Suicides of elite Japanese writers: The case of Ryunosuke Akutagawa

INTRODUCTION

Japanese writer Ryunosuke Akutagawa (1892–1927) ranks among one of the elite writers of 20th century literature (Fig. 1). He also belongs to another elite group of writers who had committed suicide. While Post¹ had omitted Akutagawa in his study sample of 291 famous creative men with psychopathology (due to his specific selection criteria for the study of the ‘availability of sufficiently adequate biographies’), Pretti and Miottto² included him among a sample of 3093 eminent ‘artists’ who had committed suicide. Though 95 years had passed since Akutagawa’s suicide, a distinct lack of medical literature on his creative life remains as a handicap to non-Japanese students and admirers of Akutagawa’s creativity.

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FIG 1.

Ryunosuke Akutagawa (source: Wikimedia Commons, photographer unknown. Lapsed copyright)

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The New York Times, in its brief obituary of Akutagawa noted: ‘…He was a humorous, popular and successful writer, was happy in his home life, with a large circle of admirers, and apparently died simply because he was weary of life, which had been made a burden by a prolonged nervous depression.

‘His wife and children left him Saturday night writing as usual. Sunday morning his wife awoke to find him dying. He was thirty-six years old and leaves three sons.

‘Akutagawa left three “testaments”. The first was addressed to his wife, bidding her not to attempt to revive him if he was a long time dying, and containing directions about the children’s education and the disposal of his property. The second was addressed to another novelist, Kan Kikuchi. The third was addressed to various old friends and stated that he had meditated on death for the past two years, and while he had a duty to write honestly, he saw no need to explain his motives….’³

In published literature, the suicide of Akutagawa’s junior contemporary writer Yukio Mishima (1925–70) had received more attention^4–9 than that of Akutagawa. Two possible reasons include the flamboyant-narcissist image of Mishima, and the macabre mode of seppuku suicide committed by him. Nevertheless, in a survey of 111 sophomore students conducted at the Gifu Pharmaceutical University in 2010, among the suicides committed by newsworthy Japanese in the 20th century, I had reported previously¹⁰ that 19.8% of the men and women students recognized Akutagawa’s suicide as number one of their interest. As a sequel to this study, to mark the 130th birth anniversary of Akutagawa, I revisit his troubled life and suicide, as recorded by his hand.

METHOD

Two short works of Akutagawa, namely Tenkibo (1926: Death Register) and Aru Ahono Issho (1927: The Life of a Stupid Man, Fig. 2) in English translations of Jay Rubin were used as the primary sources,¹¹ in addition to the published literature about his life.^12–18

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FIG 2.

Book cover for The Life of a Stupid Man (1926) by Akutagawa, consisting of 51 short fragments, translated by Jay Rubin

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RESULTS

Notable life events of Akutagawa are given in Table I. As is evident, Ryunosuke had a deprived childhood, when his biological mother Fuku lapsed into a schizophrenic state from which she never recovered,¹² a few months after Ryunosuke was born. Since his biological mother Fuku became incapable in looking after Hisa (second elder sister) and Ryunosuke, the latter was passed to Fuku’s elder brother Michiaki Akutagawa and his wife Tomo, who were childless. Thus, in addition to his biological mother, Akutagawa also had two aunts—one as a legal mother Tomo and the second one as a foster mother Fuki, who lived with Akutagawas.¹⁵

In his 1926 reminiscence Death Register, Akutagawa had described the health of his biological mother Fuku, as follows: ‘My mother was a madwoman. I never did feel close to her, as a son should feel toward his mother. Hair held in place by a comb, she would sit alone all day puffing on a long, skinny pipe in the house of my birth family in Tokyo’s Shiba Ward…I never had the experience of a mother’s care. I do seem to recall that one time, when my adoptive mother made a point of taking me upstairs to see her, she suddenly conked me on the head with her pipe. In general, though, she was a quiet lunatic… My mother died in the autumn of my eleventh year, not so much from illness, I think, as from simply wasting away. I have a fairly clear memory of the events surrounding her death.’

In the Death Register, Akutagawa also recorded the deaths of his eldest sister Hatsuko (before his own birth) who died of meningitis in 1891 and his biological father, when he was 28 from influenza, in 1919. Describing the last night he spent with his dying father, Akutagawa wrote, ‘…I found my father eagerly awaiting my return [from a geisha entertained dinner]. He sent everyone else outside the two-panel folding screen by the bed, and, gripping and caressing my hand, he began to talk about long-ago matters that I had never known – things from the time when he married my mother. They were inconsequential things – how he and she had gone to shop for a storage chest, or how they had eaten home-delivered sushi – but before I knew it my eyelids were growing hot inside, and down with my father’s wasted cheeks, too, tears were flowing. My father died the next morning without a great deal of suffering…’

Multiple reasons have been suggested for Akutagawa’s suicide. First was that he suffered from hallucinations of inheriting the schizophrenia traits of his biological mother. Second, the financial burdens left by his brother-in-law’s suicide, in January 1927, left Akutagawa in a desperate situation. Third, a medically pertinent possibility was insomnia, for which Akutagawa had been tinkering with prescribed sleep inducing medicine, Veronal, and potassium cyanide. Fourth, according to Healy,¹² mental collapse of his novelist friend Koji Uno (1891– 1961) in May 1927 might have precipitated the suicide.

DISCUSSION

It is a proven fact that Akutagawa had a fetish about his own death. In a little story entitled ‘Shiso’ (The Shadow of Death),¹⁹ he wrote probably when he was 18 or 19 years old (either in his last year of junior high school or in the first year of high school, in 1909 or 1910), Akutagawa wrote about an old fortune teller who had scrutinized his customer’s face and predicted an ‘early death’ based on a shadow between his customer’s eyebrows. The customer was the writer of the story himself. Kurachi¹⁵ had listed nine later works of Akutagawa where the theme of death symptoms dominates.

In his final work, The Life of a Stupid Man, completed in the penultimate month before suicide, 7 among the 51 brief descriptions (tagged as ‘scraps and fragments’ by reviewer Cozy²⁰) Akutagawa had described his thoughts on illness and death, in addition to visiting his birth mother in a lunatic asylum, and studying a cadaver for his famous short story ‘Rashomon’. These descriptions offer a fascinating angle on Akutagawa’s prevailing state of mind, before his suicide.

Excerpts from Akutagawa’s specific descriptions¹¹ follow:

About his biological mother (fragment #2):

All the lunatics had been dressed in the same gray clothing, which seemed to give the large room an even more depressing look. One of them sat at an organ, playing a hymn over and over with great intensity. Another was dancing—or, rather, leaping about—in the very centre of the room.

He stood watching this spectacle with a doctor of notably healthy complexion. Ten years earlier, his mother had been in no way different from these lunatics. In no way. And in fact in their smell he caught a whiff of his own mother’s smell.

‘Shall we go, then?’ The doctor led him down a corridor to another room. In a corner there were several brains soaking in large jars of alcohol. On one of the brains he noticed something faintly white, almost like a dollop of egg white. As he stood there chatting with the doctor, he thought again of his mother…

About cadavers (fragment #9):

A tag on a wire dangled from the big toe of each cadaver. The tags were inscribed with names, ages and such. His friend bent over one corpse, peeling back the skin of its face with a deftly wielded scalpel. An expanse of beautiful yellow fat lay beneath the skin.

He studied the cadaver. He needed to do this to finish writing a story—a piece set against a Heian Period background––but he hated the stink of the corpses, which was like the smell of rotting apricots. Meanwhile, with wrinkled brow, his friend went on working his scalpel…

This fragment relates to Akutagawa’s famous story of ‘Rashomon’, published in 1915 (Fig. 3), which gained international recognition, after Akira Kurosawa directed, an award-winning film by the same name in 1950.

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FIG 3.

Book cover Rashomon and Other Stories by Akutagawa, translated by Takashi Kojima

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On illness (fragment #41):

He suffered an onslaught of insomnia. His physical strength began to fade as well. The doctors gave him various diagnoses—gastric hyperacidity, gastric atony, dry pleurisy, neurasthenia, chronic conjunctivitis, brain fatigue… (dots, as in the original) But he knew well enough what was wrong with him: he was ashamed of himself and afraid of them [italics, as in the original]—afraid of the society he so despised….

This fragment indicates Akutagawa’s dissatisfaction with the diagnoses delivered by his doctors for his ailments.

On Death (fragment #44):

Taking advantage of his sleeping alone, he tried to hang himself with a sash tied over the window lattice. When he slipped his head into the sash, however, he suddenly became afraid of death. Not that he feared the suffering he would have to experience at the moment of dying. He decided to try it again, using his pocket watch to see how long it would take. This time, everything began to cloud over after a short interval of pain. He was sure that once he got past that, he would enter death. Checking the hands of his watch, he discovered that the pain lasted one minute and twenty-some seconds…

On Death (fragment #48):

He did not die with her, but he took a certain satisfaction in his never having touched her. She often spoke with him as though their dialogue had never happened. She did once give him a bottle of cyanide with the remark, ‘As long as we have this, it will give us both strength.

And it did indeed give him strength. Sitting in a rattan chair, observing the new growth of a shii tree, he often thought of the peace that death would give him.

A title ‘Stuffed swan’ (fragment #49):

With the last of his strength, he tried to write his autobiography, but it did not come together as easily as he had hoped…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…

Once he had finished writing The Life of a Stupid Man, he happened to see a stuffed swan in a secondhand shop. It stood with its head held high, but its wings were yellowed and moth-eaten. As he thought about his life, he felt both tears and mockery welling up inside him. All that lay before him was madness or suicide…

On Defeat (final fragment #51):

The hand with the pen began to tremble, and before long he was even drooling. The only time his head ever cleared was after a sleep induced by eight-tenths of a gram of Veronal, and even then it never lasted more than thirty minutes or an hour. He barely made it through each day in the gloom, leaning as it were upon a chipped and narrow sword.

It was subsequently revealed in 2008, that Akutagawa had left six suicide notes. Among the four notes which turned up at his grandchild’s house, two were addressed to his wife, one was to his children and the fourth one was to his literary friend Kikuchi Kan. The suicide note to his children, carried the admonition: ‘Don’t forget that life is a battle.’ It showed an addition made later by the writer, which modified the word ‘battle’ by adding the phrase ‘that leads to death’.²¹

Though Akutagawa’s mortal remains vanished in 1927, one of his creations ‘Rashomon’ (that focuses on the relativity of truth and the unreliability of human memory) has gained global immortality in scientific lexicon now,^22–26 via Akira Kurosawa’s 1950 film by the same name. Who among his contemporaries can lay claim to such creativity?

A COMPARISON OF SUICIDES OF RENOWNED JAPANESE WRITERS

Beginning from Durkheim,^27,28 Freud^29,30 and Shneidman,³¹ typologies proposed for suicides are aplenty. Each have their merits and demerits, based on gathered empirical data collected during different time periods that incorporated war, pestilence and individual perceptions of proposing authors, from varying cultural backgrounds. In a review of the numerous typologies proposed for suicide, Martin³² had identified 7 distinct categories pertaining to sociological, psychoanalytic, behavioural, relational, psychosocial, needs/motivation and empirical components.

Attempting to fit a small sample of elite writer suicides (in this case, from Japanese culture with distinct forms of suicide³³ such as seppuku or disembowelment, shinju or love suicide and minage or drowning by women) into the proposed suicide typologies of western authorities^27–32 is rather inconvenient. In addition, anthropologist Ruth Benedict³⁴ had pointed out, ‘American condemnation of suicide makes self-destruction only a desperate submission to despair, but the Japanese respect for it allows it to be an honourable and purposeful act.’; thus, cultural difference of condemnation (in Christian belief) and respect (in Shinto-Buddhist belief) is an issue to be tackled for using the proposed suicide typology slots of Durkheim, Freud and Shneidman (all three belonging to Jewish faith). As such, the four categories typology of suicide proposed by Pridmore and McArthur,³⁵ based on the presence/absence of predicament is useful in this regard.

For comparative purposes, in Table II, details of the suicides of five renowned Japanese writers of the 20th century which followed Akutagawa’s suicide are provided. How the suicides of Akutagawa and the other five Japanese writers fit into the Pridmore and McArthur categories typology is presented in Table III.

CONCLUSION

Before his suicide, consulted doctors gave Akutagawa various diagnoses—‘insomnia, gastric hyperacidity, gastric atony, dry pleurisy, neurasthenia, chronic conjunctivitis, brain fatigue’. Though it is uncertain what percentage of hereditary factor(s) played a role, why the practitioners of medical profession in 1920s Japan failed to save the life of this creative individual still remains a question.