The Father Of Japanese Short Stories & The Man-Made Wings Of Mental Health

Sips of Wisdom #4

Dear Drink To That reader,

Welcome to another edition of Sips of Wisdom.

This is a series in which I take a break from drink brands to wax philosophical about ideas and interesting figures who might help you in your day-to-day life.

This edition is built around the life of the Japanese writer Ryunosuke Akutagawa and the importance of a good mental health routine.

And what happens when you don’t have one…

There was once a man who flew too high to the sun. Not the sun as you and I know it, it was a sun of his own making, the distant light of intellect that he wished with all his heart to grasp for, but always seemed obscured by the darkness that he carried inside of himself. He was 29 years old when he chose to soar into the sky, to search for the brightness he couldn’t find in his life.

He built his wings off the backs of philosophers like Rousseau and Voltaire, philosophers who revealed the contradictions of his soul. On one side, he embodied the passion for humanity, the yearning for freedom of the former. On the other side, he embraced the unshakeable belief that unchecked optimism was something to laugh at, as the latter intended.

Painfully aware of the contradictions, the man found relief in the sky. The closer he got to the sun, the closer he got to himself. His true self. The self that wanted to live with such intensity that he could die without regret. But in the back of his mind, he couldn’t shake the image of being a comic puppet, dangling by the strings of the universe. For a fleeting moment, he’d been cut free, and all the responsibilities of his life seemed so small and inconsequential, somewhere far below him. His aunt. His wife. His children. His family. They were all very far away.

He didn’t know how long he went on flying. Or if he ever reached the sun. The wind screeched in his ears and a single thought flashed through his mind: It is unfortunate for the gods that, unlike us, they cannot commit suicide.

I was inspired to write this flash fiction piece as a collage of ideas from The Life of a Stupid Man, a short story by the Japanese author Ryunosuke Akutagawa. It’s a tale of a man who looks back on his life through fragments, each passage revealing a troubled soul that feels boxed in by overwhelming responsibilities and regrets.

By the end of the story, the protagonist is convinced there are only two choices for an escape from the pain he feels: death or madness. The author reached the same conclusion, as he tragically killed himself at the age of 35 by overdosing on sleeping pills.

Akutagawa’s mental health struggles are a familiar story among many creatives who feel as if the page is the only place where they can bear their souls and use it as a tonic to alleviate trauma. One of the most talented writers of his generation and of all time, Akutagawa was the father of Japanese short stories and through tracing his life, we see the double-edged sword that is creativity.

We also see a man who strived to reveal the contradictions of his culture through his work, the light and dark sides that exist within us all. We see a man who could make his readers think, laugh, rear back in shock, cry and dig deeper to find their own version of meaning.

The birth of the Dragon Son

The first of March 1892. An auspicious date in Japan. In the hour of the dragon, on the day of the dragon, in the month of the dragon, in the year of the dragon, the third child of Niihara Toshizo and Niihara Fuku was born in Tokyo. They named him Ryunosuke, Dragon Son, to mark the event.

But any happiness the family felt was cut short, as in the October of that year, Fuku went insane and for the rest of Akutagawa’s life she was kept hidden away in the family home.

Taken into the care of his uncle, Akutagawa Dosho, his wife Tomo and his aunt Fuki, the boy inherited the Akutagawa name. Between the instability of his mother and Fuki’s domineering presence, Akutagawa developed a paranoia that he would catch the madness of the former and be forever stuck with the latter. (His relationship with these women had a strong impact on his prose.) In his formative years he surrounded himself with as much art as he could find from both a Western and Eastern perspective through the help of his adoptive family.

The landscape of Akutagawa’s youth was interesting because Japan had already gone through enough change to have Western education and sensibilities stick. This meant Akutagawa didn’t only spend his time devouring Chinese classics and influential Japanese texts from authors such as Mori Ogai and Natsume Soseki, he had access to books from Western thinkers and creatives like Tolstoy, Rosseau, Maupassant and Dostoevsky, which he consumed with equal fervour, contributing to his identity as a modernist writer.

His first brush with education began in 1898 when he entered primary school and distinguished himself as an exemplary student. While he excelled in his studies, a mixture of illness and introversion kept Akutagawa apart from his peers and he experienced bullying. Perhaps to cope, he buried himself in his studies, learning about English and Chinese, growing in literary confidence, even through the traumatic event of his biological mother dying when he was ten. Akutagawa described her death as a slow three-day descent of wasting away.

He and his older sister Hisa sat by her bedside and on the second night Akutagawa’s ‘tears simply wouldn’t flow. Ashamed to be so unfeeling while right next to me, my sister wept almost constantly, I struggled to pretend. Yet I also believed that as long as I was unable to cry, my mother would not die’. On the third day, their mother passed with ‘very little suffering’ and although Akutagawa never felt close to Fuku, she lived on in stories like Death Register and Spinning Gears.

The darling of his age

1912 marked the beginning of the Taisho period, a time when Japan emerged from the rigid restrictions of the Meiji period and started to embrace modernism, liberalism and democracy. Akutagawa was on the cusp of seeing the immense vacuum of uncertainty that came from Japan going through an identity crisis.

Western ideologies were breaking down traditional values, while the country continued its rapid growth into a world superpower. Keenly aware of these changes, Akutagawa, like other intellectuals of his generation, needed to internalise Western and Eastern thinking and be ready to shift from one side to the other at a moment’s notice, an attitude he cultivated through his continued studies.

In 1913, Akutagawa entered Tokyo Imperial University, Japan’s most prestigious educational institute, to focus on English literature and get his writing career off the ground. A year later, he and a group of friends rejuvenated a literary journal called New Currents of Thought, publishing translations of French journalist Anatole France and Irish writer W. B. Yeats, alongside original work.

Akutagawa’s first couple of short stories went unnoticed. But everything changed when he came face to face with his literary hero, the powerhouse novelist Soseki. Having made a name for himself by capturing the pre-modern world of Japan and the role of an individual in a changing society, Soseki towered as an inspirational figure for Akutagawa. Plucking up the courage to visit Soseki’s weekly literary gatherings with his friend and fellow writer Kume Masao, Akutagawa felt in awe of the master’s presence. Soseki would eventually read one of his short stories called The Nose.

A comical story, The Nose is based on a thirteenth-century collection of Japanese folktales called Uji Shui Monogatari. It features a monk who’s more concerned with the appearance of his big nose than living by his religion. He becomes so obsessed with fixing his nose that he tries all kinds of remedies to make it smaller. e.g. having it stomped on, boiled etc.

When the monk’s nose finally appears normal, he’s mocked by his colleagues for his vanity. By the end of the story, the monk’s nose goes back to its original size and he’s grateful. Soseki was attracted to the insight Akutagawa had into the human ego and the surgical way in which he wrote the story. He saw an author who could weave timeless themes into a relatable situation, writing a letter of praise to Akutagawa, saying, ‘put together another twenty or thirty stories like this and there will be no one who matches you in the literary world.’

With this glowing endorsement, Akutagawa was thrust into the limelight in 1916. At the time, he was still in his early twenties and it was an incredible feat for an author so young to reach the heights that he did so quickly. Akutagawa practically had a line of editors and publishers knocking down his door to publish his work and over the next couple of years, he produced several short stories such as the samurai-centric Loyalty, while navigating important family and career changes.

Between 1916 and 1919, Akutagawa taught literature at a naval school and married Tsukamoto Fumi. They moved into a new home in Kamakura with Akutagawa’s aunt Fuki, who played the overbearing mother-in-law. In Akutagawa’s mind, Fuki was arguably the most strong-willed woman in his life and in the months that she lived with them, Fuki bossed the young couple around. Akutagawa fictionalised an incident when he scolded his wife about wasting money, admitting that he’d been ordered by his aunt to deliver it.

After Fuki returned to Tokyo, the house was much more peaceful. Although Akutagawa cared for his wife who gave him three children, he felt a creative restlessness that led him into a regretful affair with the poet Hide Shigeko. Akutagawa had met her at a literary circle in 1919 and felt attracted to her fiery temperament. That same aggressiveness eventually repulsed him and when he tried to distance himself from her, Hide claimed her second child was his. Akutagawa would refer to her with many disparaging names in his work like ‘crazy girl’ and ‘my goddess of vengeance’.

While Akutagawa claimed he had no more affairs after the age of 30, he still felt prone to weakness and used writing to break his temptation. When he felt attracted to another poet, Katayama Hiroko, Akutagawa wrote lyrical poetry to purge himself of his desires.

Here is one of countless examples of the symbiotic relationship between the demons that plagued Akutagawa’s mind and his compulsion to write them on the page as confession, therapy, cry for help and window to the world. The quiet time he had with his wife in their picturesque home in Kamakura was the last time he was ever truly happy, for the coming years would be a decline that he was never able to recover from.

Descent into hell

Refusing invitations to teach at universities in Tokyo and Kyoto, Akutagawa signed a contract with the Osaka Mainichi Shimbun newspaper in 1919. This arrangement gave him stable work, while also freeing him up to write and publish more short stories such as Dragon: The Old Potter’s Tale, which trod similar ground as The Nose with themes of absurdity and religious dogma.

Around the same time, Akutagawa moved back to Tokyo into his adoptive family’s home with his wife. With his family becoming increasingly dependent on his income, a recent attack of Spanish flu and chronic insomnia, Akutagawa felt pressure from all around him and he sought relief through travel.

On a trip to Nagasaki, he immersed himself in the complex world of seventeenth-century Japanese Christianity, soaking up inspiration for future stories. This trip was also significant because Akutagawa met the poet Saito Mokichi, a man who’d go on to become the family physician and prescribe the barbiturates that would have deadly consequences for the young author.

Akutagawa’s stress became more severe over the next two years and partly to escape his entanglement with Hide Shigeko, he left for China on a four-month assignment from the Osaka Mainichi Shimbun. Suffering from a range of maladies, the trip increased his physical and mental decline. A ray of creativity from the aftermath became In a Grove, a story director Akira Kurosawa combined and adapted into a film along with another of the author’s earlier works, Rashomon.

The next blow came in September 1923 with the arrival of the Great Kanto Earthquake and while Akutagawa and his family escaped the devastation unscathed, the homes of his half-brother and sister were destroyed. This put even more financial responsibility on Akutagawa’s weary shoulders at a time when his literary star was fading due to a lack of direction, poor reviews and sales, the increasing use of medication and the realisation that writing was no longer a haven or balm for his darkest impulses.

Trying to escape his demons again in 1926, Akutagawa left with Fumi to the Kugenuma shore with their youngest boy Yasushi and left their eldest sons Hideyoshi and Masatoshi with his family. The couple renewed their vows to each other, but it was a sad affair, with more pain on the horizon.

On returning from Kugenuma, Akutagawa discovered his sister’s husband had killed himself. A couple of years earlier, Akutagawa’s brother-in-law had been disbarred from being a lawyer and jailed for convincing a client to commit perjury. In addition, he was being investigated for suspected arson. While Akutagawa didn’t get along with his sister, he was bound to look after his family as the head of the household. His feelings about the event and the suffocating strain of being saddled with his family’s debts come to life in haunting detail through Spinning Gears.

The last six months of Akutagawa’s life were marked by extreme paranoia and hallucinations, yet within the chaos, religion and creativity pushed the author to keep on writing. In this period, he read the Bible closely but couldn’t find any belief in miracles and began 1927 by staying in the Tokyo Imperial Hotel to write one of his most mind-bending works, Kappa. Inspired by the watery creature of Japanese folklore, Kappa is a story of encroaching madness that follows the protagonist of a mental asylum, his life in the kappa society and his simultaneous rejection and acceptance of the existence he’s been forced into among them.

Between April and August, Akutagawa penned a series of essays stemming from a famous debate with the novelist Junichiro Tanizaki. Both writers argued over the importance of plot in fiction. Akutagawa believed a story without a plot was the purest form of art, while Tanizaki argued plot made all the difference.

In the middle of this debate, Akutagawa’s suicidal tendencies were beginning to show to the people around him. Speaking to the lifelong friend of his wife, Hiramatsu Masuko, he proposed they committed a platonic double suicide. Masuko nixed the idea, informing Fumi and they convinced him to see reason.

But it was only a temporary bandage. The wounds of self-loathing and guilt were too deep in Akutagawa’s psyche for him to find any hope. He committed to writing his last two stories, The Life of a Stupid Man and Spinning Gears, as well as a series of farewells to his friends, writing things like ‘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.’

Then, in summer, Akutagawa seemed to find one final moment of clarity. On 23 July, he sat down for a cheerful lunch with his family. In the evening, he received a string of visitors who were eager to chat with one of the most important writers of the age. After that, he completed his essay The Man from the West, an emotive account of Jesus that not only signalled the author’s deep connection to Christianity, but acted as a kind of self-portrait of someone who could see everyone else’s nature but his own.

Around two in the morning, Akutagawa came down from his study and lay back in the futon that was next to Fumi and their sons. He’d already ingested a fatal dose of Veronal and spent the last few moments arranging goodbye notes for family and friends on his pillow. Upon reading a Bible passage, he closed his eyes forever.

Found by his wife, Akutagawa was pronounced dead at seven in the morning. That same day, Akutagawa’s old friend Kume Masao released his most enduring suicide note to the press:

‘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.’ In the following weeks and months, Akutagawa’s death was symbolised as the end of the Taisho era, the defeat of liberalism at the hands of the militaristic might that would lead Japan into the Second World War.

Morality, madness and tragicomedies

In his brief lifetime, Akutagawa wrote over 150 short stories. A surgical stylistic flair and observational skills in his writing springboarded him into the public eye, with one of his greatest abilities being that he could pull language and ideas from multiple cultures and places to weave them into a narrative of the modern era.

In the eyes of author Haruki Murakami, this ability was both a blessing and a curse for Akutagawa, who suggested that while his ‘borrowed container’ technique of transplanting modern issues into old Japanese folktales won him a large readership in the early days of his career, Akutagawa was unable to break out of his set techniques fast enough to keep up with the changing tastes of his audience, which led to some of his later work being heavily criticised.

There is much to enjoy about Akutagawa’s stories and the themes that consistently come up throughout his oeuvre and here are some of the stories that I recommend reading. Rashomon is the quintessential example of the early Akutagawa and his penchant for writing about feudal Japan and putting the hypocrisy of the human spirit under a microscope.

The story is centred at the Rashomon gate, a decaying structure that Akutagawa used to symbolise the dying power of the nobles of the Heian period. He wasn’t interested in looking at that portion of Japanese history through rose-coloured glasses. He wanted to depict the darker, realistic side of a world that was breaking down into turmoil. The protagonist is a disgraced servant of a lord, looking for a way to survive in uncertain times.

He grapples with himself about whether he’s willing to do whatever it takes to survive, even if that means becoming a thief. When the servant finds an old woman inside the Rashomon plucking the hairs of dead bodies, it outrages him and he stops her. The old woman reveals that she was trying to make a wig for herself and the servant feels disappointed at how ordinary her motivation is. It’s like his outrage is no longer justified. But it strengthens his resolve and he brutally robs the old woman of her clothing, leaving her stranded in the darkness.

Akutagawa takes a similarly bleak approach with In a Grove, which deals with themes of objective truth and unreliable narration. A local official hears testimonials from various people about the death of a samurai at the hands of a bandit in a bamboo grove. The bandit, Tajomaru, claims he killed the samurai because he wanted the man’s wife and that the wife wanted him to do it.

He embellishes constantly and by the time the fight was over, the wife had run away. The wife presents herself as a victim, raped by Tajomaru and hated in the eyes of her husband for allowing her honour to be taken from her. The spirit of the samurai is conjured by a medium and he claims that after Tajomaru had his way with her, she screamed for the bandit to kill him. Shocked by the woman’s madness, Tajomaru offered to kill her for the samurai or let her go. Before the samurai could give his answer, the woman ran off screaming.

The only resolution of In a Grove is that there is no resolution. You’re never quite sure who to believe and that echoes what happens in real life: sometimes there are no answers and we’re left wondering.

Hell Screen is another Akutagawa masterpiece that blends the historic and modern for a spine-tingling tale of artistic obsession. A famous painter called Yoshihide is tasked with painting a tableau of the Buddhist version of Hell for his patron, the Lord of Horikawa. An unpleasant and difficult man, Yoshihide cares deeply for his daughter Yuzuki, who is rumoured to be a mistress of the lord.

When painting the screen, Yoshihide becomes increasingly obsessed with his work, to the point that he tortures his apprentices so he can paint what he’s seeing. This is all while experiencing supernatural phenomena, trying to get his daughter back from the Lord of Horikawa with little success and facing open mockery from the imperial court through Yuzuki’s pet monkey, also named Yoshihide.

The story reaches a climax when Yoshihide begs his patron to burn a beautiful woman in a carriage so he can complete his painting. Agreeing to his request, the lord burns Yuzuki and her monkey in front of Yoshihide in a savage scene that is elevated by Akutagawa’s mastery of texture and setting:

‘Fire engulfed the entire carriage. The purple roof tassels blew aside, then clouds of smoke swirled aloft, stark white against the blackness of the night, and finally a shower of sparks spurted upward with such terrifying force that in a single instant the blinds, the side panels and the roof’s metal fittings were ripped off.’

The horror that Yoshihide experienced while watching his daughter burn is replaced by a grotesque feeling of joy and artistic inspiration. He finished the screen and the night after, hanged himself.

In the story, Akutagawa examined the struggle between an artist’s devotion to their work and everything else. If art becomes the sole purpose of someone’s life, then it can ultimately destroy them and the author was clearly examining his own experiences about the creative depths he needed to sink to at the expense of his health.

Akutagawa’s later work swung towards the autobiographical as his mental health deteriorated, with three gems in his tragic crown being Death Register, The Life of a Stupid Man and Spinning Gears. These stories see the author following in the tradition of the Japanese ‘I-novel’, a confessional genre where the events of a fictional world correspond to the writer’s own experiences. Yet Akutagawa uses his stylistic control of language to still create a barrier between fact and fiction, making the reader wonder what is real and what isn’t. An indisputable fact is that all three stories show a man in extreme pain, counting down the days to an end only he can see.

Death Register is a beautiful, bittersweet recollection of Akutagawa’s biological parents and the older sister he never met. Akutagawa admits that of all three, he felt the closest to the sister, Hatsu, imagining there was a ghost of her somewhere out in the world, watching out for him. In recalling experiences with his dad, Akutagawa shows a detachment from him dying in hospital, thinking more of a geisha he met while out with a friend and the spring moon that shone on the day of his father’s funeral.

Death Register ends with a haiku poem about standing by a grave on a warm day, the wind blowing. It caps off the transience between life and death, our actions being the only thing that separates both states.

The Life of a Stupid Man follows a similar idea, the story fragments reduced to a series of actions as Akutagawa stumbles through his existence as a spectator. This contrast is both clever and tragic, the persona simultaneously being and not being in his own life. Akutagawa’s mastery of aphorisms and pulling ideas from any age is on full display, stirred into a cocktail of self-loathing, mysticism, taxidermy and laying down of a metaphorical sword.

Spinning Gears is a whittled-down exploration of a person that can’t escape the hell of his own mind. Over a couple of days, Akutagawa feels an impending sense of doom in the death omens of the number four, the black and white colours of his environment as he lurches from one situation to the next. The dread is personified by translucent gears that whir in the protagonist’s vision, causing severe headaches, distracting and terrifying him. Drinking, drugs, sleep, conversation or reading aren’t enough to keep the gears at bay and it all culminates in him finding his wife on the floor of their home, but he isn’t even sure if that’s real anymore.

In the decades since Akutagawa’s suicide, a coveted fiction prize has been named after him, while his work has marked him as a national and international literary juggernaut. His writing is instructive for the toll creativity takes on the creator, a cautionary tale of an artist who truly suffered for his art.

No matter the situation, we can’t overlook our mental health and it’s a tragedy Akutagawa died so young. Perhaps if he’d been a different person living at a different time, he would’ve been able to save himself and found the peace he so desperately hunted for in the act of creation. Or maybe not. What remains is a catalogue of human psychology to appreciate and learn from about the volatility of mental health and the lengths we go to for achieving happiness.

Check out the previous editions of Sips of Wisdom below: