Something Old

Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something Old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published four or more years ago.

 

“RASHOMON and other stories” by Ryonosuke Akutagawa (stories first published in Japanese between 1915 and 1922; first translated into English by Takashi Kojima, 1951)

Try as I might to be methodical in my reading, serendipity is often the force that leads me to a particular book. Case in point – I recently agreed to review, for a magazine, a novel about which I knew nothing. It was Patient X by David Peace. Only when the review copy arrived through the post did I discover that it concerned the famous Japanese short-story writer Ryonosuke Akutagawa (1892-1927). Thinking I should know something about this writer before I read the novel, I took off my shelves, where it had sat unread for years, a little collection of Ryonosuke Akutagawa’s work called Rashomon and other stories consisting, apparently, of the six best-known stories that Akutagawa wrote. They were translated into English in by Takashi Kojima 1951.

I read it with great pleasure.

            All of the stories in this volume were written when Akutagawa was in his twenties (the melancholy man committed suicide when he was 35) and all are set in earlier centuries, reflecting life in a feudal society. All are written with concision, in a spare and unemotive style that is simlar to early modernist stories then appearing in Europe and America. This is no coincidence as Akutagawa was fluent in French and Englsh, kept up with what was then the latest Western literature, and produced Japanese translations of writers as diverse as John Keats and Anatole France. Of which more later.

            But to the stories themselves.

This little collection opens with “In a Grove” and “Rashomon” – the best-known of all, partly because these two stories were combined by Akira Kurosawa for his famous film Rashomon, which is often regarded as the classic Japanese film. (Given that Rashomon was filmed in 1950, and released to great acclaim across the world in 1951, I assume that this is the reason why this translation was produced in 1951 – a sort of movie “tie-in”.)

“In a Grove” (sometimes called “In a Bamboo Grove”) provided the main plot of the film Rashomon. It consists of the conflicting reports of a bandit, a wife and her murdered husband (who speaks through a spirit medium) as to how the husband came to be murdered. Introducing the story, there are also shorter monologues by a woodcutter, a Buddhist priest, a police officer and an old woman – but essentially they simply lead into the testimony of the bandit, wife and husband. Understandably, this has become the world’s best-known literary reflexion on the slippery nature of  truth, and how difficult it can be to separate material facts from subjective interpretations. Because of the movie, people now often refer to stories that essay this theme as “Rashomon-like”, in the same way that stories about daunting authority are called “Kafkaesque”. What strikes me most about the story “In a Grove” itself, however, is how pared-back the prose is and how it verges on being drama – it could be performed on stage as an excellent dramatic reading by these different voices. Extreme emotions are expressed – as they inevitably will be in a story about murder – but that are expressed with great clarity.

The story “Rashomon” itself (it simply provided the “framing story” in the film Rashomon) is very different but equally effective. Told in the third person, it concerns a discharged servant, homeless and penniless, taking shelter in the great, but decaying, gate outside Kyoto known as the Rashomon. Aware that discarded corpses are dumped in the Rashomon, the homeless man is naturally uneasy and the story creates an eerie atmosphere bordering on the traditional ghost story. But this is no story of the supernatural. Reduced to penury, the servant is considering becoming a professional thief. A bizarre encounter (which I will not spoil the story by summarising here) toughens him in this resolve. Like “In a Grove”, “Rashomon” implies quite complex psychological states simply by showing precise material details.

I will not say that the remaining four stories in the collection are a come-down after these two, but none of then has quite the piquancy of “In a Grove” and “Rashomon”.

“Yam Gruel” is the lengthy tale of a humble government clerk in old feudal Japan, who is relentlessly teased and has practical jokes played upon him by his bullying colleagues. His one desire in life is to be able to eat yam gruel, an expensive dish which he gets to eat only once a year when it is served at a banquet for government officials. A fine lord overhears the clerk’s desire for yam gruel and promises to take him on a journey, to where he will be able to eat as much yam gruel as he desires. What follows is a long journey, with some possibly supernatural elements. All the while, however, we are not sure whether these are simply parts of another elaborate practical joke on the poor clerk. Again, I will not spoil the story by telling too much. It’s ultimate moral could well be that it is not always good to get what you ask for. More discursive than the two opening stories, it is amusing but without their sharpness.

Similar in its approach is the story “The Dragon”, turning on what is indubitably a practical joke. A practical joker puts up a sign saying a dragon will arise from a pond on a certain day. He has the pleasure of seeing other people taken in by the sign and awaiting eagerly the sight of the dragon. But he ends up unsure if he has merely fooled himself. At least in some sense this is related thematically to “In a Grove” – the power of imagination; the uncertainty of objective truth.

The other two stories in the collection are genuine oddities. “The Martyr”  is set in the days when Jesuit missionaries were at work in Japan. It is literally a story of Christian piety and martyrdom, with a miraculous element. Here, however, one wonders what Akutagawa’s own views on religion were – for parts of “The Martyr” could also be read as a critique of the lack of Christian charity among Christian believers. In this respect, I notice that Akutagawa was a translator of Anatole France, a jocular anti-clerical whose short story “The Procurator of Judaea” satirised the origins of Christianity, but who also wrote “Le Jongleur de Notre Dame” (“Our Lady’s Juggler”), a pious mracle story which also satirises the lack of Christian charity among believers. Did this tale inspire Akutagawa’s “The Martyr”? Possibly.

Finally what I would call the best story in this collection after “In a Grove” and “Rashomon” – the forceful “Kesa and Morito”. Akutagawa based this story on a traditional historical tale. The tale had been reworked by other writers. (Interestingly another classic Japanese film, made in 1953, Teinosuke Kinugasa’s Gate of Hell, was based on another writer’s telling of the tale.) Kesa is a married woman. Morito is her lover. They are plotting to kill her husband. But Akutagawa tells the story in his own way – as two long monologues, first by Morito, then by Kesa, as each lies awake thinking on the night before the planned murder. The resultant atmosphere is very much like a Jacobean revenge drama, or one of the better films noirs. The fact is, two people plotting murder can never be sure of each other’s motives and (given that one of the plotters is a married woman, who has already pledged fidelity to somebody else) each can never be sure how trustworthy the other is. So the two monologues give us their doubts, uncertainties and self-analysis. Do they really love each other? Is it mere lust that drives them? Is it pride? And so on. The psychological dissection is acute. Like “In a Grove”, I think this would work very well as a dramatic reading on stage.

Now what of those Western influences that I mentioned earlier?

In these comments, I am indebted here to Dr Osamu Shimizu’s learned introduction to the edition I have. Shimizu notes that Akutagawa’s depiction of an harrassed and downtrodden clerk in the story “Yam Gruel” was quite consciously copied from the downtrodden protagonist of Gogol’s short-story “The Overcoat”. Likewise, “The Martyr” follows in some ways the narrative arc of Anatole France’s novel The Crime of Silvester Bonnard. Most extraordinarily, and perhaps a shock to readers who see it as a piece of ancient Oriental Wisdom, when Akutagawa wrote “In a Grove” he was aware of Robert Browning’s (very) long narrative poem The Ring and the Book, which is also a series of monologues and which also raises the issue of the reliability of reported “truth”.  (I am one of the few people who has actually plodded all the way through The Ring and the Book – one day I might use this blog to inflict my comments on it upon you.)

Pointing out these influences is in no way to belittle Akutagawa’s originality or to suggest that he was merely “copying” foreign infuences. I used to shake my head at the number of Westerns that were rip-offs of Akira Kurosawa’s samurai movies. The Seven Samurai became The Magnificent Seven. Yojimbo and its sequel Sanjuro became A Fistful of Dollars and a number of other spaghetti Westerns. Elements of the plot of Kurosawa’s The Hidden Fortress were taken for the original Star Wars trilogy. But then I reflected that Kurosawa himself didn’t hesitate to use Western models. His Throne of Blood is a Japanese retelling of Macbeth and his Ran is clearly influenced by King Lear. And a bit more reading told me that even when he was making his samurai movies, Kurosawa was a devotee of Westerns. The simple fact is that cross-cultural influences have produced great works of art, and Akutagawa is simply part of this process. So rebukes about “cultural appropriation” be damned.

Really silly footnote: The copy of Rashomon and other stories which I have was printed in 1958. In it, the editors feel obliged to include a footnote explaining to English-language readers what sushi is. Somehow I feel that sixty years later such a footnote would be redundant. Is there any Western city now in which sushi is unknown?