Question everything
Akutagawa’s earlier stories–he was mostly a short story writer–typically refashioned classical stories with modernist formal invention. Traditional source material made his work more palatable. However, this interchange between old and new was thematically relevant for Akutagawa. His most famous works “Rashomon” and “In a Bamboo Grove” are drawn from tales of Japanese antiquity, the Heian period (794-1185). However, these stories undermine the three principles that have come to dominate modern and classical Japanese literature: (1) Writer-narrator-character identification; (2) sincerity equals truth; (3) and the goal, if there is one, is harmony with nature and relations, and an emptying out of self.
Rashomon is the name of a gate leading to Kyoto in late antiquity. The gate was a part of an entry complex to the city but is damaged by the elements and thieves. The main character is a lowly servant who is struggling to survive from bandit attacks in a torrential downpour. He seeks shelter in the gate but finds out the gate is a storage place for rotten corpses.
As he tries to rest, he hears a sound and is shocked to find an old woman plucking hair from corpses to make a wig. Disgusted at her, and his state of poverty, he steals her coat, accepting his role of being a thief to survive. This story’s focus on the macabre and actions forced to go against common decency, signal not merely a goalless protagonist, but one that is merely cast into a set of circumstances. It is a vision not only goalless, but valueless.
Phantasmagoria
Akutagawa’s dark turn is reinforced in the salacious phantasmagoria “Hell Screen.” This story is also set in antiquity and focuses on a court artist who is ridiculed, but begrudgingly praised by the court for the quality of his work. The Lord commissions that he paint a screen depicting the eight regions of hell after the Lord refuses to return the artist’s daughter from the court. The artist pours his hatred at the court and the Lord into the painting. He is adamant that he cannot paint what he has not seen and asks to see the Lord’s finest carriage burst into fire. The Lord allows this but places the artist’s daughter in the carriage and she is also burnt alive in the carriage during the “ceremony.”
In Kusamakura, Soseki expresses that art and culture shape life and morals. “Hell Screen” suggests that art is the task of the enslaved to use the calamity of human life as grist for the edification of the powerful. If there is any “emptying of self” here, it is merely the destruction of what is dear in life by the powerful with no available resource for the powerless. Here, there is no harmony in Akutagawa’s vision.
You Can’t Handle the Truth
The structure of “In a Bamboo Grove” takes to task the writer-narrator-character identification and the principle that sincerity equals truth. This short story consists of individual accounts of a crime in a grove. They contradict regarding the motives of the crime, the identity of the killer, and the location of the knife, arrows, horse, and rope. The last account from a spirit of the dead complicates rather than clarifies.
In this story, writer-narrator-character identification is exposed as a fiction as each account undermines the other and creates a rift between the narrators and their individual characters as portrayed by Akutagawa. All the characters insist they are speaking the truth, but after reading a couple, it is obvious to the reader that each is trying to secure an alternative motive or get off the hook. Sincerity does not yield the truth: Akutagawa exposes that it is clearly a fiction. That we witness this as we tally each individual account in a successive unfolding is the greatest feat of this short, yet quintessential modern Japanese work.
The filmmaker Akira Kurosawa combined “In a Bamboo Grove” and “Rashomon” to form the basis of his classic film Rashomon (1950). The film retains contradictory narrators. However, the film medium still adds some reassurance that there could have been a truthful account. Kurosawa’s work also expresses his humanism not apparent in Akutagawa’s darker works.
Akutagawa compromises our ideas of the good as tied to human ends by portraying how we ignore (“Rashomon”) or manipulate (“In a Bamboo Grove”) humans with or without an intention in mind. This is taken to an extreme in “Hell Screen” where a child is immolated to serve as a model for a devilish piece of art and to make vengeance on a savage lord.