Interestingly enough, he wrote these using third point of view as if it was another person but it was actually him. Maybe he tries to separate the creation he wrote about from his life but he knows so well it is him and will always be him. This book serves as a beautiful introduction to the work of Akatagawa that will make you want to read his other works, and is stunning and reflective in it’s own right. Somehow, I liked this excerpt "When I kill a man, I do it with my sword, but people like you don't use swords. You gentlemen kill people 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." pp 5-6. Told from a single POV, this story tells us on the difference of dwelling with grief and death as kids and adult. As we grows older, we’ll accept that death as the end point, and sense of attachment doesn’t rely on maternal relationship. The sun threatened to set before long, but he went on reading book spines with undiminished intensity. Lined up before him was the fin de siècle itself. Nietzsche, Verlaine, the Goncourt brothers, Dostoyevsky, Hauptmann, Flaubert...

The Life of a Stupid Man - Penguin Books UK

I think 2 of them are like autobiography of the author but it's written uniquely. In The Life of a Stupid Man part, it's just like the snippets of 51 short stories. But these "last words" are not words simply of self-loathing and self-pity. They are harrowing, but utterly honest. Morbid, but beautifully wrought. They are beyond class, beyond nationality. They are universal. Eternal. In their unflinching depiction of personal defeat, these works had their predecessors in Japan, notably in the later novels of Soseki, and their successors in the immediate postwar stories of Osamu Dazai and Ango Sakaguchi. But outside of Japan, perhaps only the prose of Kafka or the poetry of Celan bears comparison. I may wear the skin of an urbane sophisticate, butbin this manuscript I invite you to strip it off and laugh at my stupidity" Ah, what is the life of a human being - a drop of dew, a flash of lightning? This is so sad, so sad." 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.”Eighty years later, on the anniversary of his death, I leave an unlit cigarette on Akutagawa's grave. There are flowers here too, other cigarettes, coffee and sake. A pale girl sits by the grave, writing in a notebook. Crows scream in the trees, mosquitoes bite into her skin. Yards away, the corpse of a cat is being eaten by maggots and flies. But here Akutagawa is no longer alone and, thanks to his last words, neither are we. He happened to pass her on the stairway of a certain hotel. Her face seemed to be bathed in moon glow even now, in daylight. As he watched her walk on (they had never met), he felt a loneliness he had not known before." In the early hours of July 24, as a light rain finally broke the heat, Akutagawa spoke with his wife for the last time. Then, shortly before dawn, he took a fatal dose of the barbiturate Veronal. He lay down on his futon and fell into a final sleep reading the Bible. By the following evening, his death was national news. Friends and reporters rushed to his house. At a crowded news conference, Kume read aloud from Akutagawa's suicide note: "I am now living in an icy clear world of morbid nerves ... Still, nature is for me more beautiful than ever. No doubt you will laugh at the contradiction of loving nature and yet contemplating suicide. But nature is beautiful because it comes to my eyes in their last extremity ..." In “Life of a Stupid Man,” Akutagawa’s ego — the city-dwelling phantom that gathers his stupidities — is a literary construction submerged in fin de siècle ennui and despair. The melancholy Baudelaire and ironic Voltaire are its heroes.

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

Akutagawa's death came just six months after the death of the Emperor Taisho and the start of the Showa era. For many, it represented not only the end of an era, but the defeat of Japanese intellectualism. Two years later, Kenji Miyamoto began his career as a Marxist critic with an essay on Akutagawa entitled "Haiboku no Bungaku" ("The Literature of Defeat"), the "defeat" being a deliberate echo of the title of the last section of "The Life of a Stupid Man". Howard S Hibbett, in an essay on Akutagawa, quotes Miyamoto: The other two stories were autobiographical and very fragmentary. Those I liked less but it feel wrong to really rate it, it being autobiographical and knowing the author killed himself quite young.In the third part, which has 51 stories, there seem to be the genuine thoughts of the author about relationships, life, death, and capitalism. Needless to mention that some stories were hard for me to draw any conclusion from them. Nothing to interpret. No logical conclusion to derive. Some of them even seemed ordinary to the extent where writing them seems unexplained. It is in the next two sections where I believe the book has it’s greatest strength. Death Register and The Life of a Stupid Man are both autobiographical pieces. Death Register is Akatagawa reflecting upon his family life in the context of how all his closest relatives passed away. Sound morbid? It is. Akatagawa is regarded as one of Japan’s greatest short story authors and poets, however it is evident throughout his writing that he suffered from depression terribly. Akutagawa Ryūnosuke (芥川 龍之介) was one of the first prewar Japanese writers to achieve a wide foreign readership, partly because of his technical virtuosity, partly because his work seemed to represent imaginative fiction as opposed to the mundane accounts of the I-novelists of the time, partly because of his brilliant joining of traditional material to a modern sensibility, and partly because of film director Kurosawa Akira's masterful adaptation of two of his short stories for the screen. Apartado de esas historias feudales que lo caracterizan, nos encontramos con dos obras autobiográficas, por un lado los “engranajes” y por el otro “vida de un loco”, en los que trae una y otra vez su sentimiento de culpa, la depresión, y sus temores constantes de la enfermedad que ya atacara a su madre. Vida de un loco son relatos cortos, de un párrafo de duración en algunos casos, algunos sin sentido casi como un recuerdo que pasa, y otros que uniendo las piezas revelaban su vida privada.