‘Saint Kappa’
If you want to live a comparatively peaceful life,
it is best not to be a novelist.
‘Ten Rules for Writing a Novel’,
Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, May, 1926
Late in the morning of July 15, 1927, the second year of Shōwa, I received a telegram from Ryūnosuke Akutagawa asking me to come as soon as I could to his house in Tabata, Tokyo. I was surprised, to say the least.
I had seen very little of Akutagawa since his last visit to Nagasaki, which was over five years ago now. Remembering that visit, that time, was as though viewing scenes from someone else’s life. My rubber business in Malaysia had gone bankrupt, and I had lost everything. Last year, I had moved to Tokyo, the remote and cheaper outskirts of the city, hoping to make some kind of living through writing and publishing, hoping then to turn my financial loss into a personal gain, if nothing else, fulfilling my long-held literary ambitions. And though my wife and I were far from comfortable, I had managed to publish two books on the art and history of Nagasaki. Yet even here, on the outskirts of the capital and its literary circles, I had not seen much of Akutagawa. From what I had heard, he himself had not had the best of times either, and these rumours were confirmed on one of the rare and last occasions I had seen him, four or five months ago.
Earlier this year, towards the end of winter, Kaizōsha had thrown a party at the Kabukiza to celebrate the success of their Enbon series of one-yen books and, between the performances, I was in the corridor smoking when, suddenly, Akutagawa came rushing up to me, gripped my shoulders in both hands, pushed me up against the wall and said, ‘I can’t bear it!’
‘What,’ I said, shocked at his words, his actions and his appearance; he looked so frail, almost emaciated, his cheeks hollow and his nose even more pronounced, his face a pale blue and his lips a sickly red, with his hair long and falling over his forehead. In truth, he appeared the replica of one of those caricatures he had often drawn of himself as a Kappa in Nagasaki.
‘When I caught the train from Kugenuma today,’ he said, opening his eyes as wide as they would go, as though about to share the strangest story in the world, ‘the landscape along the tracks was burning red!’
‘Really,’ I asked. ‘Was somewhere on fire?’
But Akutagawa didn’t answer, his eyes downcast now, yet smiling to himself, suddenly looking up again, then back down again, then up at me, until at last he said, ‘You know my brother-in-law committed suicide?’
‘I know,’ I said, and nodded. ‘I heard.’
‘It really is unbearable … I still haven’t been able to settle the matter. There are so many things to sort out … I can’t stand it any more …’
There, in that dim, narrow corridor of the Kabukiza, his shoulders, his whole body seemed weighed down with the burden, his face so exhausted, so isolated and so pained, yet almost childlike in his agony and despair.
I put a hand on his shoulder, gently patting him, and said, ‘Yes, we seem to have reached the age when such things fall on us, caring for our older relatives, yet still supporting the younger ones …’
‘Well,’ he sighed, ‘I just can’t bear it.’
‘But what choice do we have,’ I said, less as a question and more as a fact, thinking of my own financial problems, knowing the mental burdens were enormous, and I continued, as much to myself as to Akutagawa, ‘But if we constantly think of our situation as a burden, then it really does become unbearable. It’s surely better just to accept it all as part of the natural order of things as we age, and that now our turn has come around …’
Again, Akutagawa didn’t answer; again, his eyes downcast, still smiling to himself, leaning against the wall of the corridor, smoking cigarette after cigarette; I couldn’t even be sure he had heard what I’d said and, as the bell rang for the next performance, as people began to go back inside the auditorium, as I said goodbye, once again urging him to do his best to endure the situation, as he looked up at me with his wide but beautiful eyes, I remember thinking, wondering what on earth they saw, those beautiful eyes, when he looked at this world, burning red along the tracks …
And that winter night was the last contact I had had with him, until his sudden telegram that summer day, and so, as I made my way from the western outskirts to Tabata, it was with some degree of trepidation.
Uncomfortable and weary from the heat and the journey, I arrived at the Akutagawa house late that afternoon to find one of the maids showing out Dr Shimojima. Dr Shimojima was widely known and respected in haiku circles, but he was also the family doctor for the Akutagawa household, and so I was naturally concerned to see him. However, the doctor’s call had been a purely social one and he proudly showed me the signed copy of Akutagawa’s latest book, The Folding Fan of Hunan, which he had just been given. Feeling somewhat relieved, I was then shown up to the second floor and into Chōkōdō, the name Akutagawa had given to his study, and which could be read as either ‘Clear River House’ or ‘Sumida River House’.
Inside Chōkōdō, Akutagawa was seated on the floor at his writing desk, drawing those thin, black, reptilian figures with one hand and chain-smoking with the other, his hair long over his face, his eyes on the paper.
I coughed and said, ‘Good afternoon, Sensei.’
Akutagawa looked up at me blankly,
