Noting Suicide with a Vague Sense of Anxiety

This essay examines Akutagawa Ryūnosuke's 1927 suicide note, "Aru kyūyū e okuru shuki" (A note to a certain old friend), against the host of other works he left behind. These texts and their many intertexts have been largely overshadowed by the fame of this note and its infamous phrase: "a vague sense of anxiety." Rather than probing these works to explain Akutagawa's motive for suicide in retrospect, this essay considers how they also worked prospectively for the author. Their tangled publication and distribution histories suggest a complex relationship between bodies of literature and bodies of artists, between the corpus and the corpse.