On the night of July 24, 1927, Rjunosuke Akutagava he swallowed a lethal dose of veronal, lay down on the futon next to his wife, and fell asleep reading the Bible. The writer was 35 years old. Although he declared himself an atheist, he was obsessed with Christianity, and shortly before he killed himself, he wrote A man from the West, a series of fifty aphoristic vignettes in which Jesus Christ is an autobiographer, a writer who deeply penetrates all people except himself.
Akutagawa was a prolific and celebrated writer, one of the first modern Japanese writers to gain popularity in the West. He was drawn to The Son of God at a time when he was suffering from visual and auditory hallucinations, often accompanied by migraines. His wife would sometimes find him huddled in his Tokyo study, holding onto the walls, convinced they were collapsing on him.
A few days before his death, Akutagawa wrote a series of letters to his family and friends. At a packed press conference the day after his suicide, his friend Masao Kume read aloud a letter addressed to him, which, under the title "A Note to an Old Friend," later became known as Akutagawa's Farewell LetterIt depicts, with dark humor, the banal practicality that belittles the grandeur of going to death: problems with the rights to his works, the assessment of the value of his property, and the question of whether he will be able to keep his hand steady enough when he puts a gun to his temple.
The letter is also a description of the writer's inner world in his final moments. "No one has ever written honestly about the mental state of a man who intends to commit suicide," reads the beginning of the note. "In one of his stories (Henry two) Desert "...depicts a man who commits suicide without even knowing why," Akutagawa writes. "Most of those who commit suicide are, as Renye portrays them, largely unaware of their true motives."
Like the Christ-poet of his fiction, Akutagawa thought he could peer into the souls of all men except his own. Perhaps he could not look; perhaps he did not want to, for where there is motive there is also guilt, the very thing he wished to renounce in death. “In my case, I am moved by at least a vague sense of unease,” he writes instead. “I inhabit a world of diseased nerves, transparent as ice.” What he wanted most, he wrote, was to rest. In To the man from the West he wrote: "We are but fellow travelers in this vast, confusing thing called life. Nothing gives us peace except sleep."
Obsessed with sin and transgression
Akutagawa was born in Tokyo in 1892, fourteen years after the city became the new capital of Japan during the Meiji Restoration. His fifth story, “Rashomon,” published when he was 22, announced a strong, distinctive talent and quickly entered the canon of modern Japanese literature. Akutagawa wrote one story after another, and they were critically acclaimed—“The Nose” (1916), “Hell” (1918), “In the Bamboo Grove” (1921)—and many of them are still part of the reading list in Japanese high schools today.
Like Mane, who painted his French contemporaries dressed in historical costumes and posed in classical poses, Akutagawa often took characters from ancient Japanese legends and brought them to life with a contemporary sensibility. He was unsentimental to the core. In the story “O-Gin” (1922), he describes an orphan who, along with his Christian adoptive parents, will be burned alive if they do not renounce their faith. The girl is the first to renounce religion—not to save her own life, but because she knows that hell is where she will be reunited with her dead parents. The narrator—Akutagawa always has a narrator, even in the close third person—derides her as “the most shameful failure.”
Akutagawa's stories were written in the period immediately following the fall of the Tokugawa shogunate, when old customs were giving way to Western influences that were flooding the country in the midst of rapid modernization. Modern Japanese literature flourished thanks to a strong culture of literary magazines that published reviews and sometimes even entire essays devoted to a single short story. The tradition of Japanese first-person prose—autobiographical novels and short stories that often combined narrative with lyrical essayism—enjoyed great prestige within the bundani, a closed circle of intellectuals, critics, and editors in Tokyo.
Like the French, who admired the literature and art of the Tokugawa era, Japanese publishing did not make a significant distinction between the autobiographical novel and the memoir. The first-person novel was considered a quintessentially Japanese form, with roots in zuihitsu tradition from the medieval Heian period - a genre of autobiographical prose interwoven with lyrical essays, verses and literary criticism.
Like contemporary autofiction, first-person prose often relied on confession, especially unflattering confessions, by a narrator who was assumed to represent the author himself. Bundan praised fiction precisely according to how repulsive its characters were, because that meant the author was taking greater risks, the stakes were higher. In the novel New life (1919) Toson Shimazaki the author's alter ego reveals that he had a sexual relationship with his brother's daughter. In the novel A non-human (1948) Osamu Dazai The main character is a sociopathic misogynist, a renegade who ends up being locked up in a mental hospital.
Attracted by the prestige of the Ya-novel genre at a time when historical fiction was increasingly losing value, Akutagawa began, in what would prove to be his late style, to experiment with autobiographical short stories and personal essays. Through these texts we encounter a young man, witty and collected, erudite in a leisurely thoughtful way, unusually wise, but also prone to lust and ambition. In the story “The Life of a Fool” (1927), the narrator feels “pain bordering on pleasure” when he learns that his mentor, the legendary Meiji-era writer, has died. Soseki Nacume. Observing an iron sake bottle with finely carved lines, he experiences a revelation about the “beauty of 'form'”. Listening The magic flute completely alone, he knows that Mozart was a man who, like him, "broke the Ten Commandments and suffered for it."
In his farewell letter, Akutagawa is obsessed with sin and transgression. The writer was “aware of all his faults and weaknesses, each one individually.” He apologizes vaguely: “I simply feel sorry for anyone who has had the misfortune to have a bad husband, a bad son, a bad father like me.” From some of his autobiographical stories, published posthumously, we know that Akutagawa had a love affair with a poetess Šigeko HideHe believed that it was this affair, as he revealed in a letter, that had Riuičiju Oani, an occasional designer of his book covers, committed suicide. In the story "The Fool", Shigeko appears only under the pseudonym "crazy girl" and is described as a charismatic and vicious woman. "I have not tried, at least not consciously, to justify myself," Akutagawa writes in a letter to a friend Kumeu Masaou. “And yet, strangely enough, I have nothing to regret.” What emerges from the pages is guilt, but only because of the lack of guilt. One gets the impression that Akutagawa speaks in two ways: both as someone who resists and as someone who longs to confess, to utter mea culpa on your own terms.
But what exactly is Akutagawa (not) trying to justify? Centuries of classical Japanese literature, from Bedside books (1002) of The life of a debaucher (1862), had already normalized adultery. Perhaps a greater sin can be sensed in the closing lines of the story “The Baby’s Illness” (1923), in which Akutagawa describes the near-fatal illness of his newborn son. He admits that at one point he considered writing a sketch about the child’s stay in the hospital, but “changed his mind because of a superstitious feeling that if I relaxed and wrote such a text, he might have a relapse. Now, however, he sleeps in a deckchair in the garden. Since I was asked to write a story, I thought I might try this. The reader may wish I had chosen something else.”
Akutagawa's transgression is simply the act of writing, writing that chooses suffering as its theme. In his masterpiece Hell, Akutagawa allegorically depicts the sadomasochistic need to talk about pain. The story is about a Heian-era painter who can only paint what he sees with his own eyes. In order to paint a picture of people being burned alive, the emperor arranges for a person to be burned alive in front of the artist. The painter agrees, but only when the fire is kindled does the emperor, smiling, shock the artist by sending his daughter, tied to a carriage, into the flames. He watches the scene in horror, then in an emanation - "radiation of religious ecstasy." His finished painting, a screen of hell, receives critical acclaim. The artist hangs himself.
The painter reaches a breaking point when he confuses the reality he lives in with what he has artistically imagined. This is a frequent theme in Akutagawa's I-novel. In the posthumously published story "The Gears That Turn" (1927), the narrator, Mr. A, becomes convinced that they are in the middle of a specimen Crime and Punishment sewn pages from The Brothers Karamazov, which is probably a hallucination. Transparent gears begin to appear in his field of vision, spinning and multiplying, like the eyes or wings of an angel from the book of the prophet Ezekiel. “I opened my eyes, then closed them again as soon as I was sure that there was no such sight on the ceiling,” he writes.
The child of a “crazy” mother, Akutagawa feared in the years before his death that he himself would lose the ability to distinguish between reality and unreality. Probably all autobiographical writers experience, sooner or later, a moment when the play of imagination with memories begins to change what really happened. In Akutagawa’s story “Daidoji Shinsuke: The Early Years” (1924), written in the third person, there is a striking sentence: “He did not observe people in the street in order to learn something about life, but he learned about life from books in order to be able to observe people in the street.” In the beginning was the word. He was a writer who could no longer distinguish reality from the confabulations of his own mind.
"I sensed the hell I had fallen into"
Prema Aristotle, the heroism of the tragic hero carries within itself the seeds of its own downfall - a tragic flaw. The tragic hero from Nietzsche's The birth of tragedy (1872) has no flaws at all, only an inhuman, semi-divine excess, for which he must “forever suffer through suffering”. Nietzsche’s influence on Akutagawa, about which he often wrote, was particularly pronounced towards the end of his life. In the story “The Man from the West”, in addition to Christ, there are many other “Christs”, embodied in writers such as Goethe i The Victim's Turn. Because of their poetic nature, these poets must, like Christ, go through “the darkest, most desolate hour,” because “sentimentality is easily confused with the divine.”
In his farewell letter, Akutagawa writes: “I have seen, loved and understood more than others. This alone gives me some comfort in the midst of insurmountable sorrow.” It is precisely this divine ability to see, love and understand more than others that is his fatal transgression. In the postscript of the letter, he states: “Reading about life Empedocles"I realized how ancient is man's desire to turn into a god."
On the eve of his death, Akutagawa was no longer an artist watching his daughter burn alive; he was in the flames. In “The Turning Gears,” Mr. A. leaves the Imperial Hotel, where he is writing, and sets off on an endless wandering around Tokyo, over and over again, like Dante's the damned. “I sensed the hell I had fallen into.” Only a writer as torn as Akutagawa, torn between sensitivity and indifference, intellectual detachment and the illusion of the grandeur of his own suffering, could have sensed and conveyed his own mental illness as it unfolded. Akutagawa’s skill is unparalleled in his generation. He was a young man whose gift soared faster than he himself could understand it, let alone control it.
Deranged mind: this ailment that appears so often in stories has, since ancient times, been considered a punishment from God. (At least from Ingredients (from 405 BC, where Dionysus, in revenge, throws madness upon the entire city of Thebes.) “I was in hell for my sins,” Akutagawa writes. “I could not suppress the prayer that came to my lips: ‘Oh, Lord, I beg you for punishment. Refrain from being angry with me, for I might soon die.’” In the world of literature, Akutagawa, as he writes in “Daidoji Shinsuke,” “discovered his own soul, which did not distinguish between good and evil.” In “The Turning Gears,” he writes: “I have no conscience at all.” For him, writing is amoral; it has no other path than the aesthetic one, and that is precisely his transgression.
Connecting with the void
Every time I read “A Note to an Old Friend,” I see a different man. I see a man who convinces himself that he is a god, or a god who convinces himself that he is a man. I see someone who suffered a pain that surpasses compassion, immune to compassion. He fantasized about suicide the way other people watch television. A sensitive man, torn by his own gifts of wisdom, he rejected the compassion of others because he could not feel it for himself. Fear had numbed reason, confusing self-pity with humility. He wanted to be forgiven, but never apologized. He believed his personal mythology was public.
His only happiness lay in the ordinary details of everyday life. Jasunari Kawabata, the first Japanese writer to win the Nobel Prize, quoted a passage from the end of Akutagawa's farewell letter in his 1968 Nobel lecture:
If we can surrender to that eternal sleep, we can undoubtedly gain peace, if not happiness, but I did not know when I would gather enough courage to take my own life. In that state, nature became more beautiful to me than ever. You love the beauty of nature and would surely laugh at my contradictions. But nature is beautiful precisely because it catches the eye, which will not be able to look at it for long.
In these words we recognize the expression of the Japanese concept monkey not aware, the feeling of beauty that arises at the very moment when we become aware of its transience. Having decided to end his life, Akutagawa begins to see clearly the beauty of every previous moment, just before his disappearance. The things of this world reveal themselves as beautiful because beauty is only a mask, however thin, over the emptiness that gives it meaning. Did that make him stop believing in that beauty, which only appeared after the decision to take his own life?
Akutagawa may have felt a flicker of spirit that he believed could only be soothed by merging with the void. There's nothing particularly extraordinary about that, though. Sometimes you can see the void behind the snow falling over the river as you cross the Williamsburg Bridge from the subway. You either accept it or you don't. You can acknowledge the void, clench your heart, close your eyes, recite your gratitude list—and get on with your work. Most of us know how to do it. We do it every day.
(Glif editorial team; source: The Paris Review; translated by: M. Jovandić)
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