Hell Screen / Cogwheels / A Fools Life

Dated Early Modernism

I bought this because I ran across one of those great old Eridanos Library editions, and this one had a preface by Borges. Ryunosuke Akutagawa was an early 20th c. Japanese modernist, short-story writer, and friend (and critic) of Tanizaki. He died by suicide in his thirties, and one of the pieces translated here, "Cogwheels," was supposedly finished on the day he died.

I found these very much of their period. The narrators (all Akutagawa, variously undisguised) read Dostoevsky, Flaubert, Poe, and other standard sources, along with Anatole France, Yeats, and other fin-de-siecle writers (Akutagawa published translations of their works in a literary journal he helped run). He mentions Van Gogh in several pieces as an show more exemplar of real passion and modernity.

These are all familiar signposts of Japanese art in the 1920s, and to me the three pieces in this book all seem dated. In "A Fool's Life" he plays with prose poems, what would now be called flash fiction, and it's clear he is thinking of surrealism and of the Japanese tradition including Basho, rather than, say, imagism. "Cogwheels" is intended to show the narrator's dissociated frame of mind, and it does, but it mainly conveys the narrator's sense of a literary representation of dissociation. show less

FYI Review - This collection contains the following short stories:
-Translator's Introduction
-Rashomon
-The Nose
-The Liquor Worm
-Sweet Yam Soup
-The Devil and Tabacco
-Fortune
-The Spider's Thread
-Hell Screen
-The Dogs and the Flute
-Magic
-The Ball
-Autumn
-The Christ of Nanjing
-Du Zichun
-Shadows
-An Odd Tale
-In a Grove
-The Flatcar
-The Wizard
-Otomi
-Momotaro
-Genkaku Cottage
-Japanese Story Titles