Perpetual Dada Machine

Recently I read a collection of short stories by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, newly translated (2018) into my native language of Finnish by Markus Mäkinen, called Hammasrattaat (after the Finnish name of the story Spinning Gears, included in the collection).

The collection includes the following ten stories:
羅生門 Rashōmon
鼻 Hana – The Nose
蜘蛛の糸 Kumo no Ito – The Spider’s Thread
地獄変 Jigokuhen – Hell Screen
魔術 Majutsu – Magic
Mandarins
南京の基督 Nankin no Kirisuto – Christ in Nanking
あばばばば Ababababa
河童 Kappa
歯車 Haguruma – Spinning Gears

This book was my first experience reading Akutagawa’s work. I knew him to be a highly influential Japanese writer of short fiction that committed suicide at the age of 35. I knew Akita Kurosawa’s Rashomon to be based on two of his stories, Rashōmon and In the Grove, former of which mostly lends the film its key setting and name, the story being mostly based on the latter.

The settings of the stories differ from undefined historical era Japan to the writer’s present day, the events from mundane to magical, poetic epiphanies of common reality to grotesque moral fables. One of the uniting themes Akutagawa’s stories is falling into evil.

In many of the stories an unidentified narrator, with whose often ambiguous role Akutagawa experiments with from story to story, recollects personal encounters and second hand information about peculiar events and characters. He tells of gripping obsession, greed and horrors of human cruelty, but also glimpses of tenderness which usually manifests in women. Most of all, there’s a hint of a pity that he feels for the condition of the monster. I can’t help but wonder, whether these masculine horrors of humanity partially contributed to the author’s heartbreaking demise.

I think the mentioned aspects are best demonstrated especially in the longer stories such as Hell Screen and Kappa. They expand their world into more detailed novella-like narratives.

Hell Screen tells a story of a skillful artist named Yoshihide, who truly loves little like his only daughter, but is generally despised by everyone for his contemptuous, almost nihilistic character. His daughter on the other hand is a compassionate, angelic darling loved by all. He gets an assignment from a venerable lord to paint a folding screen painting depicting horrors of hell, a task which he takes over with obsessive dedication and questionable methods. Madness ensues.

Power, destruction and evil have an almost mesmeric effect on people. These highly corruptive forces can also be seen as necessary nourishment for artist’s inspiration. The harmony of sanity is deceivingly fragile. Hell Screen deserves to be recognized as a classic of horror literature. I found the depiction of these twisted perverse extremes of the human mind profoundly horrifying. It is not horror like horror entertainment films are. To use perhaps wanky postmodernist terminology, it’s more like “meta-horror”, a somber meditation on the magnetic appeal of the grotesque.

The shorter stories are by no means inferior. They just don’t expand to as gruesome extents, and seem to include more hope and poetry of unspoken warmth of human encounters. The most lighthearted ones include The Nose, Magic (which could be categorized as magical moral tales) and Mandarins.

Kappa is a story of a mental inpatient who tells a tale of his experiences in the land of mythical creatures, kappas. In Akutagawa’s world kappas have a civilized syncretic, technologically advanced society different from ours, yet oddly mirroring it. They are a strange species with a biology, sexual habits and societal evolution, sense of justice, religion and cultural norms of their own. One might consider this story largely satirical, but Akutagawa’s take on such a subject as death, in any of his writing, has a certain heartfelt seriousness and sincerity to it, working as sort of a thin dark melancholic filter over a satirical backdrop. In a way, Kappa too deals with the philosophy of the artist’s role and purpose.

The role of women in Akutagawa’s work is interesting and noteworthy, I see a couple of different sides to the matter. Firstly, as I mentioned already, in many of the stories in this collection, women get a sorry role as getting trampled under cruelty of men. Given Akutagawa’s distrustful experiences with mothers in his own life though, this may be partially my own projection, and also that the translator and editor of this particular collection wanted to present a wide array of perspective on the subject matter in his work.

In Kappa, kappa women are the more sexually predatory sex. The prostitute of Christ in Nanjing is not as much bothered by the sexual lust of men as she is fighting to keep her dignity and sanity by means of personal religious faith. Was this story his portrayal on female madness and resorting to comforting illusions and lunacy of religion? Or was there even a faint bit of admiration of being able to find such comfort when he himself never could?

[…]Maybe he had contracted the disease from this girl. However, even today this girl still believes in such a half-breed rascal as her Jesus Christ. Should I awaken and enlighten her or let her continue to dream the old Western legend?”

-From the English translation of Christ in Nanking by Yoshiko Dykstra

It seems that the more I speculate on the fuller picture of Akutagawa’s view on women was, the less certain I am. To me it seems like he covered a good wide variety of aspects of the feminine nature, so it seems a little odd to see so much of writing about Akutagawa focus mainly on dominating and toxic aspects.

The last story Spinning Gears left me with an overwhelming sadness. We come to see that it is autobiographical. A writer travels to Tokyo for a friend’s wedding, after which he stays in a hotel for a some nights, works on some short stories, goes to cafés and bookstores and has chance meetings with old acquaintances. He is tormented by unstoppable rushes of thought associations (that bring to mind the concept of synchronicity, meaningful coincidences) that lead to thoughts of failure, death, fear, guilt… He is torn between polar opposites of reality, his materialism and mysticism. His anxiety occasionally manifests physically in form of visual hallucinations of spinning gears appearing in his field of vision, followed by an intense headache.

Having read Akutagawa’s suicide note to an old friend before Spinning Gears, the connection between the texts is heartrending. Spinning Gears was written in the year of his death and published posthumously during the same year.