Mandarins

Stories by Ryunosuke Akutagawa

Translated by Charles DeWolf
Ebook
On sale Mar 22, 2011 | 255 Pages | 9781935744122
Prefiguring the vital modernist voices of the Western literary canon, Akutagawa writes with a trenchant psychological precision that exposes the shifting traditions and ironies of early twentieth-century Japan and reveals his own strained connection to it. These stories are moving glimpses into a cast of characters at odds with the society around them, singular portraits that soar effortlessly toward the universal. "What good is intelligence if you cannot discover a useful melancholy?" Akutagawa once mused. Both piercing intelligence and "useful melancholy" buoy this remarkable collection. Mandarins contains three stories published in English for the first time: "An Evening Conversation," "An Enlightened Husband," and "Winter."
Evening was falling one cloud-covered winter’s day as I boarded a To¯kyo¯-bound train departing from Yokosuka. I found a seat in the corner of a second class coach, sat down, and waited absentmindedly for the whistle. Oddly enough, I was the only passenger in the carriage, which even at that hour was already illuminated. Looking out through the window at the darkening platform, I could see that it too was strangely deserted, with not even well-wishers remaining. There was only a caged puppy, emitting every few moments a lonely whimper.
It was a scene that eerily matched my own mood. Like the looming snow clouds, an unspeakable fatigue and ennui lay heavily upon my mind. I sat with my hands deep in the pockets of my overcoat, too weary even to pull out the evening newspaper.
At length the whistle blew. Ever so slightly, my feeling of gloom was lifted, and I leaned my head back against the window frame, half-consciously watching for the station to recede slowly into the distance. But then I heard the clattering of dry-weather clogs coming from the ticket gate, followed immediately by the cursing of the conductor. The door of the second-class carriage was flung open, and a young teenage girl came bursting in.
At that moment, with a shudder, the train began to lumber slowly forward. The platform pillars, passing one by one, the water carts, as if left carelessly behind, a red-capped porter, calling out his thanks to someone aboard – all this, as though with wistful hesitancy, now fell through the soot that pressed against the windows and was gone.
Ryunosuke Akutagawa was one of Japan's leading literary figures in the Taisho period in Japan. Regarded as the father of the Japanese short story, he produced over 150 in his short lifetime and is renowned as a pre-eminent prose stylist and modernist whose work ranges from the fantastical and supernatural to the psychological and formally unconventional. Haunted by the fear that he would inherit his mother's madness, his mental health deteriorated rapidly towards the end of his life and he committed suicide aged 35 by taking an overdose of barbital. View titles by Ryunosuke Akutagawa

About

Prefiguring the vital modernist voices of the Western literary canon, Akutagawa writes with a trenchant psychological precision that exposes the shifting traditions and ironies of early twentieth-century Japan and reveals his own strained connection to it. These stories are moving glimpses into a cast of characters at odds with the society around them, singular portraits that soar effortlessly toward the universal. "What good is intelligence if you cannot discover a useful melancholy?" Akutagawa once mused. Both piercing intelligence and "useful melancholy" buoy this remarkable collection. Mandarins contains three stories published in English for the first time: "An Evening Conversation," "An Enlightened Husband," and "Winter."

Excerpt

Evening was falling one cloud-covered winter’s day as I boarded a To¯kyo¯-bound train departing from Yokosuka. I found a seat in the corner of a second class coach, sat down, and waited absentmindedly for the whistle. Oddly enough, I was the only passenger in the carriage, which even at that hour was already illuminated. Looking out through the window at the darkening platform, I could see that it too was strangely deserted, with not even well-wishers remaining. There was only a caged puppy, emitting every few moments a lonely whimper.
It was a scene that eerily matched my own mood. Like the looming snow clouds, an unspeakable fatigue and ennui lay heavily upon my mind. I sat with my hands deep in the pockets of my overcoat, too weary even to pull out the evening newspaper.
At length the whistle blew. Ever so slightly, my feeling of gloom was lifted, and I leaned my head back against the window frame, half-consciously watching for the station to recede slowly into the distance. But then I heard the clattering of dry-weather clogs coming from the ticket gate, followed immediately by the cursing of the conductor. The door of the second-class carriage was flung open, and a young teenage girl came bursting in.
At that moment, with a shudder, the train began to lumber slowly forward. The platform pillars, passing one by one, the water carts, as if left carelessly behind, a red-capped porter, calling out his thanks to someone aboard – all this, as though with wistful hesitancy, now fell through the soot that pressed against the windows and was gone.

Author

Ryunosuke Akutagawa was one of Japan's leading literary figures in the Taisho period in Japan. Regarded as the father of the Japanese short story, he produced over 150 in his short lifetime and is renowned as a pre-eminent prose stylist and modernist whose work ranges from the fantastical and supernatural to the psychological and formally unconventional. Haunted by the fear that he would inherit his mother's madness, his mental health deteriorated rapidly towards the end of his life and he committed suicide aged 35 by taking an overdose of barbital. View titles by Ryunosuke Akutagawa

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