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has pared his life down and then pared it down again until he was perilously close to the edge, and once he was sure he had reached the point where he could pare it down no farther, he turned the whole thing intofiction. It is a stunning performance. In Japanese there is the expression, “Let the enemy cut your flesh so that you can cut his bone.” This is precisely what Akutagawa has accomplished in “Spinning Gears.” There is no longer any sign here of technique for the sake of technique, and his tendency to flaunt his wit and erudition is also (in effect, at least) greatly reduced. Such are the reasons why, even as I retain some minor misgivings with regard to the degree of its maturity, I rank this posthumous work of Akutagawa’s so highly.
    For a psyche as vulnerable as Akutagawa’s, writing such works was by no means healthy. He drove himself as far as he could possibly go despite a tendency to mental illness in the family. His mother had suddenly gone insane less than eight months after his birth, and he was raised by his mother’s brother and sister and the brother’s wife. He spent his life plagued by a fear that he himself might go mad at any moment, and the maintenance of his mental stability was complicated by his infrequent contacts with his birth parents. We will never know for certain whether the neuroses from which he suffered later in life were caused by hereditary factors, mental instability, or his latent fears, but sickness of mind casts a heavy shadow on the late stories and would end up taking his life. Surely it would be no exaggeration to say that writing these late works effectively shortened his life, but it is also true that he was unable to find a way to go on living as a writer without writing works of this nature—and once he could no longer live as a writer, his life would cease to have meaning.
    It well could be that Akutagawa had to turn to the world of storytelling and technique in order to find refuge from his dark heredity. Rather than face the real world, so full of terror and pain, he might have transported himself mind and body into another world in hopes of finding a kind of salvation in its fictionality. Or perhaps in the dynamism of such a move he hoped to find that life possessed some radiance after all. In the end, however, he was compelled to return to his starting place—to a world ruled by pain and fear, a world that demanded his isolation. For, at a certain point, he came to a profound realization that he must fulfill his social responsibility as awriter and as a leading intellectual of his age. He determined that he could not simply park himself in one comfortable spot as a kind of cultural correspondent.
    Perhaps the true reason that Akutagawa Ry Å« nosuke continues to be read and admired today as a “national writer” lies in this—in the realization and determination that effectively pushed him into a dead end. He started out as one of the chosen few: a Japanese intellectual with a consciousness torn between the West and Japan’s traditional culture, in the border regions of which he succeeded in erecting a uniquely vigorous world of story. As he matured, he attempted to fuse the two different cultures inside himself at a higher level. He attempted structurally to combine the distinctively Japanese style of the I-novel with his own elegant fictional method. He hoped, in other words, to pioneer a newer, more uniquely Japanese form of serious literature. But this would have required a strenuous, long-term effort that his hypersensitive nerves and delicate constitution could not sustain. Pursued by the dark visions that crawled out of the gloom, he would finally despair and cut his life short. Akutagawa’s terrible suicide administered a great shock to the minds of his contemporaries. It signaled both the defeat of a member of the intellectual elite and a major turning point in history.
    Many Japanese would see in