The Life of a Stupid Man: Ryunosuke Akutagawa (Penguin Little Black Classics)

Product Information

Just as he reached the point of utter exhaustion, he happened to read Raymond Radiguet’s dying words, ‘God’s soldiers are coming to get me,’ and sensed once again the laughter of the gods.” Interestingly enough, he wrote these using third point of view as if it was another person but it was actually him. Maybe he tries to separate the creation he wrote about from his life but he knows so well it is him and will always be him. Akutagawa Ryūnosuke (芥川 龍之介) was one of the first prewar Japanese writers to achieve a wide foreign readership, partly because of his technical virtuosity, partly because his work seemed to represent imaginative fiction as opposed to the mundane accounts of the I-novelists of the time, partly because of his brilliant joining of traditional material to a modern sensibility, and partly because of film director Kurosawa Akira's masterful adaptation of two of his short stories for the screen. While the first story is mildly amusing the rest is unreadable. The title story is broken down into 51 miserable bites there is no coherent plot and why would one find his constant moaning of wanting to die thrilling. La marcada idea del suicidio que se lo llevara está presente, en “vida de un loco” ya que cuando envió este relato estaba implícita la idea de que esta obra fuera publicada como obra postuma, pero en los “engranajes” está constantemente presente la muerte de su cuñado, y como lo asecha como un fantasma, ya que él también tiene la misma idea, quedando sumamente claro al final.

The Life of a Stupid Man (Penguin Little Black Classics) The Life of a Stupid Man (Penguin Little Black Classics)

Why did this one have to be born - to come into the worls like all the others, this world so full of suffering?" But these "last words" are not words simply of self-loathing and self-pity. They are harrowing, but utterly honest. Morbid, but beautifully wrought. They are beyond class, beyond nationality. They are universal. Eternal. In their unflinching depiction of personal defeat, these works had their predecessors in Japan, notably in the later novels of Soseki, and their successors in the immediate postwar stories of Osamu Dazai and Ango Sakaguchi. But outside of Japan, perhaps only the prose of Kafka or the poetry of Celan bears comparison. This one collects “In a Bamboo Grove” — the source material for Kurosawa’s Rashomon — and two semi-autobiographical pieces. 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.

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. In “Life of a Stupid Man,” Akutagawa’s ego — the city-dwelling phantom that gathers his stupidities — is a literary construction submerged in fin de siècle ennui and despair. The melancholy Baudelaire and ironic Voltaire are its heroes. He felt something like a sneer for his own spiritual bankruptcy (he was aware of all of his faults and weak points, every single one of them), but he went on reading one book after another.” The manuscript was completed on June 20 1927, and Akutagawa sent it to another novelist friend, Masao Kume. In an attached note, Akutagawa wrote: "I am living now in the unhappiest happiness imaginable. Yet, strangely, I have no regrets. I just feel sorry for anyone unfortunate enough to have had a bad husband, a bad son, or a bad father like me. So goodbye, then ..." He envied medieval men’s ability to find strength in God. But for him, believing in God – in God’s love – was an impossibility, though even Cocteau had done it!”

The Life of a Stupid Man by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa | Goodreads The Life of a Stupid Man by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa | Goodreads

The lapsed Shinshichō was revived yet again in 1916, and Sōseki lavished praise on Akutagawa's story Hana (The Nose) when it appeared in the first issue of that magazine. After graduating from Tokyo University, Akutagawa earned a reputation as a highly skilled stylist whose stories reinterpreted classical works and historical incidents from a distinctly modern standpoint. His overriding themes became the ugliness of human egoism and the value of art, themes that received expression in a number of brilliant, tightly organized short stories conventionally categorized as Edo-mono (stories set in the Edo period), ōchō-mono (stories set in the Heian period), Kirishitan-mono (stories dealing with premodern Christians in Japan), and kaika-mono (stories of the early Meiji period). The Edo-mono include Gesaku zanmai (A Life Devoted to Gesaku, 1917) and Kareno-shō (Gleanings from a Withered Field, 1918); the ōchō-mono are perhaps best represented by Jigoku hen (Hell Screen, 1918); the Kirishitan-mono include Hokōnin no shi (The Death of a Christian, 1918), and kaika-mono include Butōkai(The Ball, 1920). I may wear the skin of an urbane sophisticate, butbin this manuscript I invite you to strip it off and laugh at my stupidity" 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.” First I have a question: why are people rating this so highly and talking effusively of how brilliant this is.Oh come on, killing a man is not as big a thing as people like you seem to think. If you’re going to take somebody’s woman, a man has to die. When I kill a man, I do it with my sword, but people like you don’t use swords. You gentlemen kill 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.” 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 ..." July 23 1927 was a day of record heat in Tokyo. Akutagawa, however, seemed unbothered by the heat and joked with his children over lunch. Throughout the afternoon and early evening he received the usual stream of visitors eager to speak with one of the leading writers of the day. After dinner, he finished "Man of the West", his essay on Christ as a poet. He then began to write a considered and lengthy letter to Kume, entitled "A Note to an Old Friend", explaining what he was about to do. In this letter, Akutagawa describes his meticulous plans for suicide; he had rejected drowning because he was a strong swimmer, death by hanging because it was unsightly. Having decided on drugs, he had then read extensively on toxicology. Finally, he gives his actual reason for suicide as a "vague anxiety about my future". El libro trasmite continuamente una angustia feroz, la muerte está a un paso, en una vida de enfermedad mental, ya con el temor desde pequeño de padecer una esquizofrenia como la de su madre, y así como terrible es la herencia y el miedo latente la padeció. And your point is what exactly? This book made me feel stupid. I just couldn’t grasp what the author was getting at for most of it. Well, all of it really. I don’t mind obscurity in literature. Sometimes I crave it. Sometimes it’s nice not to know what something means. You ponder it perpetually. As I’ve done with Kafka’s Trial and more recently the phenomenal Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner. I couldn’t tell you what either of those books is about. Nobody can, but arguments can be made. Interpretations can be made. There are ways of reading of them even if each and every way isn’t definitive. For books life those answers will never be had, and because if this they have an undying legacy and an unshakable place in the literary cannon.