Rashomon and Seventeen Other Stories Read Free Page A

meeting with friends, though only he knows these are final farewells.
    June: Worried about mental illness of writer-friend Uno K ō ji (1891–1961), arranges for his involuntary hospitalization through Sait ō (“Life,” Section 50).
    23 July: Cheerful lunch with Fumi and three sons, andsocializes with visitors. At night, finishes aphoristic manuscript on Christ as a poet who had profound insight into all human beings but himself.
    24 July: At 1:00 a.m. gives aunt Fuki a poem for Dr. Shimojima entitled “Self-Mockery” with reference to “The Nose”: “Oh dripping snot! / The nose-tip all that’s still in view / As darkness falls.”
    2:00 a.m. Comes down from study, crawls into futon in room where Fumi and three sons are sleeping; has probably already taken his fatal dose of Veronal. Falls asleep reading the Bible; leaves testaments addressed to wife and old friends by pillow.
    6:00 a.m. Fumi realizes something is wrong, and notifies Oana and Dr. Shimojima; Akutagawa is pronounced dead shortly after 7:00 a.m. Poet and old friend Kume Masao (1891–1952) releases Akutagawa’s most famous last testament, “A Note to a Certain Old Friend,” to the press that day. The suicide becomes a sensation in the news, seen as a symbol of the defeat of bourgeois modernism at the hands of both socialism and rising state power.
    â€œSpinning Gears” and “The Life of a Stupid Man” published posthumously.
    Akutagawa’s cremated remains are interred at Tokyo’s Jigenji Temple. The plot later receives ashes of adoptive parents, aunt Fuki, son Takashi (d. 1945, student draftee killed in Burma), wife, and actor and director son Hiroshi (d. 1981). Composer son Yasushi (d. 1989) in his own separate family plot in the cemetery.
    Literary friend and publisher Kikuchi Kan (1888–1948) establishes biannual Akutagawa Prize in 1935 to memorialize Akutagawa and promote Kikuchi’s magazine
Bungei Shunj Å«
. The prize remains the most sought-after seal of approval for upcoming writers in Japan.
NOTES
    1 . On Japanese era names, see the article “neng ō ” in
Japan: An Illustrated Encyclopedia
, 2 vols. (Tokyo: Kodansha Ltd., 1993), 2:1073.
    2 . Like the haiku poet Bash ō , Natsume S ō seki is known by his literary sobriquet “S ō seki,” rather than his family name.

Introduction
    Akutagawa Ry Å« nosuke: Downfall of the Chosen
    In Japan, Akutagawa Ry Å« nosuke is a writer of genuinely national stature. If a poll were taken to choose the ten most important “Japanese national writers” since the advent of the modern period in 1868, Akutagawa would undoubtedly be one of them. He might even squeeze in among the top five. 1
    But what, in the most concrete terms, is a “writer of national stature” in Japan?
    Such a writer would necessarily have left us works of the first rank that vividly reflect the mentality of the Japanese people of his or her age. This is the most essential point. Of course the works themselves—or at least the writer’s most representative works—must not only be exceptional, they must have the depth and power to survive at least a quarter century after the writer’s death.
    The second important point would be that the writer’s character or life should have inspired widespread respect or strong sympathy. Not that the author would have to be a person of high moral character; some exceptional writers (I will not name them here) have had questions raised about aspects of their private lives. But to be of national stature, they would have garnered the approval and sense of identification of many people with regard to their principled devotion to literature and general world view. 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