I Don't Understand Akutagawa Very Well

Sometimes my essays are about art. I don't get to read a lot of fiction these days, but I've recently gotten my hands on a copy of "Rashomon & 17 other Stories" by Ryunosuke Akutagawa, and I found myself oddly driven to dissect my experience reading it. For the tl;dr portion of the readers: The stories I read, felt like a recollection of failures. I won't be going into too much depth for each of the stories, interested readers can go and read the stories for themselves, and I refuse to relive my school day assignments.

Those who also read my fiction writing might already know that this is an area I like to move in as well, especially for short stories. Still, more seasoned authors can do more interesting stuff than what I end up doing, and I aspire to be able to do that eventually, apart from my regular interest in the old literature. Rashomon was the first bit of (published) fiction writing that I read since that Spring Cleaning post I made in January, which is honestly a typical rate for me (March, at the time of writing). Of course that means that I like to think that I'm pretty discerning about which books I even start reading. Rashomon was a title that I knew mostly by reputation, and its short length left me somewhat surprised. It's not a light read, exactly, but it's manageable just by virtue of being less than 10 pages in my estimation. If I were to say which of the stories in the collection were most referenced in other works, I'd say "Rashomon" and "Jigokuhen", and of the 17 stories I do think they probably feature the most striking imagery. Well, with one notable exception I want to keep as a surprise for now. My sensibilities for non-European fiction are probably noticeably unrefined, I'm sad to say, aligning mostly with works that have been at least composed with a Western audience in mind - right up until it's marketed towards US-audiences, at which point my stomach starts doing an unsubtle anti-imperialism dance. Akutagawa's writing then left me a little cold and mostly without strong opinion. I might be lacking the cultural context, and especially the emotional connection to the settings and history that composed the background on which the short stories were built.

Still, finishing my read I felt there was a certain spark of commonality in the stories. A "colour" of sorts. His writing feels like reading the diary of a chronically worried, if not depressed person, which makes sense given his personal history. The stories are often bleak, but filled with notions of self-reflection of the characters. In Rashomon, the protagonist is reminded by an old woman gathering hair off corpses to make wigs, that in dire situations, the consideration of what is "right" or "wrong" becomes somewhat irrelevant. The protagonist agrees and proceeds to steal her clothes. It's a heel-turn if I've ever seen one. In Jigokuhen the protagonist is aware of his own flaws and urges, which by all rights probably aren't worth following for the sake of an illustrated paper screen, but he continues to do so up until the point of him making a deal to see a woman burned alive. These are the kinds of people that are centered in these stories, leading to a chilling view of the human conditions.

To be perfectly fair to Akutagawa, the Penguin-House edition partitions the collections into four parts (of which I'll write on the first three): A World in Decay, Under the Sword, Modern Tragicomedy, and Akutawa's Own Story. Both Rashomon and Jigokuhen are sorted into the first part. His other very famous works "Hana" (The Nose) and "Kumo no Ito" (Spider's Thread) are also sorted into the first part, so that seems to have been his most prolific theme. Kumo no Ito doesn't seem contain such a turn though, at least not as far as I can tell. The protagonist finds himself in hell after the end of his life, but he spots a spider's thread from above. He begins climbing it, hoping to escape it. Below him, other souls attempt to do the same after him, and he fears that the thread might snap under the weight. He tells them to wait until he reaches the end of the thread, and then climb it one by one. He kicks at the souls below him and the thread snaps.

A very arduous attempt to find the turn might point at the concept of fate, i.e. the assumption that the spider's thread can be climbed in the first place, and deciding that the souls beneath him would cause the thread to snap was maybe a little poorly conceived, but it's not necessarily wrong. Inconsistent maybe, but not really wrong. If this is actually what Akutagawa meant, then I guess we can only ever disagree, but I don't really think so. If that had been the case, he might at least have let some souls climb up the thread before the protagonist to stress the point. On the other hand, I have trouble placing Kumo no Ito in terms of point anyways, except for the imagery, so maybe that really was the point of it and Penguin House included it just to include it. I think it might be fair to consider stories of this type his "main body of work". Well, that and his semi-autobiographical short stories, denoted as "Akutagawa's Own Story" in the Penguin House edition. They have very striking imagery, but they fail to capture me for longer time - maybe with the exception of Jigokuhen, which has the advantage of coming in several parts, each the length of some of the shorter stories.

My personal favourite though came from the Tragicomedies. That is probably a surprise to nobody whose ever heard me recommend Kafka's Metamorphosis for ending for a genuinely funny ending. I'm a physics-head engaging with art on the side, so I don't have too much professional reverie of the texts I read as somebody who studies them might have. I don't know any language majors in person, so I couldn't tell. However, sometimes texts stick with me more when they're a little silly and I can pitch them to my friends in a way that makes them sound like fanfiction. In the case of my favourite story: "Horse Legs" I pitch it like this: "The arc is get horse legs, get depression."

I think that sounds compelling in a "what-am-I-reading" sort of way. The story features a man losing his legs, and them being replaced by the titular horse legs, followed by his struggles to cope with this change to his body. The story could be read under a nature vs nurture lens, and in this case nature very decisively wins, as his new legs begin behaving in very horse-like ways. The premise has certain similarities with Kafka's Metamorphosis, but in this case, the discrimination is almost entirely internalized. He spends a significant amount of time trying to hide his horse-legs from the world, but mostly his wife, who is a little shocked about seeing them toward the end of the story, but at that point the protagonist has already decided that both are better off leaving her. He doesn't give her the chance to come to terms with it, because he himself can't come to terms with it. At this point, the story effectively ends.

This might have been a mediation on Akutagawa's own struggles at the time. The story was written two years before his death by suicide, partially spurred by his worry that he might have inherited a mental illness from his mother. I think this, and the fact that he wrote autobiographical stories reveals a very open connection between Akutagawa's writing and the internal struggles to which there might not have been any questions at the time. "Nankin no Kirisuto" (Christ in Nankin) tackles the question of religious integration against the backdrop of Shintoism, a believe that features spirits that live in even the most ordinary objects, each with some modicum of power, which would have to contend with a God that purported to have made everything. It gets a bit muddled with questions of a sort of Shintoist theodicee, if I read the story correctly, but these questions are maybe what ties his story together for me. They are even present in Rashomon and Jigokuhen. In Rashomon the question is about when to abandon morals and in Jogokuhen it's about sacrifice for the sake of art, something not exactly trivial for an artist. Even Kumo no Ito might be "fixed" under this reading, though the question would be very much externalized in this case (i.e. the protagonist has no correct action to take, even though it's strongly suggested that he has).

Getting a comprehensive understanding about an entire body of work is very rarely a good idea, so I won't dwell longer on it. I thought it appropriate because of this "colour" I felt unified the reading experience, even if the stories were very different in length, concept and even in genre. Of course I read a translation as well, so I doubt it was the prose specifically. Akutagawa only lived to be 35, and his body of work consists mostly of short stories. I might read the rest, if I want to get a better sense for it, and check whether my interpretation fits them, but part of me will just have to contend with the fact that I don't really get a lot of these stories.