The Molten Notebook

Known for his flowing style and quotable wit, Ryunosuke Akutagawa launched his career in the 1910s with colorful short stories based on Japanese folklore.

He later turned from “borrowed containers” to the personal stories that were popular vehicles for Japanese modernists. His semi-autobiographical tales introduce his mad mother and his own descent into paranoia before his suicide in 1927.

The writings of Akutagawa remain embedded in the Japanese cultural consciousness, writes Haruki Murakami in his introduction to Rashomon and 17 Other Stories.

Translator Jay Rubin divides the collection into stories based on folklore, history, and memory. Most well-known, perhaps, are the spooky and superlative plots from the medieval anthologies Tales of Times Past and Tales of Uji. A monk tries to shrink his enormous nose; a businessman ends up with horses’ legs. An artist commissioned to paint a “hell screen,” deciding he can only paint what he sees, orchestrates a horrifying scene.

With traditional plots comes modern storytelling technique. The most famous example is “In a Bamboo Grove,” which is the basis for the Akira Kurosawa movie “Rashomon.” A traveler is found dead with arrow and stab wounds. One by one, witnesses and suspects recount their versions of the events that led to the killing, ending with the ghost of the traveler himself. The manipulation of point-of-view gives these stories a psychological complexity that folktales may lack. Much of the mystery and erotic charge of “Hell Screen” – already a horror story in its own right — comes from a faulty narrator who hints at a dark back story.

Far from didactic parables of Enlightenment or earthly success, these stories present unsparing portraits of selfishness and moral weakness. Typical of these is a soldier who repents his evil ways after his head is nearly severed in battle. Next thing the reader knows, a doctor recounts the strange tale of a man whose head fell off during a barfight. Apparently he’d returned to his dissolute ways the second he’d recovered from his battle wounds.

While his plot twists and surprise endings make for entertaining reading, was Akutagawa ambitious? In the introduction, Murakami hedges on this point. Among the national writers, Soseki and Tanazaki are his favorites, with Akutagawa coming in “distant” third. To him, Akutagawa never found the story he needed to tell.

That being said, Murakami praises the author’s style and erudition and acknowledges that the images he creates endure in readers’ minds. Akutagawa was “a Japanese intellectual with a consciousness torn between the West and Japan’s traditional culture, in the border regions of which he succeeded in erecting a uniquely vigorous world of story.”