Haunted by the past
Near the end of his career, Akutagawa Ryunosuke began to write shishosetsu (Japanese biographical fiction) despite having railed against this traditional Japanese form for most of his career.
Akutagawa’s personal life was extremely trying from a young age with the early passing of his mother, the incapacity of his mother due to mental illness, his own mental illness, bullying in school in his early years, the death of his father at a relatively young age, and his complicated relations with his adoptive family. His brilliance and artistry shine all the more.
In “Spinning Gears,” the image of flying wings or spinning gears return both in the mundane and supernatural within the consciousness of the narrator as he makes his way through everyday life. The origin of this “optical illusion” as he calls it rather skeptically is not so much as important as how this image follows him, how he cannot escape its unsettling presence, and how he morphs the metaphor throughout to meet his state of mind: the gears of modernity, the wings of Icarus, the Furies seeking his death, or his lover.
After getting lost on his way from the hospital, he encounters the Funeral Hall where Soseki Natsume had his memorial service. He says that he was not happy then either but had been at peace. After peering in and “recalling the basho plants at the Soseki Retreat,” he could not help feeling that a stage of his life had come to an end. The narrator states that he felt a presence had brought him here.
What is this presence? Perhaps it is the old Japan of the poet Basho and then Soseki. It may be the Furies making him survey his life before taking it. Regardless, there is nostalgia and a recognition that the aesthetic, personal, and communal values of the past have ended and that he, as the protégé of his master, had failed in his eyes to carry the torch into the modern world.
Death Register
Perhaps the most chilling story by Akutagawa is his most intensely personal and traditional story, “Death Register.” Written in 1926, the year the Emperor Taisho died and the Showa period began, this story chronicles the death of his mother, older sister, and father all the more devastating because of its plain naturalist description of those events.
In the last section, he stands in front of where they are buried in a section of a cemetery. He does not often come but came this time “perhaps because I was physically debilitated.” He says that he stood, staring, and wondering who had been the most fortunate and recalled the following haiku from Joso, one of the Basho’s ten wise disciplines:
A shimmering of heat
Beside the grave
I stand alone.
This had been originally composed when Joso had visited Basho’s grave when Joso was in failing health. Akutagawa concluded his story in prose by stating that he had never felt Joso’s words “press in upon [him] with the force they truly had for me that day.”
In this piece, which feels like his final one, it can be said that Akutagawa has created a haibun, a delicate weaving of prose and haiku. Even with as great a master as Basho, Joso may have seen his personal legacy and life simply as a shimmering of heat. Akutagawa feels the same way about his life when facing his deceased family and by extension his esteemed master, Soseki Natsume. This quotation, by this leader of the modernist avant-garde, in a story that strongly hits the three principles of Japanese literature, is resonant for the daring lack of irony.
Unlike Soseki, Akutagawa did not retreat to Old Japan. He did recognize its place and that it should not be disregarded even when living in and embracing aspects of the outside world.