Rashomon and Seventeen Other Stories Read Online Free PDF Page B

both full-length novels and short, essay-like stories), the author provides a scrupulous depiction of the trivia of his surroundings, with an exhibitionistic emphasis on negative aspects of his own life and personality. This was the way Japan modified European Naturalism for domestic consumption.
    In this way, modernist fiction became the object of a pincer attack from both the I-novel and Marxist literature, which shared an inflexible emphasis on the principle of realism. Akutagawa, with his inborn quality of lofty detachment, could not easily contribute to either side. He could never fully accept either kind of bare-bones realism. What Akutagawa chose to do was to cloak human shame in the artifice of storytelling and a sophisticated stylistic technique: this was how he lived and this was how he wrote. The literary method upon which both the I-novel and proletarian fiction were based was fundamentally opposed to his lifestyle. Cornered by the forces of the age, however, and finding it necessary to weigh the I-novel method against the Marxist method on his own personal scale, Akutagawa inevitably inclined toward the former. He was far too skeptical, far too individualistic, and far too intelligent ever to believe that he could become an effective intellectual spokesman for the working class.
    Akutagawa’s later strategy was to borrow the I-novel style but to use it with a “reverse grip,” so to speak, in order to insert artificial confessions into this seemingly artless container. This was a sophisticated and highly risky strategy. But for Akutagawa, who needed “props,” it was probably an unavoidable choice.
    Works from his last two or three years are included here in the last part, “Akutagawa’s Own Story.” Together they comprisean introspective, neurotic, and remarkably depressive group of stories. Their somberness never degenerates into a mere blurting out of emotion, however, but stands firmly upon a foundation of Akutagawa-style artifice. Some works may have their moments of wheel-spinning, but each work as a whole retains its artistic autonomy. He may be writing something close to the facts of his own life, yet his stylistic control remains strong, and his writing reveals enough literary design to put the reader on guard: “You will never quite know,” he seems to be warning us, “how much of this is true and how much is fiction.”
    Opinion is divided as to whether these experiments of Akutagawa’s are successful as literature. Some say that these late works are his only masterpieces, while others say just the opposite. I don’t see either group of works as superior or inferior: each was conceived quite differently, each constitutes a wheel of the carriage we call Akutagawa Ry Å« nosuke, and each deserves to be evaluated on its own merits. Where the degree of literaryperfection is concerned, the early works have qualities to which the late works cannot hope to aspire. But in some of the late works—“Spinning Gears” in particular—the acuity of the protagonist’s vision and the elegantly spare style have a truly spine-tingling brilliance, and their meticulously wrought mental images attain a powerful reality that will long remain deep in the reader’s psyche.
    I read “Spinning Gears” when I was fifteen—some forty years ago. Reading it again in order to write this introduction, I was amazed at how vividly I still recalled many of its images. There they were still, in my mind, not just as flat pictures but in all their three-dimensional reality, complete with the modulations of the light shining into the scene and tiny sounds in the background. Even taking into account the fifteen-yearold’s special sensitivity to works of art, I believe we can declare such memories to be a product of the work’s innate power. “Spinning Gears” leaves us with the impression that we have just read the story of a man who