Akutagawa Quotes

A man sometimes devotes his life to a desire which he is not sure will ever be fulfilled. Those who laugh at this folly are, after all, no more than mere spectators of life.

I could wish for nothing more than to die for a childish dream in which I truly believed.

I don't have the strength to keep writing this. To go on living with this feeling is painful beyond description. Isn't there someone kind enough to strangle me in my sleep?

It is unfortunate for the gods that, unlike us, they cannot commit suicide.

Yes -- or rather, it's not so much that I want to die as that I'm tired of living.

He wanted to live life so intensely that he could die at any moment without regrets.

What is the life of a human being—a drop of dew, a flash of lightning? This is so sad, so sad.

Isn't there someone kind enough to come strangle me in my sleep?

It's not so much that I want to die as that I'm tired of living.

Life is not worth a single line of Baudelaire.

..he understood far more deeply than anyone else the loneliness that lurked beneath his jaunty mask.

I have no conscience at all -- least of all an artistic conscience. All I have is nerves.

As you can imagine, those who had fallen this far had been so worn down by their tortures in the seven other hells that they no longer had the strength to cry out.

I could have sworn that the man's eyes were no longer watching his daughter dying in agony, that instead the gorgeous colors of flames and the sight of a woman suffering in them were giving him joy beyond measure.

17. Butterfly A butterfly fluttered its wings in a wind thick with the smell of seaweed. His dry lips felt the touch of the butterfly for the briefest instant, yet the wisp of wing dust still shone on his lips years later.

When I kill a man, I do it with my sword, but people like you don't use swords. You gentlemen kill with your power, with your money, and sometimes just with your words: you tell people you're doing them a favor. True, no blood flows, the man is still alive, but you've killed him all the same. I don't know whose sin is greater - yours or mine.

Life is more hellish than hell itself.

Emotions are at the center of a person’s being. But what exists in the center of the world are not emotions. Nothing exists in the center of the world……so don’t chase emotions, Akutagawa. Don’t chase the beast known as yourself. Stand on your two legs, don’t cling to somebody else, stay calm and tough. If you don’t, you won’t survive.

I have heard unsavory rumors about you and the umbrella-maker's daughter

What good is intelligence,' Akutagawa asked, 'if you can't ever discover a useful melancholy?

He disliked his own lies as much as his parents', but still he continued to lie -- boldly and cunningly. He did this primarily out of need, but also for the pathological pleasure of killing a god.

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.

As he thought about his life, he felt both tears and mockery welling up inside him. All that lay before him was madness or suicide. He walked down the darkening street alone, determined now to wait for the destiny that would come to annihilate him.

A shimmering of heat— Outside the grave Alone I dwell.

Everyone is the same under the skin.

It is important-even necessary-for us to become acutely aware of the fact that we can't trust ourselves. The only ones you can trust to some extent are people who really know that. We had better get this straight.

A life with someone you can say good-bye to is a good life, especially when it hurts so much to say it to them.

But he knew well enough what was wrong with him: he was ashamed of himself and afraid of them – afraid of the society he so despised.

But surely the will to create was a form of the will to live...?

It’s scary what greed can do to people, don’t you think?

Do I still love this woman? he asked himself. He was in the habit of observing himself so closely that the answer came as a surprise to him: I do.

The human heart harbors two conflicting sentiments. Everyone of course sympathizes with people who suffer misfortunes. Yet when those people manage to overcome their misfortunes, we feel a certain disappointment. We may even feel (to overstate the case somewhat) a desire to plunge them back into those misfortunes. And before we know it, we come (if only passively) to harbor some degree of hostility toward them.

The pale whiteness of her upturned face as she choked on the smoke; the tangled length of her hair as she tried to shake the flames from it; the beauty of her cherry-blossom robe as it burst into flame: it was all so cruel, so terrible!

El idiota cree que todos son idiotas menos él.

He felt something like a sneer for his own spiritual bankruptcy (he was aware of all of his faults and weak points, every single one of them), but he went on reading one book after another.

Still more horrible was the color of the flames that licked the latticed cabin vents before shooting skyward, as though - might I say? - the sun itself had crashed to earth, spewing its heavenly fire in all directions.

At twenty-nine, life no longer held any brightness for him, but Voltaire supplied him with man-made wings.

People used to say that on moonless nights Her Ladyship's broad-skirted scarlet trousers would glide eerily along the outdoor corridor, never touching the floor.

Why did this one have to be born – to come into the world like all the others, this world so full of suffering? Why did this one have to bear the destiny of having a father like me? This was the first son his wife bore him.

I endured it.” Within the darkness, Akutagawa’s sharp eyes gleamed. “Four times. But any more than that is impossible. There are areas mankind should never step into. If I handle that forty times, even if my body lives I will surpass the abyss of the mental realm.

I wanted to scream, but I had no throat. I wanted to cry, but I had no eyes. My entire body trembled so violently that it felt like it was going to shatter into a million pieces. I continued to run away from myself. But you can't run away from yourself. Nobody can.

Where should I direct this burning resentment, this feeling beyond despair? Who should I curse if I do not even believe in a god?

Heroes have always been monsters who crushed sentimentalism underfoot.

People say they need freedom, but in fact, nobody wants freedom.

He was said to have survived starvation by eating human flesh, after which he had the strength to tear out the antlers of a living stag with his bare hands.

Directly beneath the Lotus Pond of Paradise lay the lower depths of Hell, and as He peered through the crystalline waters, He could see the River of Three Crossings and the Mountain of Needles as clearly as if He were viewing pictures in a peep-box.

There's always a weak spot in strength.

The cable was still sending sharp sparks into the air. He could think of nothing in life that he especially desired, but those purple sparks--those wildly-blooming flowers of fire--he would trade his life for the chance to hold them in his hands." -from "The Life of a Stupid Man

Night has fallen, and morning will come too,” Kenji said while gazing at the paddy field. “Spring will arrive, and Autumn too. Everything is split in halves. The grass grows, trees wither, animals are born, and they die……when you live with the land, you slowly come to understand that nature is made up of halves. When something bad happens……when a storm or erosion happens, we feel like bad things will only continue. But in truth, the good and the bad, they are all part of nature……part of living. That’s how everyone in the village thinks.” “I do not understand,” Akutagawa said, looking at the same scenery. “So fortune and misfortune are equal halves? Do you want to say the same thing to my comrades who died in the slums?” “That is why you’re the half that’s left, Akutagawa-san.” Kenji looked at Akutagawa. “You survived. And with a very powerful Ability, too. Everybody passed on their good halves to you, I’m sure.

He felt so lost, he said later, that the familiar studio felt like a haunted valley deep in the mountains, with the smell of rotting leaves, the spray of a waterfall, the sour fumes of fruit stashed away by a monkey; even the dim glow of the master's oil lamp on its tripod looked to him like misty moonlight in the hills.

Chained inside the carriage is a sinful woman. When we set the carriage afire, her flesh will be roasted, her bones will be charred: she will die an agonizing death. Never again will you have such a perfect model for the screen. Do not fail to watch as her snow-white flesh erupts in flames. See and remember her long black hair dancing in a whirl of sparks!

A man sometimes devotes his life to a desire which he is not sure will ever be fulfilled.

He often wondered, in that suburban second story, if people who loved each other had to cause each other pain.

He envied medieval men’s ability to find strength in God. But for him, believing in God – in God’s love – was an impossibility, though even Cocteau had done it!

Truly human life is as evanescent as the morning dew or a flash of lightning.

One chilly autumn evening, he was reminded of the painter by a stalk of corn: the way it stood there armed in its rough coat of leaves, exposing its delicate roots atop the mounded earth like so many nerves, it was also a portrait of his own most vulnerable self. The discovery only served to increase his melancholy.

Well, since I’d been feeling so depressed, I thought I’d try looking at the world upside down. But turns out, it’s exactly the same.

Não tenho consciência de qualquer espécie, nem mesmo artística. Sensibilidade é tudo que tenho.

True, the Van Gogh was just a book of reproductions, but even in the photographs of those paintings, he sensed the vivid presence of nature.

Great robber though he was, Kandata could only trash about like a dying frog as he choked on the blood of the pond.

If you believe in the shadow, you cannot help believing in the light.

Yet what a wretched creature I am, not to be able to depend upon myself!

For truly he was now being left as a bleached corpse in a vast and desolate moor of humanity.

...O-suzu left whatever work she was doing at her sewing machine and dragged Takeo back to O-yoshi and her son. How dare you behave so selfishly! Now tell O-yoshi-san that you are sorry. Get down on the mats and make a proper bow!

...we could see the parapet of Ryougoku Bridge, arching above the waves that flickered in the faint mid-autumn twilight and against the sky, as though an immense black Chinese ink stroke had been brushed across it. The silhouettes of the traffic, horses and carriages soon faded into the vaporous mist, and now all that could be seen were the dots of reddish light from the passengers' lanterns, rapidly passing to and fro in the darkness like small winter cherries.

Just as he reached the point of utter exhaustion, he happened to read Raymond Radiguet’s dying words, ‘God’s soldiers are coming to get me,’ and sensed once again the laughter of the gods.

Am I the only one who kills people? You, you don't use your swords. You kill people with your power, with your money. Sometimes you kill them on the pretext of working for their good. It's true they don't bleed. They are in the best of health, but all the same you've killed them. It's hard to say who is a greater sinner, you or me.

Oh come on, killing a man is not as big a thing as people like you seem to think. If you're going to take somebody's woman, a man has to die. When I kill a man, I do it with my sword, but people like you don't use swords. You gentlemen kill with your power, with your money, and sometimes just with your words: you tell people you're doing them a favor. True, no blood flows, the man is still alive, but you've killed him all the same. I don't know whose sin is greater - yours or mine.

While still a student, Napoleon had written on the last page of his geography book: "St. Helena. Small island." This may have been what we call a coincidence, but the thought must certainly have aroused terror in him in his last days.

შთაგონებაც ხომ იგივე კოცონია,უცოდინარის ხელით გაღვივებული მაშინვე ქრება

In a word, tears like this light a modest lamp of human love amid the gathering dusk of human suffering.

It may be that the reason we love nature is because it expresses neither jealousy nor hatred toward us.

He barely made it through each day in the gloom, leaning as it were upon a chipped and narrow sword.

This passion for pictures gave him a whole new way of looking at the world. He began to pay constant attention to the curve of a branch or the swell of a woman's cheek.

It's quieter here, isn't it. Quieter than Tokyo anyway. Do unpleasant things happen here also? Well, after all this also is part of the world.

أنت لا تستطيع حتى أن تلقي نظرة على الوجه القذر للعالم الذي تعيش فيه بدون أن تشعر بالرغبة في الفرار منه. وإلا فما عليك إلا أن تتقبل الحقيقة الواقعة

Even Zeus, the grandest of the gods, is no match for the goddesses of vengeance.

Emotions are at the very center of our existence, but they aren't the center of the world. There's nothing at the center of the world. So don't let your emotions control you, Akutagawa. Do not pursue the beast within you. Stand on your own two feet, rely only on yourself, and be as cold and tough as you can. You won't be able to survive in this world otherwise.

It took two or three months more for me to discern little by little that here there was nothing to be dismissed with laughter, that behind the melancholic mask lay a terrible anguish.

Magic Flute – Mozart.’ All at once it became clear to him: Mozart too had broken the Ten Commandments and suffered. Probably not the way he had, but … He bowed his head and returned to his table in silence.

Why do you attack the present social system? Because I see the evils that capitalism has engendered. Evils? I thought you recognized no difference between good and evil. How do you make a living, then? He engaged thus in dialogue with an angel – an angel in an impeccable top hat.

What especially moved him was the corpse of a child of twelve or thirteen. He felt something like envy as he looked at it, recalling such expression as “Those whom the gods love die young.” Both his sister and his half-brother had lost their houses to fire. His sister’s husband, though, was on a suspended sentence for perjury. Too bad we didn’t all die.

His own disciples were not lamenting the death of their master but rather their own loss at his passing. They were not bewailing the piteous demise of their guide in the wilderness but rather their own abandonment here in the twilight.

At twenty-nine, life no longer held any brightness for him, but Voltaire supplied him with man-made wings. Spreading these man-made wings, he soared with ease into the sky. The higher he flew, the farther below him sank the joys and sorrows of a life bathed in the light of the intellect. Dropping ironies and smiles upon the shabby towns below, he climbed through the open sky, straight for the sun--as if he had forgotten about that ancient Greek who plunged to his death in the ocean when his man-made wings were singed by the sun." -from "The Life of a Stupid Man

ერთი წამით სიკვდილის ლანდი ჩამოემხო ბერიკაცს,ეს სიკვდილი არც ბოროტებას უქადდა,არც რაღაც ისეთს,ადრე თავზარს რომ სცემდა ხოლმე.არყოფნის შეგრძნება ამ სათლში არეკლილ ნათელ ცასავით ჩუმი,სასურველი და უშფოთველი იყო,.ო,რა ნეტარი ლტოლვით ეწადა განდგომა ამ მშფოთვარე ყოფნის ცოდვებს,სატანჯველს და სიკვდილის ჩრდილქვეშ მინებებოდა ძილს,იმ უსიზმრო ძილს,მხოლოდ უცოდველ ბავშვებს რომ ეწვევათ ხოლმე.ცხოვრებამ ქანცი გაულია.უფრო სწორად,ამ მრავალ ათწლეულში მოყოლებულმა ხელოვნებით ტანჯვამ დაუწრიტა უკანასკნელი ძალა და ღონე..

These works are handed down from teacher to pupil, from parent to child, almost without question, like DNA. They are memorized, recited, discussed in book reports, included in university entrance exams, and once the student is grown up, they become a source for quotation. They are made into movies again and again, they are parodied, and inevitably they become the object of ambitious young writers’ revolt and contempt.

That which is most precious in a human life is indeed found in such an irreplaceable moment of ecstasy. To hurl a single wave into a void of depravity, as dark as a nocturnal sea, and capture in the foam the light of a not-yet-risen moon . . . It is such a life that is worth living.

That’s because, in a way different from what you meant by it, you can’t trust anybody.” Major Kimura lit a new cigar and, smiling, continued in tones that were almost exultantly cheerful. “It is important—even necessary—for us to become acutely aware of the fact that we can’t trust ourselves. The only ones you can trust to some extent are people who really know that. We had better get this straight. Otherwise, our own characters’ heads could fall off like Xiao-er’s at any time.

Yasunari Kawabata, the Japanese Nobel Prize winner for literature in 1968, committed suicide in 1971. Two years earlier, in 1969, another great Japanese novelist, Yukio Mishima, ended his life in the same way. Since 1895 ,thirteen Japanese novelists and writers have committed suicide, including the author of the Rashomon, Ryunosuko Akutagawa, in 1927. That "continuous tragedy" of Japanese culture during 70 years coincides with the penetration of Western civilization and materialistic ideas into the traditional culture of Japan. Whatever it be, for the poets and the writers of tragedies, civilization will always have an inhuman face and be a threat to humanity. A year before his death, Kawabata wrote "men are separated from each other by a concrete wall that obstructs any circulation of love. Nature is smothered in the name of progress." In the novel The Snow Country, published in 1937 , Kawabata places man's loneliness and alienation in the modern world at the very focus of his reflections.

He tended to think that Goethe’s title ‘Poetry and Truth’ could serve for anyone’s autobiography, but he knew that not everyone is moved by literature. His own works were unlikely to appeal to people who were not like him and had not lived a life like his – this was another feeling that worked upon him.

Beneath these skies, he married his wife anew. This brought them joy, but there was suffering as well. With them, their three sons watched the lightning over the open sea. His wife, holding one of the boys in her arms, seemed to be fighting back tears. ‘See the boat over there?’ he asked her. ‘Yes …’ ‘That boat with the mast cracked in two…

The hand with the pen began to tremble, and before long he was even drooling. The only time his head ever cleared was after a sleep induced by eight-tenths of a gram of Veronal, and even then it never lasted more than thirty minutes or an hour. He barely made it through each day in the gloom, leaning as it were upon a chipped and narrow sword.

The day after he married her, he delivered a scolding to his wife: ‘No sooner do you arrive here than you start wasting our money.’ But the scolding was less from him than from his aunt, who had ordered him to deliver it. His wife apologized to him, of course, and to the aunt as well – with the potted jonquils she had bought for him in the room.

Oh come on, killing a man is not as big a thing as people like you seem to think. If you’re going to take somebody’s woman, a man has to die. When I kill a man, I do it with my sword, but people like you don’t use swords. You gentlemen kill with your power, with your money, and sometimes just with your words: you tell people you’re doing them a favor. True, no blood flows, the man is still alive, but you’ve killed him all the same. I don’t know whose sin is greater – yours or mine.

Once he had finished writing ‘The Life of a Stupid Man’, he happened to see a stuffed swan in a secondhand shop. It stood with its head held high, but its wings were yellowed and moth-eaten. As he thought about his life, he felt both tears and mockery welling up inside him. All that lay before him was madness or suicide. He walked down the darkening street alone, determined now to wait for the destiny that would come to annihilate him.

He wanted to live life so intensely that he could die at any moment without regrets. But still, out of deference to his adoptive parents and his aunt, he kept himself in check. This created both light and dark sides to his life. Seeing a comic puppet in a Western tailor’s shop made him wonder how close he himself was to such a figure. His self beyond consciousness, however – his ‘second self’ – had long since put such feelings into a story.

As rumor had said, he found several corpses strewn carelessly about the floor. Since the glow of the light was feeble, he could not count the number. He could only see that some were naked and others clothed. Some of them were women, and all were lolling on the floor with their mouths open or their arms outstretched showing no more signs of life than so many clay dolls. One would doubt they had ever been alive, so eternally silent they were.

The people of Ike-no-o used to say that Zenchi Naigu was lucky to be a priest: no woman would ever want to marry a man with a nose like that. Some even claimed it was because of his nose that he had entered the priesthood to begin with. The Naigu himself, however, never felt that he suffered any less over his nose for being a priest. Indeed, his self-esteem was already far too fragile to be affected by such a secondary fact as whether or not he had a wife.

The Heian Period (794–1185) was Japan’s classical era, a time of peace and opulence, when the imperial court in Heian-kyō (“Capital of Peace and Tranquility”: later Kyoto) was the fountainhead of culture, and the arts flourished. Toward the end, however, political power slipped from the aristocracy to the warrior class, the decline of the imperial court led to the decay of the capital, and peace gave way to unrest. This was the part of the Heian Period that interested Akutagawa, who identified it with fin-de-siècle Europe, and he symbolized the decay with the image of the crumbling Rashōmon gate that dominates his story. Director Kurosawa Akira borrowed Akutagawa’s gate and went him one better, picturing it as a truly disintegrating structure, entirely bereft of its Heian lacquer finish, and suggestive of the moral decay against which his characters struggle. His film Rashōmon (1950) was based on two of Akutagawa’s stories, “Rashōmon” and “In a Bamboo Grove.” Both—themselves based on tales from the twelfth century—reach far more skeptical conclusions than the film regarding the dependability of human nature and its potential for good. (Jay Rubin)

And so, by means both active and passive, he sought to repair the damage to his self-esteem. He tried first of all to find ways to make his nose look shorter. When there was no one around, he would hold up his mirror and, with feverish intensity, examine his reflection from every angle. Sometimes it took more than simply changing the position of his face to comfort him, and he would try one pose after another—resting his cheek on his hand or stroking his chin with his fingertips. Never once, though, was he satisfied that his nose looked any shorter. In fact, he sometimes felt that the harder he tried, the longer it looked. Then, heaving fresh sighs of despair, he would put the mirror away in its box and drag himself back to the scripture stand to resume chanting the Kannon Sutra. The second way he dealt with his problem was to keep a vigilant eye out for other people’s noses. Many public events took place at the Ike-no-o temple—banquets to benefit the priests, lectures on the sutras, and so forth. Row upon row of monks’ cells filled the temple grounds, and each day the monks would heat up bath water for the temple’s many residents and lay visitors, all of whom the Naigu would study closely. He hoped to gain peace from discovering even one face with a nose like his. And so his eyes took in neither blue robes nor white; orange caps, skirts of gray: the priestly garb he knew so well hardly existed for him. The Naigu saw not people but noses. While a great hooked beak might come into his view now and then, never did he discover a nose like his own. And with each failure to find what he was looking for, the Naigu’s resentment would increase. It was entirely due to this feeling that often, while speaking to a person, he would unconsciously grasp the dangling end of his nose and blush like a youngster. And finally, the Naigu would comb the Buddhist scriptures and other classic texts, searching for a character with a nose like his own in the hope that it would provide him some measure of comfort. Nowhere, however, was it written that the nose of either Mokuren or Sharihotsu was long. And Ryūju and Memyoō, of course, were Bodhisattvas with normal human noses. Listening to a Chinese story once, he heard that Liu Bei, the Shu Han emperor, had long ears. “Oh, if only it had been his nose,” he thought, “how much better I would feel!