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the death of this one writer the triumph, the aestheticism, the anguish, and the unavoidable downfall of the Taish ō Period’s cultivated elite. His individual declaration of defeat also became a signpost on the road of history leading to the tragedy of the Second World War. In the period just before and after his death, the flower of democracy that had bloomed with such promise in the Taish ō Period simply shriveled and died. Soon the boots of the military would resound everywhere. The writer Akutagawa Ry ū nosuke stands as an illuminating presence in the history of Japanese literature, a symbol of his age’s brief glory and quiet defeat.
    Has Akutagawa left behind a lesson for Japan’s contemporary writers (including me)? Of course he has, both as a great pioneer and, in part, as a negative example. One thing he has to teachus is that we may flee into a world of technique and storytelling artifice but will eventually collide with a solid wall. It is possible to borrow the containers for our first stories, but sooner or later we have to transform the borrowed container into our own. Unfortunately for Akutagawa (and it really was unfortunate), he took too long to make his move, and that may well have ended up costing him his life. Perhaps, though, for a life so short, there was no other choice.
    The other lesson he has for us concerns the way we overlay the two cultures of the West and Japan. With great pain and suffering, the self-consciously “modern” Akutagawa groped for his identity as a writer and as an individual in the clash of the two cultures, and just at the point where he had begun to find what was, for him, a hint of a way to fuse the two, he unexpectedly ended his life. For us now, this is by no means someone else’s problem. Long after Akutagawa’s time, we are still (with some differences) living amid the clash of things Western and Japanese, only now we may call them “global” and “domestic.”
    We can say for sure, however, whether with regard to Akutagawa’s day or our own, that a half-baked eclecticism of the “Japanese spirit, Western technology” variety is not only fairly useless in the long run, it is downright dangerous. Joining the two cultural systems through a clever technique is never more than a temporary solution to the problem. Eventually, the bond just falls a part. Akutagawa was fully cognizant of the danger, and as an advanced intellectual of his time, he strove to discover the point of union that was right for him. He adopted the correct stance in this regard, and when we catch glimpses of it in his stories, it reverberates for us even now.
    What we must aim for today, of course, is not a superficial accommodation with an alien culture but a more positive, essential, and interactive engagement. Having been born in Japan, a country with its own particular cultural environment, we have inherited its language and history, and we live here. Obviously, we need not—and cannot—become completely Westernized or globalized. On the other hand, we must never allow ourselves to descend into narrow nationalism. This is the one great lesson, the inflexible rule, that history has taught us.
    Today, when the world is growing ever smaller through the spectacular development of the Internet and the increasingly rapid flow of economic interchange, we find ourselves in a pressing situation whereby, like it or not, our very survival depends on our ability to exchange cultural methodologies on an equivalent basis. To turn toward a stance of national exclusivity, regionalism, or fundamentalism in which nations become isolated politically, economically, culturally, or religiously could bring about unimaginable dangers on a worldwide scale. If only in that sense, we novelists and other creative individuals must simultaneously broadcast our cultural messages outward and be flexible receptors of what comes to us from abroad. Even as we