Rashomon and Seventeen Other Stories Read Online Free PDF

literary sense to avoid such a dead end. In the first part of this collection, “A World in Decay,” the reader can enjoy several examples of Akutagawa’s works that adapt pre-modern materials to modern ends.
    One thing I hope to make clear here is that Akutagawa was by no means simply a modernist with Western affectations. He grew up in the “low city” (Shitamachi), the old eastern side of Tokyo where the common people had lived since the capital city of the Tokugawa Sh ō gun was called Edo and where the roots of Edo Period (1600–1868) culture were still strong. (The new middle class, with its strong individualist tendencies, generally preferred to live in the hilly “high city” known as Yamanote.) 13 From childhood he was deeply immersed in Kabuki, the popular drama that had continued to flourish in the low city, and he enjoyed the witty writings of the Edo literati. He also had a rich knowledge of the Chinese language and literature that had been indispensable to any educated person in pre-modern times. (The visual beauty of the Chinese characters that Akutagawa used deserves special mention, though unfortunately this cannot be seen in translation.)
    Thus, the fierce clash between the modern and the premodern was occurring not only in his relations with the world around him but deep inside him as well. The same can be said of the Meiji literary giants who had immediately preceded him—Natsume S ō seki and Mori ō gai, for example. East vs. West: for Japan’s budding cultural elite, whose stance was far from definitively settled, it could be fatal to lean too far in one direction or the other. As if taking out a kind of insurance policy, they had to strive to internalize both Eastern and Western high culture in equal doses so that they could be ready at a moment’s notice to switch from one to the other. There is an expression used to characterize cultured Japanese of the first rank:
Ko-kon-t ō -zai ni ts ū -jiru
(to be conversant with old-neweast-west), which was, for them, the essence of political correctness. It was precisely because he had thoroughly absorbed this kind of “old-new-east-west” education that Akutagawa could so freely switch between the pre-modern and the modern in constructing his own unique fictional world. He could just as easily transpose Western literary forms intact into Japanese, and this technique was another powerful weapon of the early Akutagawa.
    Sheer technique, however, though skillfully applied, does not necessarily translate into original literature. A fictional world that was not truly his own and that used borrowed containers would eventually reach an impasse and come to stand in his way like a high wall. Further pursuit of fictional method could only yield technical polish. And not surprisingly, the novelty would wear thin and readers would tire of seeing the same devices.
    For Akutagawa, however, after 1925 it was not possible to advance in the direction of writing purely modernistic fiction. He was already too important—and too old—to escape into sophisticated intellectual play. The era had moved on as well since his debut. The giant tremors of the Russian Revolution had reached Japan, and the dense shadow of Marxism had begun to stretch across the earth. The spirit of the age was edging toward a demand for “literature of substance.’People’s attention was beginning to shift toward a literature thatdepicted the burdens of life with realistic precision. In Japan, this new writing was called “Marxist” and later “proletarian” literature.
    There was also the “I-novel” (
watakushi-sh ō setsu
) to think about, a form that had been gaining strength in Japan since the turn of the century and which garnered the greatest critical respect as it became the mainstream of modern Japanese fiction. In the I-novel (orperhaps “I-fiction,” since the style was employed in