Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, the master of the Japanese short story who taught readers to doubt every witness

Ryūnosuke Akutagawa

Photo: Unknown authorUnknown author / Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	March 1, 1892 Kyōbashi, Tokyo, Japan
Died	July 24, 1927 (35)
Occupation	Writer

Every summer, on the anniversary of his death, a small crowd gathers in Tabata, the hillside Tokyo neighbourhood where Ryūnosuke Akutagawa lived and wrote, to remember him. They call the day Kappa-ki, after the water imp he loved to draw and the satirical novella Kappa that he finished a few months before he died. In the summer before the centenary of his death, the gathering was bigger than usual: in the Buddhist count it marked his hundredth memorial, and some four hundred people came to hear his granddaughter, Teruko Akutagawa, talk about the family’s memories of him and of his lifelong friend, Kan Kikuchi.

She left with a new title. Tokyo’s Kita ward has named her honorary director of a museum devoted to her grandfather, due to open for that centenary. In English, meanwhile, translators keep returning to him. Tuttle’s The Essential Akutagawa, translated by Richard Medhurst, gathers twenty-two stories, among them the first English version of his sardonic retelling of the folk hero Momotarō. Prototype’s Hell of Solitude, translated by Ryan Choi, goes further off the map, into minor stories, poems and short essays.

Choi’s book opens with a foreword by the translator Polly Barton, who notes that outside Japan his name tends to draw blank stares, or a vague memory of the literary prize named after him. It is an odd fate for the man often called the father of the modern Japanese short story, and for a writer whose plots have travelled further than almost any other Japanese fiction of his century.

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He was born Ryūnosuke Niihara on 1 March 1892 in Irifune, in the Kyōbashi district of Tokyo, the son of a dairy businessman. Months after his birth his mother, Fuku, suffered a mental breakdown, and the boy was taken in by her brother, Michiaki Akutagawa, whose name he took. The adoptive household was bookish, and he grew up on Chinese classics and on Mori Ōgai and Natsume Sōseki. The fear that he had inherited his mother’s illness never really left him.

At the First Higher School and then at Tokyo Imperial University, where he read English literature, he fell in with a group of future writers that included Kikuchi and Masao Kume. In 1914 they revived the literary magazine Shinshichō, and the following year Akutagawa published Rashōmon, a grim little story about a dismissed servant who robs an old woman stealing hair from corpses in the ruins of Kyoto’s great gate. His friends were unimpressed. Sōseki was not: when The Nose appeared in 1916, the most famous novelist in Japan wrote to the student to praise it, and Akutagawa was suddenly a name.

What followed was a decade of astonishing range. Many of his best-known stories rework tales from the medieval Konjaku Monogatarishū and other old sources with a thoroughly modern, sceptical eye: Yam Gruel (1916), about a minor official whose lifelong craving turns to disgust once it is satisfied; Hell Screen (1918), in which a painter sacrifices everything, and everyone, to finish a picture of the Buddhist inferno. He wrote for children too, and The Spider’s Thread (1918), a moral fable about a sinner climbing out of hell on a single silken strand, is still read in Japanese classrooms, as are Toshishun (1920) and Minecart (1922). He opposed the confessional naturalism that dominated Japanese letters, and preferred his fiction built, polished and ironic.

He taught English at the Naval Engineering School in Yokosuka before turning full-time writer, married Fumi Tsukamoto in 1918 and had three sons, among them the actor Hiroshi Akutagawa and the composer Yasushi Akutagawa. In 1921 the Osaka Mainichi Shinbun sent him to China for four months as a correspondent. The trip produced the travel account Shanghai yūki, later dramatised by NHK as A Stranger in Shanghai (2020) with Ryuhei Matsuda in the lead, and it broke his health. He never fully recovered.

Shortly after his return he published In a Grove (1922), the story that has done most for his name abroad. A samurai lies dead in a bamboo thicket, and a woodcutter, a priest, a bandit, the samurai’s wife and, through a medium, the dead man himself each give an account of what happened. The accounts contradict one another, and Akutagawa never says which is true. Akira Kurosawa fused it with the frame of Rashōmon for his 1950 film Rashomon, and the idea of irreconcilable eyewitnesses has been known ever since as the Rashomon effect, often by people who have never read the story.

The last years darkened. Insomnia, stomach trouble and hallucinations wore him down, and the late work turned inward and autobiographical. Kappa (1927) sends a psychiatric patient to a land of water imps whose customs mock human ones. Spinning Gears, written in his last months, follows a writer haunted by translucent cogwheels at the edge of his vision. A fool’s life, a sequence of brief numbered fragments, reads like a self-portrait drawn in flashes. That spring he also sparred in print with Jun’ichirō Tanizaki over whether a story needs a plot. On 24 July 1927 he took his own life with an overdose of barbiturates at his home in Tabata. He was thirty-five, and his final note spoke of a vague unease about the future.

Kikuchi created the Akutagawa Prize in his memory in 1935, and it remains the most watched debut award in Japanese fiction. Younger writers took him as a model; Osamu Dazai worshipped him and was shaken by his death. Readers now meet him by many doors: the Kurosawa film, school anthologies, Jay Rubin’s Penguin Classics selection with its introduction by Haruki Murakami, or the manga and anime series Bungo Stray Dogs, where a character bearing his name fights alongside fictional versions of his peers. The new museum will give him a permanent home in Tabata. The stories themselves, short, cool and unsettling, need no introduction to do their work. Read one, and you start to doubt the version of events you were just told.

Tags: writers, Akira Kurosawa, Osamu Dazai, Japanese literature, Rashomon, Ryūnosuke Akutagawa

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