The Life of a Stupid Man

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The sun threatened to set before long, but he went on reading book spines with undiminished intensity. Lined up before him was the fin de siècle itself. Nietzsche, Verlaine, the Goncourt brothers, Dostoyevsky, Hauptmann, Flaubert... You gentlemen kill with your power, with your money, and sometimes with your words: you tell people you're doing them a favour. True, no blood flows, the man is still alive, but you've killed him all the same."

By 1926, his insomnia was chronic and his fear of having inherited his mother's madness had become an obsession. There had also been a number of affairs and near-affairs with women, which left him with feelings of guilt. One woman in particular remained his private fury, the Goddess of Revenge, and the source of much of his torment. The following two stories are autobiographical and a bit harder to get your head around. Akutagawa has a reflective and delicate way of forming his thoughts and I suspect that the beauty of his writing got lost in translation, however, this is a wild guess and I have no way of actually validating this.In the third part, which has 51 stories, there seem to be the genuine thoughts of the author about relationships, life, death, and capitalism. Needless to mention that some stories were hard for me to draw any conclusion from them. Nothing to interpret. No logical conclusion to derive. Some of them even seemed ordinary to the extent where writing them seems unexplained.

I am living now in the unhappiest happiness imaginable. Yet, strangely I have no regrets. I just feel sorry for everyone and anyone unfortunate enough to have had a bad husband, a bad son, a bad father like me. So, goodbye then." The Life of a Stupid Man" is a harrowing summation of Akutagawa's life, told in a montage of 51 fragments. In its form it more closely resembles the film scripts he was also working on during these last months, "Yuwaku" ("Temptation") and "Asakusa Koen" ("Asakusa Park"), and betrays the influence German expressionism had on him. The sections describe books he has read and women he has loved, his fear of society and his hatred of himself, and every line reeks of defeat and death. Section 49, entitled "A Stuffed Swan", concludes: Apartado de esas historias feudales que lo caracterizan, nos encontramos con dos obras autobiográficas, por un lado los “engranajes” y por el otro “vida de un loco”, en los que trae una y otra vez su sentimiento de culpa, la depresión, y sus temores constantes de la enfermedad que ya atacara a su madre. Vida de un loco son relatos cortos, de un párrafo de duración en algunos casos, algunos sin sentido casi como un recuerdo que pasa, y otros que uniendo las piezas revelaban su vida privada. Akutagawa’s stories are fascinating because they each deal with themes of death and decay through the lens of everyday objects, nature, and human relationships. The stories are deeply embedded in the heaviness of feeling and human experience, putting into perspective the confines of a human life and how synonymous it is with the eternal ephemerality of “a drop of dew, a flash of lightning.” In the early hours of July 24, as a light rain finally broke the heat, Akutagawa spoke with his wife for the last time. Then, shortly before dawn, he took a fatal dose of the barbiturate Veronal. He lay down on his futon and fell into a final sleep reading the Bible. By the following evening, his death was national news. Friends and reporters rushed to his house. At a crowded news conference, Kume read aloud from Akutagawa's suicide note: "I am now living in an icy clear world of morbid nerves ... Still, nature is for me more beautiful than ever. No doubt you will laugh at the contradiction of loving nature and yet contemplating suicide. But nature is beautiful because it comes to my eyes in their last extremity ..."

Summary

It is in the next two sections where I believe the book has it’s greatest strength. Death Register and The Life of a Stupid Man are both autobiographical pieces. Death Register is Akatagawa reflecting upon his family life in the context of how all his closest relatives passed away. Sound morbid? It is. Akatagawa is regarded as one of Japan’s greatest short story authors and poets, however it is evident throughout his writing that he suffered from depression terribly.

The higher he flew, the farther below him sank joyd and sorrows of a lifr bathed in the light of intellect" Somehow, I liked this excerpt "When I kill a man, I do it with my sword, but people like you don't use swords. You gentlemen kill people with your power, with your money, and sometimes just with your words: you tell people you're doing them a favor. True, no blood flows, the man is still alive, but you've killed him all the same. I don't know whose sin is greater - yours or mine." pp 5-6. An anthology of three short stories, which two stories mainly revolves on the author himself, making it an autobiography leading to his death. Akutagawa's writing has always had a flair that is quite hard to pinpoint, but its one that I really liked. In this state he lived out the last six months of his life. But these months also witnessed a final creative outburst, as diverse as it was prolific, which included some of his finest work: criticism and essays such as "Seiho no Hito" ("Man of the West"), the stories "Genkakusanbo" ("The Villa of Genkaku") and "Shinkiro" ("Mirage"), and three masterpieces: Kappa, "Aru Aho no Issho" ("The Life of a Stupid Man") and "Haguruma" ("Spinning Gears"). Nothing like dipping into your favourite author's works when you're stressed no? I'm glad this was the last book I read before studying for my exams.

Retailers:

I may wear the skin of an urbane sophisticate, butbin this manuscript I invite you to strip it off and laugh at my stupidity" There was, however, one final piece. "Spinning Gears" is the story of a few days in the life of a writer. "Mr A", the author of "Hell Screen", is staying at the Imperial Hotel, Tokyo, as he struggles to write the works demanded of him. During these days, he is tormented by visions of his dead mother, a spurned lover, his own doppelgänger and hallucinations of rotating cogwheels. Everywhere he goes, everything he sees threatens him; books, taxis, airplanes and, particularly, the colour yellow. Finally, Mr A joins his wife and children at a seaside resort. He finds his wife face down on the floor, sobbing. He asks her what's wrong: "It wasn't any one thing. I just had this feeling that you were going to die . . ." Mr A/Akutagawa concludes: "I don't have the strength to keep writing this. To go on living with this feeling is painful beyond description. Isn't there someone kind enough to strangle me in my sleep?" As the critic Donald Keene wrote, "After reading 'Spinning Gears', we can only marvel that Akutagawa did not kill himself sooner." But that time was now approaching. In September 1926, Akutagawa had written a short piece entitled "Death Register" ("Tenkibo"), which made public for the first time his fears of having inherited his mother's madness. The piece ends at the family burial plot, where Akutagawa recalls a haiku: