Demands from urban Japan
Akutagawa Ryunosuke was born in 1892 and died in 1927. Akutagawa stands as the representative writer of the Taisho period (1912-26). Like Soseki Natsume, his life bookended an era. In Soseki’s Meiji period the emperor was restored as head of state and Japan industrialized at a blistering pace. The formula of “Japanese Spirit, Western Technology” seemed to work. Japan had heavy industry, rail, and a banking infrastructure. With a strong army and navy, Japan had established itself as a world power. But Soseki probed the shallow nature of “progress” and notions of individual happiness that threatened to disregard Japan’s cultural history.
In Akutagawa’s Taisho period, democracy had been expanded with the institution of full manhood suffrage and party cabinets. Greater wealth, an exposure to the rest of the world, the Russian Revolution (1917), and relative stability led to an easing of social rules and a greater demand for individual and worker rights. Akutagawa’s death marks the end of the cultural openness of the so-called Taisho Democracy and the eventual transition to a military authoritarian regime.
An artist’s depiction of urban life
Akutagawa depicts the urbane spirit of his times in the comical short story “Green Onions.” Framed as a story about writing a story, this cheeky writer/narrator focuses on the interior life of a single young woman living in the big city. The author frets about his deadline and relates her story in a colloquial tone which is a self-conscious stream of consciousness.
This subject of a young woman in love reflects the period as people were moving in the cities for work. The constraining yet organizing bonds of family and community had less of a grip for many and casual encounters, like between the heroine and her would-be lover, were more prominent.
In addition to the Japanese art this waitress adores, Akutagawa lists the foreign influences that plaster her room and pique her interest and not much differentiation is made between foreign and Japanese, which was a new sensibility for the educated and city dwellers. The joke in the end–spoiler alert–is that the price of vegetables, a long-standing concern in the period, was more of a concern than this chance encounter.