{"id":170519,"date":"2025-04-28T10:48:35","date_gmt":"2025-04-28T14:48:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=170519"},"modified":"2025-04-28T10:48:38","modified_gmt":"2025-04-28T14:48:38","slug":"man-of-the-west-akutagawas-tragic-hero","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2025\/04\/28\/man-of-the-west-akutagawas-tragic-hero\/","title":{"rendered":"Man of the West: Akutagawa\u2019s Tragic Hero"},"content":{"rendered":"
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A drawing of the Noppera-b\u014d by Ryunosuke Akutagawa, via Wikimedia Commons<\/a>. Public domain.<\/p><\/div>\n

On the night of July 24, 1927,\u00a0Ryunosuke Akutagawa swallowed a lethal amount of Veronal, slipped onto a futon beside his wife, and fell asleep reading the Bible. The writer was thirty-five years old. Proclaiming himself an atheist yet preoccupied by Christianity, he had written, shortly before his suicide, \u201cMan of the West,” a series of fifty aphoristic vignettes in which Jesus Christ is an autobiographical writer who has profound insight into all human beings but himself. Akutagawa was a prolific and celebrated writer and one of the first modern Japanese writers to gain popularity in the West. He was drawn to the son of God at a time when he suffered from visual and aural hallucinations, often accompanied by migraines. His wife sometimes found him crouched in his study in Tokyo, clinging to the walls, convinced they were falling in.<\/p>\n

Days before he died, Akutagawa wrote a series of letters to his family and friends. At a crowded news conference the day after Akutagawa\u2019s suicide, his friend Masao Kume read aloud a letter addressed to him, \u201cNote to an Old Friend,\u201d commonly referred to as Akutagawa\u2019s suicide note. The letter describes, in dark comedy, the practical banalities that undignify the grandiosity of arranging one\u2019s own death: problems involving the rights to his work and his property value and whether he\u2019d be able to keep his hand from shaking when aiming the pistol to his temple.<\/p>\n

It is also a portrait of the author\u2019s interiority in his final moments. \u201cNo one has yet written candidly about the mental state of one who is to commit suicide,\u201d the note opens. \u201cIn one of his short stories, [Henri de] R\u00e9gnier depicts a man who commits suicide but does not himself understand for what reason,\u201d he writes. \u201cThose who commit suicide are for the most part as R\u00e9gnier depicted, unaware of their real motivation.\u201d Like the Christ-poet of his fiction, Akutagawa thought he could see into the souls of all men\u2014except his own. Perhaps he couldn\u2019t look; perhaps he did not want to, for where there is motivation, there is culpability: precisely what he wanted to abdicate in death. \u201cIn my case, I am driven by, at the very least, a vague sense of unease,\u201d he writes instead. \u201cI reside in a world of diseased nerves, as translucent as ice.\u201d He mostly wanted rest, he wrote. In \u201cMan of the West,\u201d he writes, \u201cWe are but sojourners in this vast and confusing thing called life. Nothing gives us peace except sleep.\u201d <\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

Akutagawa was born in 1892 in Tokyo, fourteen years after the city became the new capital of Japan during the Meiji Restoration. His fifth story, \u201cRashomon,” published when he was twenty-two, heralded a force of emerging talent and went on to enter the canon of modern Japanese literature. Akutagawa wrote critically acclaimed stories, one after another\u2014\u201cThe Nose\u201d (1916), \u201cHell Screen\u201d (1918), and \u201cIn the Bamboo Grove\u201d (1921)\u2014many of them still taught in Japanese high schools. Like Manet, who painted his French contemporaries wearing historical costumes in classical poses, Akutagawa often took the characters of historic Japanese legends and reanimated them with a contemporary sensibility. He was viscerally unsentimental. In \u201cO-Gin\u201d (1922), he describes an orphan girl who, along with her adopted Christian parents, will be burned alive unless they renounce God. The girl is the first to renounce her religion, not to save her life but because she knows it is hell where she will reunite with her dead parents. The narrator\u2014Akutagawa always has a narrator, even in close third person\u2014ridicules her as \u201cthe single most embarrassing failure.\u201d<\/p>\n

Akutagawa\u2019s stories flourished during a time just after the fall of the Tokugawa shogunate, when old customs were falling away to Western influences pouring into a rapidly modernizing country. Modern Japanese literature flourished because there was a robust culture of literary magazines that published criticism, sometimes whole essays devoted to a single short story. The Japanese I-novel tradition\u2014autobiographical novels and short stories that often mixed narration with essayistic lyric\u2014enjoyed high acclaim with the bundan<\/em>, a coterie of intellectuals, critics, and editors in Tokyo. Like the French, who adored Tokugawa-era literature and art, Japanese publishing did not stake a meaningful difference between autobiographical novels and memoir. The I-novel was said to be inherently Japanese, dating back to the zuihitsu <\/em>of the medieval Heian period, <\/em>a genre of autobiographical storytelling braided with lyric essay, verse, and literary criticism.<\/p>\n

Much like contemporary autofiction, I-novel fiction often hinged on a confession, particularly unflattering, made by a narrator assumed to represent the author. The bundan <\/em>praised fiction for how unlikeable its protagonists appeared, which signaled a greater risk by the author\u2014higher stakes. In Toson Shimazaki\u2019s A New Life<\/em> (1919), the author\u2019s stand-in discloses having sex with his brother\u2019s daughter. Osamu Dazai\u2019s No Longer Human <\/em>(1948) follows a sociopathic misogynist, an outcast of society who is locked up in an insane asylum.<\/p>\n

Drawn to the prestige of the I-novel genre at a time when historical fiction was increasingly devalued, Akutagawa began, in what would be his late style, to experiment with autobiographical short stories and personal essays. Throughout these works, we encounter a young man who is funny and self-possessed, erudite in a comic way, uncommonly wise, and susceptible to lust and ambition. In \u201cThe Life of a Stupid Man\u201d (1927), the narrator feels a \u201cpain close to joy\u201d after hearing that his mentor, the legendary Meiji novelist Soseki Natsume, has died. Regarding a cast-iron sake bottle with finely incised lines, he has an epiphany of \u201cthe beauty of \u2018form.\u2019\u201d By listening to The Magic Flute <\/em>alone, he knows that Mozart was a man who, like him, had \u201cbroken the Ten Commandments and suffered.\u201d<\/p>\n

Akutagawa\u2019s suicide note is preoccupied with sin and transgression. The writer was \u201caware of all of his faults and weak points, every single one.\u201d He apologizes vaguely, \u201cI just feel sorry for anyone unfortunate enough to have had a bad husband, a bad son, a bad father like me.\u201d From some of his autobiographical stories, published posthumously, we know that Akutagawa had an affair with the poet Shigeko Hide. He believed the affair, as he disclosed in a letter to Ryuichi Oana, his frequent cover designer, led to his suicide. In \u201cStupid Man,\u201d Shigeko is pseudonymized merely as \u201ccrazy girl\u201d and characterized as a charismatic and vicious woman. \u201cI have not tried\u2014consciously<\/em>, at least\u2014to vindicate myself,\u201d he writes in a separate note to his friend Kume Masao. \u201cYet, strangely, I have no regrets.\u201d What comes off the page is guilt only for his lack of guilt. One gets the sense of Akutagawa speaking out of both sides of his mouth, of someone both resisting and desiring to confess, to issue a mea culpa on his own terms.<\/p>\n

But from what, exactly, does Akutagawa wish\u2014or not wish\u2014to vindicate himself? Centuries of classic Japanese literature, from The Pillow Book <\/em>(1002) to The Life of an Amorous Man <\/em>(1862), had already normalized the practice of adultery. A greater sin might be found in the final lines of \u201cThe Baby\u2019s Sickness\u201d (1923), in which Akutagawa recounts his infant son\u2019s near-death illness. Akutagawa admits that he had once thought about writing a sketch about his child\u2019s hospital stay but \u201cdecided against it because of a superstitious feeling that if I let my guard down and wrote such a piece, he might have a relapse. Now, though, he is sleeping in the garden hammock. Having been asked to write a story, I thought I would have a go at this. The reader might wish I had done otherwise.\u201d<\/p>\n

Akutagawa\u2019s transgression is the act of writing itself, writing that takes suffering as its subject. Akutagawa allegorizes the sadomasochistic desire to tell stories about pain in his masterpiece \u201cHell Screen.\u201d It tells the story of a Heian painter who can paint only from life. To paint a scene of people burned alive, the emperor arranges to have someone burned in front of the artist\u2019s eyes. The painter agrees, but it is only during the burning when the emperor, smiling, shocks the painter by sending the artist\u2019s own daughter, bound to a carriage, burning in flames. He watches in horror, then radiance\u2014\u201cthe radiance of religious ecstasy.\u201d His finished painting, the hell screen, is lauded by critics. The artist hangs himself.<\/p>\n

The painter reaches his breaking point at the moment when he confuses his life\u2019s realities with art\u2019s imaginaries. This is a common theme in Akutagawa\u2019s I-novel writing. In the posthumously published \u201cSpinning Gears\u201d (1927), the narrator, Mr. A., becomes convinced that pages from The Brothers Karamazov <\/em>have been stitched into the middle of a copy of Crime and Punishment<\/em>\u2014presumably a hallucination. In his field of vision, he begins to see semitransparent wheels, spinning and multiplying, like the eyes or wings of the angel in the book of Ezekiel. \u201cI opened my eyes, and shut them once again once I had confirmed that no such image existed on the ceiling,\u201d he writes.<\/p>\n

Born to a \u201clunatic\u201d mother, Akutagawa was afraid in the years before his death that he, too, would lose the ability to tell what was real and what was not. Perhaps all autobiographical writers experience the moment when the imagination of their recorded memories begins to overwrite what actually happened. Akutagawa\u2019s story \u201cDaidoji Shinsuke: The Early Years\u201d (1924), told in the third person, includes the memorable line: \u201cHe did not observe people on the street to learn about life but rather sought to learn about life in books in order to observe people on the streets.\u201d In the beginning was the word. Here was a writer who could no longer distinguish between reality and the confabulations of his own mind.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

For Aristotle, the tragic hero\u2019s heroism carries the seeds of its own destruction: the tragic flaw. The tragic hero of Nietzsche\u2019s The Birth of Tragedy <\/em>(1872) possesses no flaw at all, only an inhuman, semidivine surplus that requires him \u201cto do penance by suffering eternally.\u201d Nietzsche\u2019s influence on Akutagawa, of which the latter wrote often, is particularly legible at the end of his life. In \u201cMan of the West,\u201d there are, in addition to Christ, many other \u201cchrists,\u201d incarnated in writers like Goethe and Walt Whitman. For their poetic temperament, these poets must suffer, like Christ, a \u201cdarkest, most desolate hour,\u201d for \u201csentimentalism is easily confused with the divine.\u201d In his suicide letter, Akutagawa writes: \u201cI have seen, loved, and understood more than others. This alone grants me some measure of solace in the midst of insurmountable sorrows.\u201d It is his godlike ability to see, love, understand more than others<\/em> that constitutes his mortal transgression. The postscript to the letter reads: \u201cReading the life of Empedocles, I realized what an ancient desire it is to make oneself a god.\u201d<\/p>\n

By the end of his life, Akutagawa was no longer the artist watching his daughter burned alive; he was in the burning. In \u201cSpinning Gears,\u201d Mr. A. leaves the Imperial Hotel, where he writes, to walk in endless circles around Tokyo, over and over, like Dante\u2019s damned. \u201cI had sensed the inferno I had fallen into.\u201d Only a writer as conflicted as Akutagawa\u2014struggling between sensitivity and indifference, intellectual distance and delusions of the grandeur of his own pain\u2014could effectively sensationalize his own mental illness as it was happening. <\/em>Akutagawa\u2019s craft was unparalleled in his generation. Here was a young man whose talent had accelerated beyond his own ability to comprehend it, much less control it.<\/p>\n

A disordered mind: this affliction that so often appears in stories has, since antiquity, been sent by the gods. (At least as early as \u201cThe Bacchae,\u201d of 405 B.C.<\/small>, Dionysus casts a vengeful spell of madness upon the entire city of Thebes.) \u201cI was in hell for my sins,\u201d Akutagawa writes. \u201cI could not suppress the prayer that rose to my lips: \u2018Oh, Lord, I beg thy punishment. Withhold thy wrath from me, for I may soon perish.\u2019\u201d In the world of literature, Akutagawa \u201cdiscovered his own soul, which made no distinction between good and evil,\u201d as he wrote in \u201cDaidoji Shinsuke.\u201d \u201cI have no conscience at all,\u201d he writes in \u201cSpinning Gears.\u201d To him, writing is amoral, has no compass except for the aesthetic, which is its transgression.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

Each time I read \u201cNote to an Old Friend,\u201d I see a different person. I see a man convincing himself he is a god, or a god convincing himself he is human. I see someone who suffered a pain beyond empathy, immune to empathy. He fantasized about suicide the way people watch TV. A sensitive man distracted by his gifts of wisdom, he resisted the compassion of others because he had no compassion for himself. He numbed his fear with intellect, mistook self-pity for humility. He wanted to be forgiven\u2014but never to apologize. He believed his own self-mythology was a public service.<\/p>\n

His only happiness was in the mundane details of everyday life. Yasunari Kawabata, the first Japanese writer to win the Nobel Prize, quoted, in his 1968 Nobel Lecture, a passage at the end of Akutagawa\u2019s suicide letter:<\/p>\n

If we can submit ourselves to that eternal slumber, we can doubtlessly win ourselves peace, if not perhaps happiness, but I had doubts as to when I would be brave enough to take my own life. In this state, nature has only become more beautiful than ever to me. You love the beauty of nature, and would no doubt scoff at my contradictions. But nature is beautiful precisely because it falls upon the eyes that will not appreciate it for much longer.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Here, we find an articulation of the Japanese notion of mono no aware<\/em>, the perception of beauty precisely at the revelation of its transience. Having decided to end his existence, Akutagawa begins to see clearly the beauty of every prior moment in his life, just before its extinction. The things of this world are revealed as beautiful because beauty is but a mask, however thin, for the void that constitutes its meaning. Is this why he didn\u2019t trust the beauty that became visible only after his decision to kill himself?<\/p>\n

Akutagawa might have felt a tremor of the spirit that he believed could be pacified only by merging with the void. There\u2019s nothing all too special about that. Sometimes, you can see the void behind the snow falling on the river from the window of a subway car crossing the Williamsburg Bridge. You either make peace with it or you don\u2019t. You can acknowledge the void, clutch your heart, squeeze your eyes closed, say your gratitude list, and then go on with your commute. Most of us know how to do this. We do it every day.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Geoffrey Mak is a queer Chinese American writer whose work has appeared in\u00a0<\/em>The New Yorker,\u00a0the<\/em>\u00a0Guardian,\u00a0and<\/em>\u00a0Artforum,\u00a0among other publications. He is cofounder of the reading and performance series Writing on Raving.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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