this story in a single sitting tonight in time for the deadline I'm facing tomorrow." His heroine is O-Kimi, a virginal café waitress living on a miniscule salary and many dreams, but in imminent danger of being forcibly seduced by the predatory Tanaka, an affected artist who frequents her place of work. As Tanaka leads O-Kimi to the house where he intends to (in modern parlance) date rape her, they pass a grocery store advertising green onions at deep discount and she happily runs in to buy two bunches. As she comes out, "a happy smile dancing in her limpid gaze," her would-be seducer is suddenly assailed by "the very real stink of green onions—as penetrating and eye-stinging as real life itself," and gives up his plot. "I did it! I finished the story!" cries our author, stepping in to bring things to a neat conclusion; but then, contemplating O-Kimi's future, he realizes that there is no guarantee that she—this figment of his imagination who is now as real to us as she is to him—won't go out with Tanaka again. "And when I think of what might happen then—no, what happens then will happen then. No amount of worrying on my part now is going to change anything. All right, that's it, I'm going to stop writing. Goodbye, O-Kimi. Step out again tonight as you did last night—gaily, bravely—to be vanquished by the critics!"

Earlier readers may have preferred the more exotic "Rashomon" and other stories from Akutagawa's early period, but on the evidence of this volume, it is the later Akutagawa who may appeal more to us now. And there are more translations of stories from this period coming soon, in a volume under preparation by Charles De Wolf. Make way for the new vision of Akutagawa Ryunosuke that will grace the first decade of the new century.