Read Online Rashomon and Seventeen Other Stories by Ryûnosuke Akutagawa - Free Book Online

Screen.” This is Hell itself. 7
    There could easily have been more categories than the above four to represent Akutagawa’s broad interests, including Meiji Period settings, Chinese settings, and children’s stories.
    Nine of the stories in this volume are published in English for the first time: “Dr. Ogata Ry ō sai: Memorandum,” “O-Gin,” “Loyalty,” “Green Onions,” “Horse Legs,” “Daid ō ji Shinsuke: The Early Years,” “The Writer’s Craft,” “The Baby’s Sickness,” and “Death Register.”
    All have been translated in their entirety except “Dragon: The Old Potter’s Tale,” which omits a ponderous framing device, and “The Baby’s Sickness,” which omits a brief dedication to Akutagawa’s good friend Oana Ry Å« ichi. 8
    A word about the annotations. As mentioned in the Introduction, Akutagawa’s language is rich, which means it is full of vocabulary that requires annotation for modern Japanese readers. This is especially true when Akutagawa draws heavily from medieval or Chinese sources or mines his broad knowledge of European literature. Correspondences between the life and the autobiographical works call for annotation as well. Many of the notes contain information so widely shared among modern Akutagawa annotated texts that individual attribution would be nearly meaningless. Where no source is cited, IARZ, CARZ, and/or NKBT can be assumed. Some of the information also comes from useful Akutagawa Japanese “dictionaries.” 9 In one or two cases I managed to identify items that had remained obscure in Japanese annotated texts, and I hope thiswill be a small repayment for the enormous benefit I gained from the extensive Japanese scholarship on Akutagawa. For some stories a headnote gives background information, and the reader may want to consult these before reading the story, especially “Loyalty.”
NOTES
    1 . For publication information, see list of abbreviations, p. 237.
    2 . For English translations of the original “Rash ō mon” story from
Konjaku monogatari
, see Marian Ury,
Tales of Times Now Past
(Ann Arbor, Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan, 1979/1993), pp. 183–4, Royall Tyler,
Japanese Tales
(New York: Pantheon Books, 1987), p. 88, or Yoshiko K. Dykstra,
The Konjaku Tales
, 3 vols. (Osaka: Intercultural Research Institute, Kansai Gaidai University, 1998–2003), 3:245–6, and of the original “In a Bamboo Grove” story from
Konjaku monogatari
, see Ury,
Tales
, pp. 184–6, or Dykstra,
Konjaku Tales
, 3:250–53. See also Ambrose Bierce’s “The Moonlit Road” for a possible source of “In a Bamboo Grove” (
The Complete Short Stories of Ambrose Bierce
, compiled by Ernest Jerome Hopkins (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984)). Akutagawa enthusiastically introduced Bierce to the Japanese reading public in 1921.
    3 . For an English translation of the early thirteenth-century sources for “The Nose” and “Dragon: The Old Potter’s Tale”, see D. E. Mills,
A Collection of Tales from Uji: A Study and Translation of Uji sh Å« i monogatari
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), pp. 172–5 and 344–5.
    4 . The story, “Karma: A Tale with a Moral,” was written by Paul Carus (1852–1919), a German-born scholar of Eastern philosophy and editor and publisher of
The Open Court
. Leo Tolstoy translated the piece into Russian. Akutagawa’s immediate source was D. T. Suzuki’s 1898 Japanese translation of the 1895 revised version of the Carus story. See Yamaguchi Seiichi, “Akutagawa Ry ū nosuke to P ō ru Ke ō rasu: ‘Kumo no ito’ to sono zaigen ni kansuru oboegaki saihen,” in Miyasaka Satoru (ed.),
Akutagawa Ry Å« nosuke sakuhinron sh Å« sei
, 5 vols. (Kanrin shob ō , 1999), 5:7–25.
    5 . For