The Life of a Stupid Man:

by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, 江田 あだむ (translator)

"Or Aoi's Life," one of Ryunosuke Akutagawa's representative works, was published in 1911 (Meiji 44). This work depicts the life of a man and explores human existence and societal issues.

Ryunosuke Akutagawa was born on March 19, 1892 (Meiji 25), and passed away on June 24, 1927 (Showa 2). In his short life, he left behind many masterpieces that have had a significant impact on modern Japanese literature.

22 pages, Kindle Edition

Published March 12, 2024

About the author

Akutagawa Ryūnosuke (芥川 龍之介) was one of the first prewar Japanese writers to achieve a wide foreign readership, partly because of his technical virtuosity, partly because his work seemed to represent imaginative fiction as opposed to the mundane accounts of the I-novelists of the time, partly because of his brilliant joining of traditional material to a modern sensibility, and partly because of film director Kurosawa Akira's masterful adaptation of two of his short stories for the screen.

Akutagawa was born in the Kyōbashi district Tokyo as the eldest son of a dairy operator named Shinbara Toshizō and his wife Fuku. He was named "Ryūnosuke" ("Dragon Offshoot") because he was born in the Year of the Dragon, in the Month of the Dragon, on the Day of the Dragon, and at the Hour of the Dragon (8 a.m.). Seven months after Akutagawa's birth, his mother went insane and he was adopted by her older brother, taking the Akutagawa family name. Despite the shadow this experience cast over Akutagawa's life, he benefited from the traditional literary atmosphere of his uncle's home, located in what had been the "downtown" section of Edo.

At school Akutagawa was an outstanding student, excelling in the Chinese classics. He entered the First High School in 1910, striking up relationships with such classmates as Kikuchi Kan, Kume Masao, Yamamoto Yūzō, and Tsuchiya Bunmei. Immersing himself in Western literature, he increasingly came to look for meaning in art rather than in life. In 1913, he entered Tokyo Imperial University, majoring in English literature. The next year, Akutagawa and his former high school friends revived the journal Shinshichō (New Currents of Thought), publishing translations of William Butler Yeats and Anatole France along with original works of their own. Akutagawa published the story Rashōmon in the magazine Teikoku bungaku (Imperial Literature) in 1915. The story, which went largely unnoticed, grew out of the egoism Akutagawa confronted after experiencing disappointment in love. The same year, Akutagawa started going to the meetings held every Thursday at the house of Natsume Sōseki, and thereafter considered himself Sōseki's disciple.

The lapsed Shinshichō was revived yet again in 1916, and Sōseki lavished praise on Akutagawa's story Hana (The Nose) when it appeared in the first issue of that magazine. After graduating from Tokyo University, Akutagawa earned a reputation as a highly skilled stylist whose stories reinterpreted classical works and historical incidents from a distinctly modern standpoint. His overriding themes became the ugliness of human egoism and the value of art, themes that received expression in a number of brilliant, tightly organized short stories conventionally categorized as Edo-mono (stories set in the Edo period), ōchō-mono (stories set in the Heian period), Kirishitan-mono (stories dealing with premodern Christians in Japan), and kaika-mono (stories of the early Meiji period). The Edo-mono include Gesaku zanmai (A Life Devoted to Gesaku, 1917) and Kareno-shō (Gleanings from a Withered Field, 1918); the ōchō-mono are perhaps best represented by Jigoku hen (Hell Screen, 1918); the Kirishitan-mono include Hokōnin no shi (The Death of a Christian, 1918), and kaika-mono include Butōkai(The Ball, 1920).

Akutagawa married Tsukamoto Fumiko in 1918 and the following year left his post as English instructor at the naval academy in Yokosuka, becoming an employee of the Mainichi Shinbun. This period was a productive one, as has already been noted, and the success of stories like Mikan (Mandarin Oranges, 1919) and Aki (Autumn, 1920) prompted him to turn his attention increasingly to modern materials. This, along with the introspection occasioned by growing health and nervous problems, resulted in a series of autobiographically-based stories known as Yasukichi-mono, after the name of the main character. Works such as Daidōji Shinsuke no hansei(The Early Life of

Reviews

[Gaurav Sagar · Rating 4 out of 5]

Life is not worth a single line of Baudelaire….


Albert Camus once said that suicide is the only serious philosophical problem which essentially means that the only question to answer in life is to decide whether the life is worth living or not, of course, he is talking about the philosophical suicide here. The thought stems from the absurdity of life which means that we always look for purpose or a grand meaning of life however, the universe stands indifferent to our pleas and provides no comforts. Camus says that there could be two ways of suicide- philosophical and physical, the philosophical one happens when we take a leap of faith, in other words when we go beyond rationality and incline towards faith. The comfort we seek for through our existential angst we find in the faith, which thereby dissolves the absurd of life. But what about the physical suicide? The moment we end our life we escape the existential angst since the absurd ceases of exist anymore. In other words, the being who is looking for ultimate meaning of life, and thereby encountering the indifference of universe towards it, does not exist anymore so without anyone seeking the grand meaning of life the absurd ceases to exist since it is the very experience of a man struggling against the indifference of universe or life. However, does it become too difficult at times to take a Sisyphean attitude towards life and thereby revolt against the absurd which means to be fully conscious of this absurd and accept the life as it is?


Suicide has been one of the most integral, though may be disguised, aspects of the Japanese tradition. Although there may be psychological, financial, and emotional reasons of the suicide but the suicide has been elevated to the level of aesthetics through Japanese culture and tradition. There have been numerous instances of suicides in Japanese culture wherein it has been associated with honor as we see with Samurais or Seppuku which has been observed with some of the prominent authors of Japan too. Japanese art and culture took suicide to the sacred levels which often conceal the dark secrets of humanity beneath the veneer of aestheticism. There has been a general tolerance in Japan towards suicide, one of the reasons of it could have roots in the religious faith since suicide is not considered a sin in the country which thereby does not put a moral forbidding to adversely inspire the conscience of people against it.



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Any specimen of a particular form of art may be considered to reach the sacrosanct and unassailable pinnacle of greatness not only on its merit (which of course is a prerequisite) but it also should traverse beyond the limits of the time to attain immortality. The devotion of a profound author towards literature gives rise to an alive prose which flows like a moving river and entices its readings and re-readings to stand with firmness as a great piece of literature. Such a literature should also be able to create a connect with readers on a broader level through a tender and defenseless thread of consciousness. We often say that any form of art such as literature is actually the creative expression of an artist but how could it resonate at universal level then, perhaps it sheds away our delusions about humanity and signifies that essentially, we all are same. Japanese literature has kept on raising the profound questions of humanity although with a delicate and silken touch as if dealing with the most dark secrets of humanity with an incredibly exquisite and beguiling treatment. But we all know that greatness demands everything such that your own life may be reduced to a mere shadow of the artist you are (as discussed by Borges in his stories such as August 25, 1983) as if you are just a mere custodian of the great art which expresses itself through you. After a while (post carving space for oneself in the realm of art) the being of an artist dissolves into nothing to rise from the mundanity of individuality and accept the role given to him as his essence.


The prose of the story is written like small sections reflecting upon various phases of life of narrator (appears to be a journal on prima facie, however, the narrator refers to them as parts of a manuscript), without a continuous stream of time though all these sections are arranged with temporality as if these represent the significant phases of the life of the narrator. It has been written in a manner to pull along the reader and actively engage him to use these sections for building the entire narrative. The narrator starts his tale mirroring the gloomy phase of his teenage echoing the elements of Kafkaesque universe reflecting upon the melancholy of life. The misery of his life is so profound that even love causes him pain since essentially sadness lies at the heart of affection. The autobiographical elements of the prose are hard to be ignored, the narrator echoes the talent of author to use his imagination for painting a vivid picture of his life, no matter how gloomy it may be, it is likes beauty with a tinge of sadness. He takes the wings of literature and art to fly high into the heavenly realms of art but the higher he flies, the deeper he sinks in the joys and sorrows of a life of intellect and charm. The narrator learns that great art may take us to the deepest corners of our soul which we may otherwise be unaware of, and that sometimes may lead to our most vulnerable self.


Our cursed narrator keeps striking against the endangered and unprotected corners of our consciousness and establishes that our birth marks the onset of melancholy of our life which is so full of suffering. The artistic inclination of his soul however keeps him going, he wants to live life so intensely that he could die at any moment without regrets. He goes every nook and corner reflecting upon his achievements, his passions, his disappointments, the summary of his life; but a strange sort of illness keeps sucking his soul, he realizes that he is ashamed of himself and afraid of society and therefore despises it. Amidst the soul breaking sadness of life, suicide comes up as an opportunity to break free from the painful ordeal of life, he knows once he manages to cross the uncomfortable short interval of pain he would enter the blessed refuge of death.


There could be numerous other reasons of suicide besides the aesthetic ones, as we have deciphered during the psychological study of humanity over the years. As humans we always look for validation and therefore look for acceptance in society, besides, in Japan it is considered above one’s individuality so the alienation may also shut the doors of life on us. The human relationships have always been complex as we know them; inherently we need the eternal connections with others to satiate our primary instinct of social connection and connectedness, however, at times these windows of connectedness may get transformed into cages of our souls which may try to break free through death. The eternal loneliness of human existence may become too much to bear at times for keep on living. Moreover, our brain may work in fuzzy ways at times as our all-other organs may do. There could be another strange possibility too which lies in our inability to outburst ourselves which means that we may be carrying weight too heavy for our soul but unable to express it through our forms of expressions such as art or literature, the existential suffering emerges from such gloomy ostracizations of our souls may characterize our self-triggered deaths.



The story has been written as a sort of memoir painfully reflecting the vulnerable psyche of the author. The genetic history of the author had not been too kind to him and the perhaps circumstances he lived in provided him no relief either. As we know that greatness demands great sacrifices, he took upon himself to devise the great piece of art which may resonate with the people of that age about the dark secrets of humanity. The line between sanity and insanity always hangs by a delicate thread of chance surviving against the razor-sharp reality of life. The stories of Akutagawa were affected from his mental instability and his health in turn from his stories, these stories demanded everything from him, in a way reduced his life as if the great literature he produced consumed his life and sucked out his soul. However, as a custodian of great art, he was unable to find a way to go on living without writing stories of his nature and once he failed to do so his ceased to have any meaning as if he was caught by some inner demon to write or the literature provided him some sort of refuge from melancholy of life and therefore as it ended his life could not go on.





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[Carla · Rating 5 out of 5]

5/5
Loved this collection such a good writing and interesting concepts