(1926)
Arthur Waley
by Akutagawa Ryunosuke (1892-1927)
When I am insulted, for some reason or other it is always good while before I am annoyed. But after about an hour I do invariably begin to feel gradually more and more annoyed.
When I saw Rodin's Count Ugoli—or rather, a photograph of the Count Ugoli—certain homosexual passages in my life suddenly came into my mind.
When I look at trees, it seems to me quite unbelievable that I, like any other human being, have a front and back side.
Sometimes I become a tyrant and want to see large numbers of men and women eaten by lions and tigers. But the mere sight of a bit of bloodstained gauze lying on a surgical tray gives me a sudden feeling of physical indisposition.
I sometimes feel about other people that I should be glad if they were dead, and some of the people about whom I have felt this were my nearest relations.
I have no conscience of any kind, not even an artistic conscience; but nerves I have in abundance.
I am entirely devoid of hate, but I make up for this from time to time by outburst of contempt.
I know by experience that among my own characteristics the one that fills me with the greatest loathing of myself is the fact that I find falseness everywhere. Moreover, I do not, even at the time, get the slightest feeling of satisfaction by these discoveries.
I listen very closely to the way different sorts of people speak. For example, the way the boy from the fishmonger's says konnichi wa (good morning). He doesn't end it with a vowel sound, but says something more like konchiwaas. I don't know why he puts this unnecessary s at the end of the word.
I am not merely one person. I am a son, a landlord, a male, in my view of life a realist, by temperament a romantic, in philosophy a sceptic, and so on. There's nothing particularly inconvenient about this. Yet I am tormented by a perpetual conflict as to which of these is really me.
Whenever I get a letter or anything else from a woman whom I do not know, I cannot help beginning at once to wonder whether she is good-looking.
All words go in pairs that are like the head and tail of a coin, I call so-and-so pretentious; but that does not mean that in the relevant respects he is at all different from me. When I behave in the same way I am only showing a decent amount of self respect.
When I go to a doctor, I never succeed in telling him anything definite or precise. With the result that I come away feeling that I have simply been shamming.
In proportion as I move away from where I am living, I feel my identity growing dimmer and dimmer. This phenomenon seems to begin as soon as I am about thirty miles from home.
My spiritual life never goes smoothly forward, but progresses in jumps, like a flea.
When I meet anyone I know by sight, I always bow. If he does not notice that I am doing so, I have a feeling of being out of pocket.
Akutagawa Ryunosuke was a prolific and intensely original writer whose influential career came abruptly to an end when he committed suicide at the age of thirty-five. This fragment, written shortly before his death, is one of his few autobiographical writings.
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Translated by ARTHUR WALEY
edited by Ivan Morris:
Madly Singing in the Mountains
(Harper 1972)
