The first chapter after Hell Screen is Dr Ogata Ryosai: A Memorandum. I'm skipping it though, for reasons that shall soon become clear ( i didn't understand it :[ )
The one after that is called- woah did you guys see that
catch that horse!!! it'll come back round, and when it does, click on it! i need it stable! i mean. you know what i mean
Anyway, where was i... after Memorandum is The Story of a Head That Fell Off.
The Story of a Head That Fell Off [13 pages]
For a name so derelict of meaning, the prose in this piece is Beautiful. The man in question, named Xiao-er, dies without much fanfare, but the scene he creates as his mind dies is described so wonderfully. Perhaps it's because he died honorably- riding into battle clashing with the enemy commander atop a horse. No better way to go out in a soldier's mind. As he dies, he looked back on his life, as his mind is overtaken by the "ugliness that filled it". If I escape death today, I swear I will do whatever it takes to make up for my past, he says. Which is why it's great when he *does* come back to life.
Akutagawa does something great here. He switches the focus *completely* to a different time, place and person. It's now been a year, and the war is over. We're focusing on some military men discussing naturally, when a news article comes across the table describing the debauchery of a local alcoholic man known for womanizing. He got into a bit of a fight, where the strangest thing happened. His head fell off. A reopened wound on the neck. What a waste of a beautiful moment. All that hope he had, only in death.
We aren't granted the view to his internal monologue when he dies in the bar. It's just skipped over. One can only imagine him making the same wish, asking for another chance. Remember though- we're on a trail of unreliable narrators. This is a brilliant way to show that even omniscient narration can be fucked with if it's following one guy's thoughts. Everything the narrator said was true- but it was based off of Xiao-er's world view, one biased by the icy grip of death.
Horse Legs [21 pages]
I'm not reviewing this one, I fucking HATE horses. Fuck those long-faced pieces of shit. All they do is eat hay and jump over hurdles- I CAN DO THAT TOO!!!
Death Register [9 pages]
It's just a list of dead people. A story about a man going through life as his family dies. At the end, the man says "I don't much like visiting the cemetery, and I would prefer to forget about my parents and sister if I could".
I think it's good to remember the dead. We can watch the memories in which they lived. That's worth the pain of grief, but the man has given up. Maybe he didn't like any of them.
The Life of a Stupid Man [30 pages]
This is where a pivotal switch occurs: for every part of this and the last chapter, we follow Ryunosuke Akutagawa, the writer himself. Thus, he is the stupid man, and it is his life.
As a sort of microcosm for the book as a whole, this chapter is split into many different stories, in this case, 51. Some are so small it'd be okay to call them poetry, and even the big ones aren't longer than a page. Each has a title of a single word, every time.
Before the stories start, there's a little letter addressed to Kume Masao- a friend of Akutagawa's. He describes how utterly depressed he is, "living in the unhappiest unhappiness imaginable". It reads as if Akutagawa will never write anything more, like he won't be around to even publish this. Sure enough, there's nothing fictional about this letter. Though it's ambiguous whether this is the note accompanying his first or second attempt, it's certain that he wrote a suicide letter to Masao, and this is it. At the end of the letter, the last words the writer may have ever wrote, he says: "I may wear the skin of an urbane sophisticate, but in this manuscript I invite you to strip it off and laugh at my stupidity".
The following 51 stories paint a picture of a deeply confused man pestered and harassed by the outside world, but with a profound interest in the arts. Akutagawa's imposter syndrome is palpable- he name drops all the authors he thinks are better than him. Nietzche and Dostoevesky get mentioned several times. It's worth mentioning that Nietzche coined the phrase "God is dead", and famously rejected nihilism as a retort to theism. Perhaps the positivity and beauty that Nietzche brought forth in his philosophy made a man as depressed as Akutagawa jealous. There's a weird cultural perception for jealousy as a childish ugly thing, but the jealousy of others that can emerge in the depths of depression is common and natural. Being depressed can feel like you are so alien to the human experience, you're a creature of some sort. It's this personal distance to the "big other" that reinforces the depression that created it, and something that Akutagawa's work reeks of. It really underlines these later stories, and especially Spinning Gears.
When you feel so apart from the souls of others like that, so distant to the human experience, it becomes easier to align yourself with nature. As you lose all feeling, empathy for others especially, you ironically start empathising with the uncaring universe itself- and as such, almost every single one of these stories includes some gorgeous metaphor centered around reality that reflects the human condition, or the psychology of the story. Here are but a few, each being it's own little metaphor for Akutagawa's life. I've put the number and name of the story before the quote itself.
The 51st story, the final one, is titled "Defeat".