The Last Word?: Akutagawa Ryūnosuke's "The Man from the West"

Akutagawa Ryūnosuke 芥川龍之介 finished writing the first part of "The Man from the West" ("Saihō no hito" 西方の人) on 10 July 1927 and completed "The Man from the West: The Sequel" ("Zoku Saihō no hito" 続西方の人; hereafter referred to as "The Sequel") late at night on 23 July. Both were subsequently published in the journal Kaizō 改造.¹ Akutagawa finished the work just hours before he took his own life by ingesting a lethal dose of Veronal. He died early on the morning of 24 July, with his Bible open near his body—evidence that he was reading it in the final moments before he slipped into unconsciousness and death. One commentator, Sekiguchi Yasuyoshi 関口安義, has referred to "The Man from the West" together with "The Sequel" as Akutagawa's "final work into which he literally poured his heart and blood."²

While this history alone should be enough to attract scholarly interest, sadly, the work has not been included in major English-language anthologies of Akutagawa's writings, and overall it has received only marginal treatment from anglophone scholars.³ Japanese-language scholarship, in contrast, has taken the work quite seriously.⁴ The current translation of "The Man from the West" and its sequel is intended to accomplish three goals: to help close the gap between the vast literature in Japanese on this important text and its near invisibility in English, to present evidence that Akutagawa's interest in Christianity was not merely cultural or "aesthetic," but deep and serious,⁵ and to shed further light on Akutagawa's tragic suicide.

In this short introduction, it is impossible to do justice to the rich literature on "The Man from the West" and its related themes. At best, I hope to provide a brief overview of the major issues raised in scholarly criticism of the text, following the authoritative synopsis provided by Ishiwari Tōru 石割透. Ishiwari divides the major studies on "The Man from the West" into two groups: those who argue the text is best read as a self-portrait of Akutagawa and those who—emphasizing the principle of indigenousness—see it as a challenge to modernity. The first group includes Takeuchi Makoto 竹内眞, Yoshida Seiichi 吉田精一, Sako Jun'ichirō 佐古純一郎, Sasabuchi Tomoichi 笹淵友一, Fukuda Tsuneari 福田恆存, and Miyoshi Yukio 三好行雄. The self-portrait interpretation may be an attempt to deflect the question whether Akugatawa experienced an authentic conversion to Christianity. Rather than finding in this work Akutagawa's embrace of religious faith, they discover only the literary self-expression of a solitary, tormented writer. From this perspective, they discern in Akutagawa's fascination with Christ, His passion, and His death merely reflections of the writer's own increasingly dark, suicidal impulses. Some who take this perspective embrace Christianity themselves but believe that Akutagawa did not. Sako, for example, believes that Akutagawa failed to grasp the true meaning of the Gospels because of his overreliance on intellect;⁶ conversely, Sasabuchi argues that Akutagawa failed to understand Christ because of the influence of Flaubert's aestheticism.⁷

It is not surprising to find differences of nuance and emphasis within this first group, but as a whole they stand in contrast to those in the second group, whom we might tag "the antimoderns." This group includes Satō Yasumasa 佐藤泰正, Kajiki Gō 梶木剛, Isoda Kōichi 磯田光一, and Chino Naoko 茅野直子. Satō's argument that Akutagawa first reveals his true self in "The Man from the West" resembles the position of the "self-portrait" group, but his reasons place him among the "antimoderns." In Satō's reading, Akutagawa's "Japanesey" Christ is more important than the historical and cultural transcendence of Christian faith. Isoda, however, recognizes the authenticity of Akutagawa's Christian faith, noting that in the early twentieth-century debate between the atheist George Bernard Shaw and the Catholic G.K. Chesterton, Akutagawa sided with Chesterton. Isoda concludes by warning that "if we don't see that, then we overlook something important."⁸

But Isoda does not regard Akutagawa as a simple advocate of universalism at the expense of indigenousness. A close reader of texts, Isoda was one of the first to uncover...