Rashomon and Seventeen Other Stories is an absolute gem of a collection. It showed Ryunosuke Akutagawa’s immense talents through his timeless short stories. Moreover, it bared his struggle as an artist and as head of the family to the point of his descent to madness.
I really love the opening lines of The Life of a Stupid Man go;
“He was upstairs in a bookstore. Twenty years old at the time, he had climbed a ladder set against a bookcase and was searching for newly-arrived Western books: Maupassant, Baudelaire, Strinberg, Ibsen, Shaw, Tolstoy…
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…
He took stock of their names as he struggled with the impending gloom. The books began to sink into the sombre shadows. Finally his stamina gave out and he made ready to climb down. At that very moment, directly overhead, a single bare light bulb came on. Standing on the perch at the top of the ladder, he looked down at the clerks and the customers moving among the books. They were strangely small – and shabby.
Life is not worth a single line of Baudelaire.”
That last line embodied his view of life.
Here are some of the books mentioned in Rashomon and Seventeen Other Stories.
Green Onions
- The Cuckoo – Kenjirō Tokutomi
- Collected Poems of Toson Shimazaki
- The Life of Matsui Sumako
- The New Asagao Diary (The American Diary of a Japanese Girl) – Yon Noguchi
- Carmen – Prosper Mérimée
Daidoji Shunsuke
- Nature & Man – Tokutomi Roka
- The Beauties of Nature – Sir John Lubbock
- Diary without Self-Deceit – Kunikida Doppo
- The House of the Dead – Fyodor Dostoevsky
- A Hunter’s Diary (Sketches from a Hunter’s Album) – Ivan Turgenev
- Outlaws of the Marsh – Shi Nai’an
- The Red & The Black – Stendhal
- Thus Spoke Zarathustra – Friedrich Nietzsche
Death Register
- The Story of the Western Wing – Wang Shifu
- Candide – Voltaire
- The Confessions of a Fool – August Strindberg
- Confessions – Jean-Jacques Rousseau
- New Life (Before the Dawn) – Shimazaki Toson
- The Inspector General – Nikolai Gogol
Spinning Gears
- Legends – August Strindberg
- Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
- A Dark Night’s Passing – Shiga Naoya
- Conversations with Anatole France – Nicolas Segur
- The Collected Letters of Prosper Merimee – Prosper Merimee
- History of English Literature – Hippolyte Taine
- Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoevsky
- Red Lights – Saito Mokichi
- The Brothers Karamazov – Fyodor Dostoevsky