The Life of a Stupid Man: Ryunosuke Akutagawa (Penguin Little Black Classics)

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It was to escape these personal and professional pressures that Akutagawa fled Tokyo for a period of recuperation in his wife's village.

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Here there was a "sad renewal" of their marriage vows, but Akutagawahad also made another vow: as he boarded the train home for Tokyo that January, he knew he would be dead within the next six months. He reasoned that he must be similar to others who despair, and that his actions have ultimately produced such circumstances of his tiredness of living. Seven months after Akutagawa's birth, his mother went insane and he was adopted by her older brother, taking the Akutagawa family name. They take us from a balloon ride over Victorian London to a garden of blossom in Japan, from Tierra del Fuego to 16th-century California and the Russian steppe. However, behind his attempts at intellectualizing his despair, you can recognize Ryunosuke was a humble man, who continuously sold himself short and reduced himself to the title of a ‘stupid man’.Akutagawa married Tsukamoto Fumiko in 1918 and the following year left his post as English instructor at the naval academy in Yokosuka, becoming an employee of the Mainichi Shinbun. For some time, Akutagawa had been taking sleeping pills: "If I do not sleep for two nights, I am tired enough to be able to sleep on the third night. In April, Akutagawa began a lengthy exchange with his friend the novelist Junichiro Tanizaki on the Japanese novel.

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Indeed, Akutagawa often drew himself as an ink-black Kappa and the society he describes is the one in which he lived. He doesn't try to explain himself, just gives words to the emotions that had been running amok within him for years. In here, we see his life in full lights with him describing the death of his insane mother, an elder sister he barely knew, and the father who left him when he was an infant but always tried to reconcile with him somehow.Work provided no respite; an anthology of new Japanese writing, which Akutagawa had painstakingly edited, became mired in accusations of financial impropriety and breach of copyright. 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. You gentlemen kill with your power, with your money, and sometimes just with your words: you tell people you’re doing them a favor. More Hamburger icon An icon used to represent a menu that can be toggled by interacting with this icon. The next year, Akutagawa and his former high school friends revived the journal Shinshichō (New Currents of Thought), publishing translations of William Butler Yeats and Anatole France along with original works of their own.

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Later, however, he came to realize that the contract saddled him with all the obligations and the company with none. Everywhere he goes, everything he sees threatens him; books, taxis, airplanes and, particularly, the colour yellow.

I found that to be an interesting approach considering how this technique is often used in novels to piece the puzzle. By 1926, his insomnia was chronic and his fear of having inherited his mother's madness had become an obsession.