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The Life of a Stupid Man

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Eighty years later, on the anniversary of his death, I leave an unlit cigarette on Akutagawa's grave. There are flowers here too, other cigarettes, coffee and sake. A pale girl sits by the grave, writing in a notebook. Crows scream in the trees, mosquitoes bite into her skin. Yards away, the corpse of a cat is being eaten by maggots and flies. But here Akutagawa is no longer alone and, thanks to his last words, neither are we. 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. Ah, what is the life of a human being - a drop of dew, a flash of lightning? This is so sad, so sad."

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. 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: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. Akutagawa's death came just six months after the death of the Emperor Taisho and the start of the Showa era. For many, it represented not only the end of an era, but the defeat of Japanese intellectualism. Two years later, Kenji Miyamoto began his career as a Marxist critic with an essay on Akutagawa entitled "Haiboku no Bungaku" ("The Literature of Defeat"), the "defeat" being a deliberate echo of the title of the last section of "The Life of a Stupid Man". Howard S Hibbett, in an essay on Akutagawa, quotes Miyamoto: He happened to pass her on the stairway of a certain hotel. Her face seemed to be bathed in moon glow even now, in daylight. As he watched her walk on (they had never met), he felt a loneliness he had not known before." Ah, what is the life of a human being, a drop of dew, a flesh of lightning? This is so sad, so sad. What can I say?" 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:

Short stories, I know for me, have always been a hit-or-miss. I’m almost always left with wanting more from a short story, but not this time. The Death Register is the thoughts of the author himself which told about the three people in his family and how they died. It was a recollection of his thoughts, on the people that somehow mattered to him, and also showing how he had felt at each individual's death at the time. It was sorrowful, and I had definitely loved the haku at the end of the story. It is difficult to say that such book is understandable or not, factual or fictional. Either way it is reasonable to believe that this kind of writing was written and published by a desperate man who suffered enough in his life and had depressing thoughts about life in general. The first story is a little bit disturbing. It describes an incident of a man who was murdered and tortured before his wife which acted in a strange way. 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. 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 ..."This book serves as a beautiful introduction to the work of Akatagawa that will make you want to read his other works, and is stunning and reflective in it’s own right. At twenty nine, life noblonger held any brightness for him, but Voltaire supplied him with man made wings.

He wrote on reflections on different parts of his life, and this short essays of his was given to his good friend Kume Masao, and published as it is. Its one thing to read about someone's life, its also another thing to read on suicidal thoughts that eventually lead to death. One thing's for sure, Akutagawa's love for literature and reading is something that is commendable. He reads a lot, even before he took his own life. He tried to find meaning in life but in such a way that at one point, he just felt empty. It is unfortunate for the gods that, unlike us, they cannot commit suicide.” (The Laughter of the Gods) This short story is an autobiography of Akutagawa’s past. Most of it was reflection on his mother who was insane, his elder sister who had died young, the death of his mother, his relationship with his father, and the death of his father. These are the events we focus on and we see through very little just how much Akutagawa looked down upon himself. He continuously felt inadequate and estranged from his family. It’s a sad story and not one you can really give a rating to, but his execution was stupendous especially since he abhorred the idea of writing an autobiography of himself. Lo primero que me encontré con este libro fue con el “biombo del infierno”, el cual pasé de largo ya que ya lo leí la semana pasada en “Roshomon y otros cuentos”, luego me vi sumergida en un ambiente denso de “Los engranajes” me costó leerlo sinceramente, no estaba preparada para verme en un ambiente de depresión mezclado con un comienzo de esquizofrenia, donde las alucinaciones visuales y otros fantasmas comienzan a alterar su pensamiento.

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We started with his descriptions of his mother whom he described as lunatics and whom he barely have any affection for but also afraid he becomes like her as he lives each days with fear. Then, we moved slowly as he grows to become a writer but pressured to concur with the writing industry, married to a woman he loves but ends up in affairs, growing passion for arts and philosophy but also contradicts most of them, become a father but felt he is useless and unsuitable and each time he muses on death and what does it mean to live.

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