Santa Maria, Brazil, March 2026

Introduction

Akutagawa Ryūnosuke was born in Tokyo on the first day of March, 1892, and drank poison and died in Tokyo early on the morning of July 24, 1927. Of the thirty-five years of his life, lived almost entirely in that same Tokyo, he spent some eighteen mostly in school as a young prodigy and some eleven mostly at his desk as the fashioner and polisher of perhaps 200 overwrought short stories, of which this book contains eleven, translated into English as nearly word for word as possible.

His father, a man named Niihara Toshizō, is said to have given him the name Ryūnosuke (Dragon-helper) because he was born at the dragon hour on a dragon day in the dragon month of a dragon year. But his father’s part in the story ends there. His mother was unwell, and he was given in infancy, in the Japanese way, to her childless elder brother, Akutagawa Shōdō. His adoptive mother’s great uncle is reported to have been a man of fashion in the latter days of the old Edo period, but beyond this very frail hint, no home influence has been suggested as contributing to his genius.

When in the third year of primary school, bright young Ryūnosuke picked up Tokutomi Roka’s book of sketches, Shizen to Jinsei (Nature and Man) and read it with a pleasure that is said to have turned him to literature. He went into the First High School in Tokyo on recommendation without examination, passed through the school an honor student and entered the Imperial University of Tokyo, where he studied English literature, graduating in 1916. His graduation thesis was entitled, “Wiriamu Morisu Kenkyū” (A Study of William Morris).

He was like Morris in his surrender to the fascination of the Middle Ages, but he had none of the practical reforming tendencies of that artist socialist. He has been more aptly compared to Flaubert for the seriousness with which he took his art and the preciousness of his style. And the post-bellum point of view has been expressed by a Japanese social worker who, at his death, compared him, as a man with a keen sense of humor and knowledge of human nature and “an arbiter of elegance in the vicious society in which he lived,” to Petronius.

He says of himself while at the University that he did not attend classes very well and was an idle student, but we may take this for the expression of a sincere wish to be more like some of his hardier classmates, for Kikuchi Kan, one of them and today the literary Croesus of Japan, says that Akutagawa went to his classes faithfully and had the confidence of his professors.

Writing some time after 1921, Kikuchi said of his friend Akutagawa that, when he thought of him as he was during their school days together, the first thing he always saw was the bright spot his red lips made in his pale white face. Akutagawa was very quiet and self-contained as an honor student. He was always buying new literary books, and always carried one with him wherever he went. Kikuchi envied him the books but thought at first that he was trying to show off when he carried them about with him. And he disliked the clever remarks and paradoxes with which Akutagawa was wont to pepper his conversation. Later he admired him as a writer. His life, like his writing, was most meticulous. He had a good memory and was full of ideas and of a delicate understanding. He was doing, Kikuchi felt, the most artistic work then being produced in Japan, but he was too cold and intellectual. He played with life with silver tweezers, but never touched it and had no real experience of it.

In 1923 Kikuchi was writing again that he thought Akutagawa, who had turned down an offer of a professorship at the Kyūshū Imperial University, should be given the recently vacated chair of English literature at the Kyoto Imperial University. It was his opinion that Akutagawa, who always had hanging on his door the sign, “Sick, Compliments to Callers,” that he might have more time to read, was the most scholarly of the literary men of Japan. He expressed a wish, however, that Akutagawa would forsake Persia and Greece and their curios and devote more time to men like Marx and Shaw.

Kikuchi first came to admire Akutagawa when, with a few others at the University, they began in 1914 the publication of the third series of the magazine Shinshichō. His maiden effort appeared in the first issue, attracting no particular attention. But in the following year he published in the magazine Teikoku Bungaku two stories, the second of which, “Rashōmon,” became the title story of his first volume, published in May, 1917, and is now always associated with his name. It is a gruesome thing concerning the old two-storied south gate of Kyoto in the days when that landmark was falling into decay with the rest of the ancient capital toward the end of the twelfth century. By way of lame extenuation, this much, at least, may be said for the story (which is the fourth in this volume), that in other tales, Akutagawa has written with even more disgusting realism of this truly distressing period.

In December, 1915, while still at the University, Akutagawa became a disciple of the preeminent writer of the day, Natsume Sōseki, who probably had a greater influence than any other man on his literary life. Mori Ogai, the versatile army surgeon, who tried his hand at so many things in the literary field during the periods of Meiji and Taishō, has been credited with having had the next greatest influence on him.

In 1916, in a fourth revival of the magazine Shinshichō, Akutagawa published “Hana” (The Nose), the second story in this book, which drew from Natsume the highest praise. He told his young disciple that if he would write twenty or thirty more stories like it, he would find himself occupying a unique position among the writers of his country, a prophecy which came true. Out of old material, with the greatest attention to detail and to the atmosphere of the period of which he wrote, Akutagawa had produced a grotesquely amusing thing, writing into it some modern psychology and the little lesson that ideals are precious only so long as they remain ideals. This new way of treating historical material in Japan attracted the attention of his countrymen and became characteristic of much of Akutagawa’s work. Of this sort of tale, “Lice” and the Chinese story, “The Wine Worm,” go one step further in grotesquery, while “The Pipe” turns to lighter and more wholesome humor.

In 1917, when Akutagawa published his second volume of short stories, Tobako to Akuma (The Devil and Tobacco), he had already established himself as one of the foremost writers of the day. The title story of the volume is the opening story in this book. In it we see an Oriental saturated with western literature playing with an old theme in a highly amusing and clever way. (Incidentally Akutagawa was himself an inveterate cigarette smoker.) It is one of the many stories he wrote about the early Catholic missionaries of the sixteenth century, one of them so cleverly that it fooled Japanese students of the period into believing that it was a translation from an old Latin text, nonexistent, but called by Akutagawa “Legenda Aurea.”

Of the other stories in this volume of translations, a few comments may be of interest. Prof. Hasegawa in “The Handkerchief” is generally recognized as the distinguished author of “Bushidō,” Dr. Nitobe Inazō. “The Spider’s Thread” was written for a young peoples’ magazine. “The Badger” is one of those comic bits in which Akutagawa, making extravagant use of his wide reading, loved to play with a quaint idea in make-believe seriousness. “The Ball” is a recreation of a fragment of that strange and romantic period in Japanese history when, soon after the Restoration, the West was being swallowed whole, only to be cast up again in revulsion in the inevitable reaction of the nineties. The Rokumeikan was the, to later eyes ridiculous, center of the social phase of this effort, and Pierre Loti, fresh from the sordid little transaction in Nagasaki out of which he made his best-known book on Japan, makes quite a respectable hero there. Who could have been the original of Mōri Sensei in the character study at the end of the volume, I do not know, but I have seen so many Mōri Senseis like him during my years in Japanese schools that I cannot read it without a doubtless gratuitous, but none the less poignant, feeling of the futility of many men’s lives, or should I, in a very general sense, say, “of all our lives?”

Just before he killed himself, Akutagawa coolly set down at considerable length an explanation of the ending of his short life (naming all the suicides of Eastern and Western history, including even Christ) on highly reasoned and philosophical grounds, which do not matter much here, for the simple truth seems to be that he was at the time a physical and nervous wreck, having been all his life a high-strung and frail man. Though he mentions an unnamed woman as furnishing some immediate excuse for it (he was a normal husband and father), and though the poetess Byakuren has gone out of her way to drop a hint that this woman was her own very good friend Kujō Takeko, the poetess and woman of letters whom public sentiment has made the ideal woman of modern Japan, Akutagawa seems simply to have been world-weary and, after coldly contemplating death for years, not able himself to say exactly what did drive him to it. All that can be said surely about it is that it took the vast majority of his countrymen greatly by surprise.

Then here ends the story of a sort of literary ascetic, whose history, as one biographer puts it, is really little more than a list of the dates on which he published his stories and the names of the magazines in which they appeared. But there can be no doubt that he had more individuality than any other writer of his time and has left in Japanese literature a mass of artistic work, often grotesque and curious, that, while it undoubtedly angers the proletarian experimenters who now hold the stage and fight with lusty pens and a highly developed class consciousness against all that he stood for, will continue to live as long as men go on treasuring the fancies their fellows from time to time set down with care on paper.

The translation of “Rashōmon” here given was first published in the English study magazine, Eigo Seinen, in 1920, three years after Akutagawa published the original in his first book. “Lice” was published in the same magazine in 1921. I am grateful to the magazine for permission to republish them in this volume. I am once more grateful, too, to my very sympathetic Japanese colleagues, whom I have always used freely when, from time to time, dictionaries and my own imagination have failed me. And finally I am grateful to the author, whom, though his days of seeing and hearing are over, I here address as would a Japanese: Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, at last I am publishing the book I started with your approval years ago. May you find it pleasing.

Glenn W. Shaw

Osaka, June 10, 1930.

Short Fiction

Rashōmon

It was evening. A solitary lackey sat under Rashōmon waiting for the rain to clear.

Beneath the broad gate, there was not another soul. Only, on a big round pillar, from which the vermilion lacquer had peeled off here and there, sat one lone cricket. Since Rashōmon was in the great thoroughfare Sujaku Ōji, it would seem that there should also have been two or three tradeswomen in wide straw hats and men in citizen’s caps sheltering there from the rain. All the same, besides this single man, there was no one.

This was because for the past two or three years in Kyoto one calamity after another—earthquakes, cyclones, fires and famines—had followed each other in rapid succession. Wherefore, throughout the capital the desolation was extraordinary. According to the old records, things had come to such a pass that Buddhist images and temple furniture were broken up and, with their red lacquer and gold and silver foil clinging to them, were heaped along the streets and sold for fire wood. With the whole town in such a state, of course no one took the least thought for the upkeep of Rashōmon. So turning its abandonment to their profit, foxes and badgers found habitation there. Thieves abode there. And finally it even became a custom with men to bring unclaimed bodies there and leave them in the gate. Whence, when day had closed his eye, the place was abhorred of all, and no man would set foot in the neighborhood.

Instead, swarms of ravens from nobody knows where congregated there. By day the innumerable rout described a circle and wheeled crying about the ornamental grampuses high on the roof. Especially when the sky above the gate was aflare with the sunset glow, did they stand out distinctly like a scattering of sesamum seeds. Of course, they were there to pick the flesh from the corpses up in the gate. However, on this day, perhaps because of the lateness of the hour, not a bird was to be seen. Only here and there on the crumbling stone steps, where grass grew long in the crevices, their droppings shone in white splashes. The lackey sat in a threadbare coat of dark blue on the topmost of the seven steps and, fingering a great carbuncle on his right cheek, looked vacantly at the falling rain.

I have said that he was waiting for the rain to clear. But even if it did clear, he had nothing in particular he wished to do. Ordinarily, of course, he must have gone back to his master’s house. But four or five days before, he had been turned out. As I have already said, Kyoto was in unprecedented decay. And the dismissal of this man by a master whom he had served for years was one small ripple on this sea of troubles. Wherefore, rather than that he was waiting for the rain to clear, it would be more to the point to say that, driven to shelter by the storm, this lackey who had no place to go was at a loss what to do. Besides, the gloomy sky that day had no small effect on the sentimentalism of this man of the Heian period. The rain, which had been falling since a little after the hour of the monkey, still showed no sign of letting up. So the servant sat following a rambling train of thought on the one vital and immediate question of how he could ever manage to live through the morrow—that is, how he could ever do the impossible—and listened listlessly to the long rain that kept pounding down in Sujaku Ōji.

The rain, enveloping Rashōmon, mustered a rattling roar from afar. Darkness gradually lowered in the sky, and overhead the roof of the gate supported a heavy leaden cloud on a point of its obliquely projecting tiles.

For the accomplishment of the impossible, there was no time left in which to choose a plan. If he took time, he could but choose between starvation under some wall and starvation by some road. And then he would simply be brought to the loft in this gate and thrown away like a dog. If he did not choose—again and again the man’s thoughts went over the same winding way and arrived finally at this same place. But no matter how often this “if” came up, it remained still in the end but “if.” Even though he did not choose any plan, yet he had not the courage to make the positive admission naturally necessary to the settlement of the “if,” that there was nothing for it but to turn thief.

He sneezed a great sneeze and then got up laboriously. Night-chilled Kyoto was cold enough to suggest the comfort of a fire. The pitiless wind swept with the deepening darkness between the pillars of the gate. And the cricket that had clung to the red lacquer of one of them had disappeared.

Drawing in his neck and lifting his shoulders high in the bright yellow shirt which he wore under his dark blue coat, the lackey looked all about the gate. If he could find a place, out of the wind and rain and free from the gaze of men, where he could pass one night in peaceful sleep, there anyway, he fain would rest until the dawn. Then fortunately his eyes fell upon a wide ladder, likewise red, mounting up into the tower of the gate. Above, though there might be men, they were but dead men after all. Then, taking heed lest the great plain-handled sword swinging at his side should slip in its scabbard, he planted a straw-sandaled foot on the bottom step of the ladder.

A few minutes elapsed. In the middle of the wide ladder leading to the tower of Rashōmon the man crouched like a cat and, holding his breath, took in the state of affairs above. A ray of light shining from the tower faintly illumined his right cheek. It was the cheek on which the festering red carbuncle gleamed in his short beard. He had lightly calculated from the first that everybody up there was dead. But when he had climbed up two or three steps, it appeared that not only had someone above struck a light but that he was moving it to and fro. This was at once made evident by the dull yellow gleam that danced in reflection on the cobwebs hanging in the corners of the ceiling. Whoever had struck this light in Rashōmon on this rainy night was surely no ordinary being!

At last, stealing up with muffled steps like a gecko, the lackey, crouching, scaled the ladder to the topmost step. Then lying as flat as he could and craning his neck forward as far as it would go, he peered with dread into the loft.

He peered, and the loft, as rumor had it, was full of corpses flung carelessly away, but, the circle illuminated by the light being smaller than had at first seemed apparent, he was not able to judge how many there might be. Only, he could make out vaguely that there were among them both clothed and unclothed cadavers. Of course, men and women appeared all to be jumbled up together. And like so many dolls of kneaded clay, these bodies sprawled on the floor with open mouths and out-thrown arms in such confusion as to make one doubt even that they had once been living beings. Moreover, while the wan light played on their shoulders, breasts and more elevated parts, the shadows of their depressions were intensified, and they lay in silence like eternal mutes that had never known speech.

In the stench of decaying flesh, the lackey involuntarily covered his nose. But the next moment his hand had forgotten its work. Excess of feeling had almost completely deprived him of his olfactory sense.

For the first time he had just caught sight of a living mortal squatting down among the dead. It was a monkey-like old hag in a dark brown kimono, short, skinny and white-headed. With a blazing splinter of pine in her right hand, she was peering fixedly into the face of one of the corpses. From its long hair, it seemed to be the body of a woman.

For a space, the lackey, moved by six parts of horror and four of curiosity, forgot even to breathe. To borrow the words of an old writer, he felt that “the hair on his head and body swelled.” Then sticking the pine splinter into a crack in the floor, the hag took the head at which she had been gazing and, just like an old monkey picking lice from its young, began to pull out the long hairs one by one. They seemed to yield to her pull.

With every hair that came out, the dread seemed to depart appreciably from the heart of the lackey. And at the same time, intense hatred of the old hag was little by little engendered. No, “of the old hag” may not be just the right words. Rather his antipathy to all evil grew stronger every minute. If someone at that time had broached afresh the question which this man had been considering under the gate a little while before, whether he should starve or turn thief, in all likelihood he would have unhesitatingly chosen starvation. Thus fiercely, like the splint of pine the old hag had stuck in the floor, blazed up this man’s detestation of evil.

The lackey, of course, did not know why the old hag was pulling out the hair of the dead. Consequently, he did not know, rationally, whether her conduct should be set down as good or evil. But to him the pulling of hair from the heads of the dead on that rainy night up in Rashōmon was, on the face of it, an unpardonable crime. Naturally he had already forgot that a little before he had had half a mind to turn thief himself.

So, bracing his two feet firmly, he suddenly sprang from the ladder up into the room. Then, grasping the plain handle of his sword, he advanced with great strides up to the hag. Naturally she was startled out of her wits.

With a glance at the lackey, she sprang up as if shot from a catapult.

“Wretch! Where are you going?” cursed the man, blocking her way, as she stumbled among the corpses in a panic-stricken effort to escape.