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Farewell Notes: The Pathos of Things

JA May 11

Another strange, moving discovery from the vaults of A Journey Round My Skull this week, which a while ago reprinted this article entitled ‘Taedium Vitae: Farewell Notes of Japanese Literary Suicides’ by the ever-colourful Gilbert Alter-Gilbert. According to Alter-Gilbert:

Twentieth-century Japan (particularly during the Showa period, 1926 – 1989) has been rich in literary development. Writers such as Shiga Naoya, Arishima Takeo (who committed suicide in 1923), Junichiro Tanizaki, Sato Haruo, and Ryunosuke Akutagawa comprised the White Birch School; there were also the Neo-perceptionists Yokomitsu Riichi and Yasunari Kawabata, as well as proponents of the business novel, the pop novel, and postmodernism…. Of these many significant authors, several were suicides, including three of the most prominent: Ryunosuke Akutagawa, Osamu Dazai, and Yukio Mishima. Each of them left an embarkation missive, expressing defiance or resignation.

Alter-Gilbert writes that Akutagawa, whose best known work was the short story Rashomon, suicided in 1927 by overdosing on veronal, a sleeping aid common throughout the early 20th century. He left a long, final note entitled To an Old Friend, in which he said:

We humans, being human animals, do have an animal fear of death. The so-called vitality is but another name for animal strength. I myself am one of these human animals. And this animal strength, it seems, has gradually drained out of my system, judging by the fact that I am left with little appetite for food and women. The world I am now in is one of diseased nerves, lucid as ice. Such voluntary death must give us peace, if not happiness. Now that I am ready, I find nature more beautiful than ever, paradoxical as this may sound. I have seen, loved, and understood more than others. In this at least I have a measure of satisfaction, despite all the pain I have thus far had to endure.

Earlier that same year, Akutagawa had written a satirical work entitled Kappa, based on Japanese folklore. Jorge Luis Borges' comments on the text seem strangely apt and poignant in retrospect:

Halfway through the story, Akutagawa forgets the satiric conventions: it hardly matters to him that the Kappa, who are water imps, turn into humans who talk about Marx, Darwin or Nietzsche. According to the literary canons, this negligence is a flaw. In fact, the last pages of the story are infused with an indescribable melancholy; we sense that, in the author’s imagination, everything has collapsed, even the dreams of his art.

akutagawa-kappa01

Illustration from Kappa


 

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