Rashōmon and Seventeen Other Stories

Rashōmon and Seventeen Other Stories (2009) is a collection of works by Ryünosuke Akutagawa (1892–1927). I'd seen Akira Kurosawa's 1950 film Rashomon a couple times but never read the story on which it's based. Turns out that the film is actually more of a retelling of Akutagawa's 1922 short story "In a Grove", which is the second of the 17 stories in this book. "Rashōmon" the story is the first in the collection and categorized under the editor's heading "A World in Decay". This section also includes Akutagawa's fantastically imaginative tales "The Nose" and "Hell Screen", the latter of which recounts the degenerating sanity of a renowned artist ("the greatest painter in the land") who is commissioned to paint his vision of Buddhist hell on a folded screen. The artist becomes obsessed with accuracy and truth in his work, and this eventually drives him over the edge.

The other sections are: "Under the Sword", "Modern Tragicomedy", and "Akutagawa's Own Story". And reading through these subsets of stories you get a good sense of this troubled author's rise to literary success and fall due to drugs and mental instability ("wracked nerves" as he describes it) before he committed suicide at the age of 35. He was considered a prodigy in his youth, publishing in popular magazines and newspapers and gaining the respect of celebrated Japanese writers, and then later tried his pen at different types of writing (tragicomedy, autobiography, perhaps a play he might've burned, etc.), and then finally published (some posthumously) what reads like diary excerpts, many of which are dark and at times cryptic.

I really enjoyed the collection for how it reflects this arc that was Akutagawa's life. He was a painstakingly honest writer, not only in terms of conveying his sensitivities but also in delivering highly textured, authentic images through language. He was quite modern in terms of style as well. I found it remarkable that the stories had been written around a hundred years ago. Also, Akutagawa was terrified of going insane. His mother went mad during his adolescence, and a fear of insanity creeps into a number of these stories. The first and final parts of the book are most absorbing. The first for its strong descriptions and elements of horror and the latter for Akutagawa's honesty (albeit in third person) in his writing at great depths about his own life and suffering, with "The Life of a Stupid Man" and "Spinning Gears" especially standing out. The cover art is impressive too, and I like the paperback's uncut-style pages and the book's introduction by Haruki Murakami.

Akutagawa Ryūnosuke

Star

Star (1960), recently translated into English for a release in April of this year, is a novella by Yukio Mishima written in the first person and about celebrity and the exclusivity, pressures, and pleasures of stardom. A young man contemplates his experience of acting in a yakuza film, his rising fame, and his life off the set. Mishima wrote it soon after or during the filming of Afraid to Die (1960), in which he starred. The novella was originally published in a Japanese magazine.

The novella takes about an hour to read. What I found interesting is that it's somewhat of a memoir disguised as fiction. Mishima's protagonist here, who goes by the name Richie, philosophizes on super stardom and later comes to a conclusion that life is pretty much meaningless. He is regularly sent love letters from his young admirers, and he too adores his godlike status, telling us that the "worst" thing is to see his promotional poster face down on the street after a gust of wind. Towards the end, Richie mulls over the idea of killing himself, and sees an older celebrity, whose age he'd never hope to reach. Reading these parts it's hard not to think Richie is Mishima, suffering with thoughts of ending his life back then, a decade before he performed seppuku on a balcony at the Ichigaya Camp in 1970.

After watching Afraid to Die and reading Star, I read through a bunch of bits and pieces about Mishima online and discovered that he'd been raised in an area three blocks away from the office building where I work, in the Yotsuya area of Shinjuku. So on my lunch break I walked down there (like down into a valley) to see if I could find the address, realizing of course that the actual place where he'd grown up had very likely been torn down long ago and replaced with something else.

At the address was a lackluster three- or four-story apartment building, maybe with six flats at most. Behind it was a tiny art gallery with a damp concrete, basement-like or garage-like feel. This was just inside a little side street that dead-ended at a house on the slope of a rather steep hill. It really felt like I was at the bottom of the neighborhood, in this otherwise hilly area not quite between Yotsuya-sanchōme Station and Akebonobashi Station but a few blocks closer towards Shinjuku proper.

There's a graveyard down there too and a lonely park with a five-foot weathered totem pole for whatever reason. Anyway, I went into the gallery since the sliding door was open and I figured somebody would be inside and behind the hanging curtain, and they might be able to confirm I was at the right location. There were a couple dozen framed photographs on the wall, nothing striking. Sumimasen, I said, and then said it again, hoping whoever was in charge would appear from behind the curtain.

A timid woman stepped out and then stood leaning away from me as if I were about to leap at her or make off with one of the dull pictures. I asked her in Japanese if she knew if this was the spot where Yukio Mishima had lived as a boy. Despite my best Japanese, she gave me a quizzical look, as though I'd stuffed a sock in my mouth before asking an odd question. Long story short, she had no idea if someone named Yukio Mishima had lived there or lived there now. No idea. Arigato gozaimasu, I said with a quick bow. Shitsureishimashita. And up out of that gloomy deep neighborhood I went, back to my office. It was a lovely day for a walk, though. And the sun felt warmer once I'd left what may or may not have been the place where Mishima dreamed as a child.

After the Quake

After the Quake (published in Japan in 2000 and in English in 2002) by Japanese author Haruki Murakami is a collection of six short stories set in Japan right after the Kobe earthquake and before the Tokyo sarin gas attacks in 1995. They're all very Murakami in his bright and breezy style and humor mixed with sentiment and mostly young characters finding themselves in surprising and typically bizarre situations. In "Super-Frog Saves Tokyo," my favorite of the six, a massive frog calls on a regular nine-to-fiver to help save Tokyo from an impending earthquake caused by a gigantic angry worm dwelling beneath Shinjuku. The story at the beginning is delivered like Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis” and later feels as if the frog represents a failing sense of duty in the Japanese consciousness, while the worm has been absorbing the frustrations of Japanese society (post-bubble) and perhaps some of its moral decay (it's under Kabukicho), with the end of the story interspersed with dream fragments. The other five have no to few supernatural elements, though they share similar themes, most prominent being that many of the main characters carry within themselves an emptiness that also weighs on them at this specific time, when they, and Japan as well, are at a crossroads. The characters and stories are quite memorable but also left me wanting to read them again.