Ryunosuke Akutagawa Quotes

The people of Ike-no-o used to say that Zenchi Naigu was lucky to be a priest: no woman would ever want to marry a man with a nose like that. Some even claimed it was because of his nose that he had entered the priesthood to begin with. The Naigu himself, however, never felt that he suffered any less over his nose for being a priest. Indeed, his self-esteem was already far too fragile to be affected by such a secondary fact as whether or not he had a wife.

For all our talk about modern enlightenment, Japan is still quite openly a land of kept women.

What is the life of a human being - a drop of dew, a flash of lightning? This is so sad, so sad.

The cable was still sending sharp sparks into the air. He could think of nothing in life that he especially desired, but those purple sparks
those wildly-blooming flowers of fire
he would trade his life for the chance to hold them in his hands."
-from "The Life of a Stupid Man

But surely the will to create was a form of the will to live...?

I may wear the skin of an urbane sophisticate, but in this manuscript I invite you to strip it off and laugh at my stupidity.

But he knew well enough what was wrong with him: he was ashamed of himself and afraid of them – afraid of the society he so despised.

Directly beneath the Lotus Pond of Paradise lay the lower depths of Hell, and as He peered through the crystalline waters, He could see the River of Three Crossings and the Mountain of Needles as clearly as if He were viewing pictures in a peep-box.

Heroes have always been monsters who crushed sentimentalism underfoot.

Life is not worth a single line of Baudelaire."
-from "The Life of a Stupid Man

Yes
or rather, it's not so much that I want to die as that I'm tired of living.

His own disciples were not lamenting the death of their master but rather their own loss at his passing. They were not bewailing the piteous demise of their guide in the wilderness but rather their own abandonment here in the twilight.

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.

He felt so lost, he said later, that the familiar studio felt like a haunted valley deep in the mountains, with the smell of rotting leaves, the spray of a waterfall, the sour fumes of fruit stashed away by a monkey; even the dim glow of the master's oil lamp on its tripod looked to him like misty moonlight in the hills.

It's scary what greed can do to people, don't you think?

A man sometimes devotes his life to a desire which he is not sure will ever be fulfilled. Those who laugh at this folly are, after all, no more than mere spectators of life.

Even Zeus, the grandest of the gods, is no match for the goddesses of vengeance.

Yes, sir. Certainly, it was I who found the body.

And so, by means both active and passive, he sought to repair the damage to his self-esteem. He tried first of all to find ways to make his nose look shorter. When there was no one around, he would hold up his mirror and, with feverish intensity, examine his reflection from every angle. Sometimes it took more than simply changing the position of his face to comfort him, and he would try one pose after another - resting his cheek on his hand or stroking his chin with his fingertips. Never once, though, was he satisfied that his nose looked any shorter. In fact, he sometimes felt that the harder he tried, the longer it looked. Then, heaving fresh sighs of despair, he would put the mirror away in its box and drag himself back to the scripture stand to resume chanting the Kannon Sutra.

The second way he dealt with his problem was to keep a vigilant eye out for other people's noses. Many public events took place at the Ike-no-o temple - banquets to benefit the priests, lectures on the sutras, and so forth. Row upon row of monks' cells filled the temple grounds, and each day the monks would heat up bath water for the temple's many residents and lay visitors, all of whom the Naigu would study closely. He hoped to gain peace from discovering even one face with a nose like his. And so his eyes took in neither blue robes nor white; orange caps, skirts of gray: the priestly garb he knew so well hardly existed for him. The Naigu saw not people but noses. While a great hooked b

At twenty-nine, life no longer held any brightness for him, but Voltaire supplied him with man-made wings.
Spreading these man-made wings, he soared with ease into the sky. The higher he flew, the farther below him sank the joys and sorrows of a life bathed in the light of the intellect. Dropping ironies and smiles upon the shabby towns below, he climbed through the open sky, straight for the sun
as if he had forgotten about that ancient Greek who plunged to his death in the ocean when his man-made wings were singed by the sun."
-from "The Life of a Stupid Man

A shimmering of heat
Outside the grave
Alone I dwell.

He often wondered, in that suburban second story, if people who loved each other had to cause each other pain.

Yet, as we humans are by nature coldhearted, of what use is it to offer moral reprobation?

One chilly autumn evening, he was reminded of the painter by a stalk of corn: the way it stood there armed in its rough coat of leaves, exposing its delicate roots atop the mounded earth like so many nerves, it was also a portrait of his own most vulnerable self. The discovery only served to increase his melancholy.

There's always a weak spot in strength.

For truly he was now being left as a bleached corpse in a vast and desolate moor of humanity.

It's quieter here, isn't it.
Quieter than Tokyo anyway.
Do unpleasant things happen here also?
Well, after all this also is part of the world.

It is important-even necessary-for us to become acutely aware of the fact that we can't trust ourselves. The only ones you can trust to some extent are people who really know that. We had better get this straight.

He saw his contract, written on a single sheet of yellow paper, as a great source of strength. Later, however, he came to realize that the contract saddled him with all the obligations and the company with none.

If you believe in the shadow, you cannot help believing in the light.

He moved on from Anatole France to the eighteenth-century philosophers, though not to Rousseau. Perhaps this was because one side of him - the side easily moved by passion - was too close to Rousseau. Instead, he approached the author of 'Candide', who was closer to another side of him - the cool and richly intellectual side.
At twenty-nine, life no longer held any brightness for him, but Voltaire supplied him with man-made wings.
Spreading these man-made wings, he soared with ease into the sky. The higher he flew, the farther below him sank the joys and sorrows of a life bathed in the light of intellect. Dropping ironies and smiles upon the shabby towns below, he climbed through the open sky, straight for the sun - as if he had forgotten about that ancient Greek who plunged to his death in the ocean when his man-made wings were singed by the sun.

Great robber though he was, Kandata could only trash about like a dying frog as he choked on the blood of the pond.

Do I still love this woman? he asked himself. He was in the habit of observing himself so closely that the answer came as a surprise to him: I do.

These works are handed down from teacher to pupil, from parent to child, almost without question, like DNA. They are memorized, recited, discussed in book reports, included in university entrance exams, and once the student is grown up, they become a source for quotation. They are made into movies again and again, they are parodied, and inevitably they become the object of ambitious young writers' revolt and contempt.

What especially moved him was the corpse of a child of twelve or thirteen. He felt something like envy as he looked at it, recalling such expression as "Those whom the gods love die young." Both his sister and his half-brother had lost their houses to fire. His sister's husband, though, was on a suspended sentence for perjury.

Too bad we didn't all die.

We could see the parapet of Ryougoku Bridge, arching above the waves that flickered in the faint mid-autumn twilight and against the sky, as though an immense black Chinese ink stroke had been brushed across it. The silhouettes of the traffic, horses and carriages soon faded into the vaporous mist, and now all that could be seen were the dots of reddish light from the passengers' lanterns, rapidly passing to and fro in the darkness like small winter cherries.

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. He walked down the darkening street alone, determined now to wait for the destiny that would come to annihilate him.

Life is more hellish than hell itself.

17. Butterfly
A butterfly fluttered its wings in a wind thick with the smell of seaweed. His dry lips felt the touch of the butterfly for the briefest instant, yet the wisp of wing dust still shone on his lips years later.

As you can imagine, those who had fallen this far had been so worn down by their tortures in the seven other hells that they no longer had the strength to cry out.

Just as he reached the point of utter exhaustion, he happened to read Raymond Radiguet's dying words, 'God's soldiers are coming to get me,' and sensed once again the laughter of the gods.

Like an unblemished golden jar, our glorious National Essence stands upon a foundation of belief in the family. We need to ask, then, how grave the responsibilities of the head of any one family might be. Does the head of a family have the right to go mad any time he feels like it? To this question we must offer a resounding "No!". Imagine what would happen if the husbands of the world suddenly acquired the right to go mad. All, without exception, would leave their families behind for a happy life of song on the road, or wandering over hill and dale, or being kept well fed and clothed in an insane asylum.

It is unfortunate for the gods that, unlike us, they cannot commit suicide.

I could have sworn that the man's eyes were no longer watching his daughter dying in agony, that instead the gorgeous colors of flames and the sight of a woman suffering in them were giving him joy beyond measure.

Everyone is the same under the skin.

That's because, in a way different from what you meant by it, you can't trust anybody." Major Kimura lit a new cigar and, smiling, continued in tones that were almost exultantly cheerful. "It is important - even necessary - for us to become acutely aware of the fact that we can't trust ourselves. The only ones you can trust to some extent are people who really know that. We had better get this straight. Otherwise, our own characters' heads could fall off like Xiao-er's at any time.

Yet what a wretched creature I am, not to be able to depend upon myself!

That which is most precious in a human life is indeed found in such an irreplaceable moment of ecstasy. To hurl a single wave into a void of depravity, as dark as a nocturnal sea, and capture in the foam the light of a not-yet-risen moon . . . It is such a life that is worth living.

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.