Rashomon and Seventeen Other Stories by Ryûnosuke Akutagawa Read Free Book Online Page A

”), “The Martyr” (“H ō ky ō nin no shi”)
    Rashomon and Other Stories
, tr. Glenn W. Shaw (Tokyo: Hara Shobo, 1964). Essentially a reissue of
Tales Grotesque and Curious
    The Spider’s Thread and Other Stories
, tr. Dorothy Britton (Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1987). Contains “Tu Tzechun” (“Toshishun”), “The Art of the Occult” (“Majutsu”), “Flatcar” (“Torokko”), “The Dolls” (“Hina”), “The Tangerines” (“Mikan”)
    Tales Grotesque and Curious
, tr. Glenn W. Shaw (Tokyo: Hokuseido, 1930). Contains “Tobacco and the Devil” (“Tabako to akuma”), “Lice” (“Shirami”), “The Handkerchief” (“Hankechi”), “The Wine Worm” (“Shuch ū ”)
    The Three Treasures
, tr. Takamasa Sasaki (Tokyo: Hokuseido, 1951). Contains “Tu Tze-chun” (“Toshishun”), “The Art of the Occult” (“Majutsu”)
STUDIES OF AKUTAGAWA
    Cavanaugh, Carole,
Akutagawa Ry Å« nosuke: An Abbreviated Life
(Cambridge: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University, forthcoming)
    Hibbett, Howard S., “Akutagawa Ry Å« nosuke and the Negative Ideal,” in
Personality in Japanese History
, ed. Albert M. Craig and Donald H. Shively (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970), pp. 425– 51
    â€”—, “Akutagawa Ry Å« nosuke,” in
Modern Japanese Writers
, ed. Jay Rubin (New York: Scribner’s, 2001), pp. 19– 30
    Keene, Donald,
Dawn to the West: Japanese Literature of the Modern Era
(New York: Holt Rinehart and Winston, 1984), pp. 556– 93
    Lippitt, Seiji M., “The Disintegrating Machinery of the Modern: Akutagawa Ry Å« nosuke’s Late Writings,”
Journal of Asian Studies
58, no. 1 (1999), pp. 27–50
    Yu, Beongcheon,
Akutagawa: An Introduction
(Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1972)

Translator’s Note
    (New readers are advised that this section discusses
details of the plots
.)
    The stories in this volume have been arranged in chronological order according to the time of their setting rather than the order of their publication, and the part titles are my own. Except as noted below, the translations are based on texts in IARZ and compared with those in CARZ and NKBT. 1 The completion dates with which Akutagawa closed his manuscripts (usually month and year) are preserved here in accordance with customary publishing practice. So, too, are the various text separators he used in each story, such as the solid lines in “Loyalty” and the asterisks in “The Writer’s Craft.” The choice of stories is intended to reflect the great range of Akutagawa’s fictional world, based on my reevaluation of the complete works. Many of the acknowledged masterpieces are here, including the two on which the Kurosawa film
Rash ō mon
is based, but the important late novella “Kappa,” which is readily available in translation, has been excluded primarily because of its length. My reasons for including several less well-known pieces appear in the following remarks on the individual stories. I like to think that the Akutagawa presented in this book is funnier, more shocking, and more imaginative than he has been perceived to be until now in the English-speaking world.
A WORLD IN DECAY
    The Heian Period (794–1185) was Japan’s classical era, a time of peace and opulence, when the imperial court in Heian-ky ō (“Capital of Peace and Tranquility”: later Kyoto) was the fountainheadof culture, and the arts flourished. Toward the end, however, political power slipped from the aristocracy to the warrior class, the decline of the imperial court led to the decay of the capital, and peace gave way to unrest. This was the part of the Heian Period that interested Akutagawa, who identified it with
fin-de-siècle
Europe, and he symbolized the decay