BJ’s Comments (group member since Sep 30, 2021)

BJ’s comments from the On Paths Unknown group.

Bonitaj wrote: "hello BJ. just wanted to thank you for coming back with your insightful comments..I suspect it's my academic pursuit on the subject of Narcissism that won't allow me to let the protagonist (the aut..."

I had not thought of Akutagawa (or his authorial voice, anyway) as being narcissistic, necessarily, but now that you say it... I did, however, feel that the whole book just gave me the chills. Whether writing fables about dragons or stories about young women working as waitresses or intense narratives about his own life, there was a coldness that I just found relentless. I could not help but feel that I was reading the work of a very unhappy man. Based solely on the stories in this collection, I might go so far to say that one of the shadow narratives I see playing out in this collection is of an author whose lack of respect and empathy, for women in particular, poisons his soul, and eventually he could not help but turn his cruelty on himself.

I think that this interpretation dovetails interestingly with yours. I would love to hear more of your insights on narcissism!

(Also just to clarify, I don't think that the men in Hell Screen actually loved the daughter in a real way, more that what passed for love or attraction for them was actually this other horrible thing. I should have put "love" in scare quotes, perhaps.)

I haven't exactly been speeding my way through books, either... January is a busy time for a lot of jobs, it seems, mine included. I only finally knocked out the back half of the Akutagawa collection finally yesterday! I do hope you come contribute your thoughts in those threads when and if you can and want to, though :) I would be happy to lead a discussion, but I don't have anything specific in mind, and I'm happy to just peacefully wait for things to quiet down again for everyone!

Is there anything coming up for this group? I've really enjoyed reading Shirley Jackson, Poe, Akutagawa, and Zweig with you all over the last few months :) I can't tell if the forthcoming reads goodreads is showing me are really happening somewhere deep in the threads, though, or if goodreads is just showing zombie plans from the past!

I finally made it all the way to the end of the volume. I really liked this book, but at the same time, I’m not sure I enjoyed it. I think the stories are excellent, but I was not particularly eager to pick it up at any given moment, and I had to sort of force myself to finish it. I’m glad I did though, because the set of autobiographical stories in the last section was very interesting.

I’ve said before that I thought this collection was very cold and rather cruel. Reading Shifting Gears and The Life of a Stupid Man, its hard for me not to feel like the writer is just turning that coldness and cruelty inwards, directing it against himself. (And here, I am talking about the narrator, I have done no research about Akutagawa and am simply reflecting on the character he is presenting in these stories. The fact that that character appears, at least from the footnotes in this volume, to have been very close indeed to his own point of view and life, is incredibly sad, but at the same time I don’t want to put all this weight on Akutagawa the man, who I never met and do not know.)

In any case, the derision with which Akutagawa treats the “crazy girl” is, in my view, the poison he cannot see. He obviously feels so much shame around his affairs, but if he could muster a little more compassion for the women around him, perhaps then he would be able to muster a little more compassion for himself. But he cannot, or at least does not, and by the end of the volume he is spiraling into paranoia and darkness.

Another thing I found interesting about these autobiographical stories was the role of literature in them, Japanese and western. It was clear that Akutagawa lived for books, that he read ravenously. He is not name-dropping to name-drop, the books he mentions clearly are proper allusions; their content is very much relevant. And yet, I never got a sense of what he got from literature, really, or even what he wanted to get from literature. It was just this incredible appetite for books, behind which lay…I don’t know.

Of course, there must have been something, but I didn’t get a sense of what that was from these stories. Was it pleasure? Beauty? A sense of detachment or distraction? Feeling close to other people? Feeling distanced from other people? Or was reading and writing simply a compulsion. It is certainly striking that Akutagawa (the character, anyway) never stops writing in these stories, no matter how delirious or confused he becomes.

This, too, contributed to the overwhelming feeling of emptiness and waste that this collection gave me, despite that every single story was good, and that Akutagawa was obviously an exceptionally gifted writer with keen insight into…something…but what?

That quote is very interesting, Bonitaj. I feel like it applies, more or less, to the more autobiographical work in the back half of this collection, but perhaps less to Hell Screen. The daughter in Hell Screen occupies a kind of odd position. She's not quite a fully rounded character—in some respects, she seems to exist, like a buxom side character in a B-horror movie, merely to be dispatched. At the same time, though, there is the monkey, which though not exactly characterization in the traditional sense, emphasizes and obscures her position in the story. And then, I can’t stop thinking about those few lines, when she is biting her lip and crying, in the crucial scene in the hallway (the moment, at least in one version of the story’s reality, just after she had rejected "His Lordships" advances, and thus earned her fate). She comes across as very real, in that moment. As a victim, yes, but as more than a symbol, too. In a story like this, with an unreliable narrator relying on rumors and otherwise uncredited information to build a narrative that contains multiple versions of reality (and Hell Screen performs that particular trick much more subtly, but equally effectively, to In a Bamboo Grove, in my opinion), there are these moments of reality that feel convincing, anchor points around which various story lines and explanations pivot, and that moment was one of them, for me at least. The painter’s daughter really was in the hallway, the narrator really did encounter her there. Around this point of seeming reality, a variety of possible narratives hover uneasily.

In any case, this is a story about two undeniably sadistic men (three counting the narrator), and the innocent woman who is ultimately doomed by their love and attraction, not their hatred. The idea of lust as a destructive force is clearly alluded to in the later stories in the volume— rather disturbingly, to my sensibility—but here, it is tied up in a kind of twisted take on the Pygmalion myth, with an artist who creates a vision of hell so perfect that he falls in love with it, and so it is brought to life to punish him. It is very cold and very cruel, but at the same time it is not cynical; nor is it meant to evoke pathos. Nor is it only about ideas.

This group can move slowly, and we don’t always turn out, but I’m starting to see that there are much, much more active groups on this site that don’t achieve the kinds of involved conversations where you really get to see a book differently nearly so often! (Of course, Traveller deserves a lions share of the credit for that, I suspect :)

I found two more translations, this one by Howard Norman, and available to take out by the hour at archive.org https://archive.org/details/cogwheels...

Norman's translation of the first paragraph seems to be much closer to Takashi Kojima's than to Jay Rubin's. It only has 135 words, an astonishing 83 fewer words than Rubin used for the same part of the original text. However, the first two lines are closer to Rubin:

I doubt whether there will ever be another man like the Lord of Horikawa. Certainly there has been no one like him till now. Some say that a Guardian King appeared to her ladyship his mother in a dream before he was born; …

And then here’s Morinaka Akira’s translation, from the collected volume traveller linked above. The first few pages, though I assume not the whole thing, are available on google books:

Neither in the past nor in the time to come could one imagine a person comparable to the High Lord of Horikawa. I heard that, before his birth, Dai Ioku-Myo-o, the King of Magical Science, appeared at his mother’s bedside.

Akira takes 196 words, which is closer to Rubin’s word count. In my judgment, Akira’s tone is also closer to Rubin’s, which suggests that Rubin is not so much taking liberties as interpreting the original in a way that uses more words to suggest ambiguities in what in Japanese is perhaps more concise but also somewhat imprecise language??

If only I could read Japanese!

Also sorry for stealing your thunder, Traveller! Once I saw how different the pdf you linked was, I couldn't resist digging in a little!

Traveller, I eagerly await your further research, but I must say, comparing the Takashi Kojima translation to the Rubin is unbelievably striking. Its almost hard to believe they are translating the same text, although they are basically saying the same things, its true. Also, I counted the words in the first paragraph of each, and Takashi used 147, Rubin 218, which seems like an absolutely huge difference (I counted myself, so those numbers probably aren't perfect).

Or compare just the first few sentences:

Takashi Kojima:

The Grand Lord of Horikawa is the greatest lord that Japan ever had. Her later generations will never see such a great lord again. Rumor has it that before his birth, Daitoku-Myo-O appeared to her ladyship, his mother, in a dream.

Jay Rubin:

I am certain there has never been anyone like our great Lord of Horikawa, and I doubt there will ever be another. In a dream before His Lordship was born, Her Maternal Ladyship saw the awesomely armed Guardian Deity of the West—or so people say.

The tone is completely different. In substance, the second sentences are actually not so different, since Daitoku-Myo-O gets a footnote in the Takashi. (That footnote, which describes Daitoku-Myo-O as “a three-faced and six-armed god that guards the west…”, at first suggested to me that Rubin had confusingly made it sound like the god in question was armed in a military sense, when actually she was armed in the sense of having six arms, but google suggests that both are true, making this perhaps a rather clever little joke on Rubin’s part!

But that first sentence! One of them must be a bad translation, no? Or is it possible that the references to “Japan” and “later generations” which give the Takashi such a different valence than the Rubin are actually somehow ambiguous in the original?

This story knocked me out! I will try to get some thoughts together soon :)

I loved the dragon story too! And I don't know who was responsible for sequencing this collection, but I thought it was a wonderful breath of fresh air when it showed up! (view spoiler)[it is pretty subtle too; that question at the end, who is the joke on? Or is there no joke at all? A question worth thinking about, as you say, Traveller, in our own world. Also loved the nose theme going on, although I thought Dragon was much more effective than the Nose, which fell a little flat for me. Akutagawa must have read Gogol, no? (hide spoiler)]

Re: translation, I had that very same thought. But honestly, part of me might venture the utterly unsupported opinion that it is not Rubin, but a certain tone of global-literature-in-contemporary-translation, an effort to be both very precise and also very contemporary in terms of the English idiom used, that can make Rubin's Akutagawa not so different from Rubin's Murakami, but also not so different from , say, Pevear and Volokhonsky's Tolstoy - translations for which accessibility to a broad audience in English is, perhaps, more important than preserving the texture of the foreign language (as opposed to say, the various Kafka translations, all of which seem somewhat at pains to broadcast that they couldn't really have been written this way in English, that they were written in conversation with a different set of rules and conventions.) I don't think this is a question of accuracy, not at all, simply one of style. But perhaps this is all codswallop and I should stop making things up :)

BJ, how wonderful that you are a historian - thanks for sharing that with us! I wonder if being one as a profession might spoil one's armchair endeavors a bit, or does it enhance one's readings of history? Pray tell, BJ, I feel pretty envious of you now, I must say...."

Well, I can't read history and have it not be work, that's for sure. But then, reading history for work is a pretty lucky position to be in, and I can always pick up something on physics or biology or whatever if I'm looking for the really-dense-but-not-technically-work reading experience!

I specialize in 17th and 18th century North America, and my research is on the colonization of the Hudson River Valley in New York, with an emphasis on the connections between slavery and indigenous dispossession in a multicultural context (Dutch, English, German, Mohican, Munsee, West African, and Angolan mainly).

But I read fiction for fun and don't bring any insight more special than anyone else who brings their own life experience and other reading to the table :)

Happy New Year Bonitaj and Traveller and anyone else still sticking around the thread :)

I do want to say that I hope my comments here (and on the In the Grove thread, for that matter) have not given the impression that I think it isn't worthwhile to try to learn about the history and culture of other times and places, and to use that knowledge to further our understanding of literature! I'm an historian professionally, although I don't track my history reading on Goodreads, and in my view there is absolutely nothing more rewarding than reading history and literature alongside each other—each offers insights that the other can't, each compliments the other! And Traveller, I very much appreciate the insights that you always bring to these discussions from your further research into the author's time and place and background! I think reading Japanese cultural history absolutely will help you understand Akutagawa's work much better. And for that matter, nowhere is the impact more dramatic, in my opinion, than at the beginning—the difference between someone in my position, who has read nothing but fiction about Japanese cultural and history, and someone who has read just one or two books, and has begun to see the big themes and outlines and pivot points!

There are just times, and this story was one of those times, for me, when I feel that the gulf that separates us from the past is insurmountable, and all the research in the world just throwing pebbles into a lake—but throw pebbles we must, and throw pebbles we shall!

This conversation is fascinating. The issue of translation has been very much on my mind, recently. I'm reading the Rubin, and comparing the passage traveller posted above, it is striking how different the tone is. Just looking at that one paragraph, in the Rubin it is very conversational, whereas the Kojima is quite a bit more "literary" feeling, at least to me. I wonder what the original is like? It is certainly possible that one of the two translations has missed the tone. But of course it is also possible that the Japanese achieves that rare and difficult balance of putting heightened, literary language in the mouths of a character while at the same time maintaining the informality of everyday language, in which case I would imagine that neither translation of that paragraph quite hits the mark. Without reading Japanese, there's no way to know, though!

Another complicating factor in terms of interpreting this story is that it is historical fiction, which always leads to a kind of doubled context, and can be particularly hard to pull apart when you're looking at another culture. I've been thinking about this recently because I just read a Theodor Fontane Berlin novel written in the 1880s and set around 1800, and of course the Germany of the 1880s was vastly different from the Germany of the Napoleanic era. But there is just no way for me, as an American in the waning days of 2021, to untangle that difference. When is the Berlin of the 1800s standing in for the Berlin of the 1880s? Would these characters and their surroundings have seemed alien and antiquated to the reader of the 1880s, or like familiar echoes? Is the author actually trying to reconstruct the values of the 1800s, or is he just using that earlier decade as a mirror to discuss the values of the 1880s? And of course, whatever his intention, did he succeed? In what ways did the 1880s bleed into the 1800s? We have to ask these same questions of Rashoman. According to the notes in my edition, the story is based on a 12th-century tale, and is possibly set around the same time, although I have had trouble figuring out what century we are supposed to be in! Would the timing of this story be obvious to an educated Japanese reader? Or is the time of the story supposed to be ambiguous? And then, of course, it was written in 1915. So are we dealing with the values and morality of the 12th century? Or of 1915? Or both? Where should we look for the appropriate cultural context for this story? Would learning about medieval Japan help us understand what Akutagawa is trying to say, or would it only confuse us, because actually Akutagawa is commenting on the 20th century? Like the question of translation, I feel these kinds of questions are almost impossible for an outsider to the culture to even approach, let alone answer.

But then what are we left with? Do we simply take the story on its own terms, self-contained? Try to read it through the lens of our own values? Look for what appears to be universal in it? Or take is as a window into a world we cannot understand, but that is worth looking through nonetheless? But what world are we looking at? What century? What culture, really?

Also sorry for being so late to the party! The holidays are a very unpredictable time for reading for me, where I might spend many hours buried in a book one day, and then spend three days in a row without even opening one!

I have seen, and very much enjoyed, the famous movie version of this story. (view spoiler)[What I thought was most interesting about the story version, was the fact that not a single testifier had any interest in establishing their innocence or goodness. Which is different than the fact that all three principles confess to the crime, which is obviously the point of the story. But they don't just confess to the crime, they confess to the crime with a kind of pride, almost. For each participant, only by being the one to stick the knife into the body, can they keep their sense of self or their sense of control intact. But of course, from my perspective, anyway, the bandit is responsible no matter what; he is the one who created the situation; he is the one who committed the key rape. That rape itself was horrifying and disconcerting. The reaction of each character to it clearly comes out of a very different moral system than I live in, or even from the victorian mindset I associate with older literature (which makes sense, of course, since this is a story in a non-European tradition). The characters do not exhibit the least bit of interest in looking outside of that moral code, or even feeling sympathy for the woman beyond the rape's effect within the context of the moral system they've all bought into. (hide spoiler)] Which, like Rashoman, left me feeling very cold and distanced from the action. Who are these cold, feelingless people, who cannot see outside of the moral strictures of their time even in such a desperate and extreme situation? Who cannot create a larger sense of responsibility, beyond grasping at the agency of murder in response to the unagency of rape? Did husband and wife always view each other with contempt? Or is that too an artifact of their desperate need to exert control over the narrative? I hesitate to ascribe this to some kind of Japanese tradition of honor. Obviously, that is part of this, but literature is full of people constrained by codes of honor at odds with their emotions or innate moral sense. This does not seem like that kind of story to me, although perhaps it is intended to inspire such reflections in the reader.

In terms of other stories to discuss, I enjoyed the Nose, Dragon, and The Spider Thread, all three of which were like little moral fables. I'm not sure if there is much to say about them, other than they seemed both highly contrasting to Rashoman and In a Grove, and also, from purely a readers perspective, a welcome relief. However, I would very much like to discuss Hell Screen, which is absolutely horrifying. And that is as far as I've read in the volume up to now!

I found this story surprisingly bitter. So far, I'm finding the whole collection surprisingly bitter, which isn't to say I don't like it, because I do.

I think that Traveller, your interpretation as amended in response to Amy's comment hits the nail on the head. At the beginning of the story, the servant is wondering if he has what it takes to live outside of society and morality in order to survive, and he is uncertain. But the drive for someplace dry to sleep pushes him up the stairs among the dead, no matter how horrible. There, his initial response to the woman is "six parts terror and four parts curiosity". But the woman, in her desire to justify her actions, also justifies his actions, and in effect brings her fate down upon her because of her very desire to explain and justify her existence outside of, as you put it, Traveller, 'inside the system'.

In the end, I am left with a bitter, joyless feeling.

This finally arrived at the library today, and is now in my hands :) I'm looking forward to diving in this weekend and discussing these stories!!

I am at a bit of a loss about what I want to say about this story. It certainly compelled me; I stayed up much later than I planned the other night, having foolishly expected just to start it. I feel that I *should* have a lot to say about it. But I have sat down to join this discussion three times now and found nothing to say... so this time I'm just saying nothing (albeit at some length).

I guess one thing, in direct response to Traveller above, I really enjoyed how ambivalent the story was about chess itself and its value. And by extension, I think - as you imply - the value of all games. Not that Zweig is questioning the worth of games, but rather, that he is poking at what their role is, exactly, for people, or for their minds. There is that incredible moment, actually the end of the long paragraph you quote the beginning of, about how it is almost impossible for the narrator to imagine "a mentally unincapacitated person ["eines geistigen regsamen Menschen", which could perhaps better be translated as mentally active or mentally alert, but in any case clearly *not* describing Czentovic!] whose world reduces itself to the cramped monotony of black and white, one who seeks his life's triumphs in the mere to and fro, back and forth of thirty-two figures ..... an intellectual person who, without going insane, directs his mind's full analytic force time and again onto the laughable task of backing a wooden king into the angle of a wooden board!"

To me, this paragraph, which when I came to it felt just like the kind of exhilarating philosophizing that good writers often give themselves the freedom to indulge in, turns out to be a kind of thesis statement, or perhaps testable hypothesis, for the rest of the story.

And of course the fact that Dr B worked for the Austrian royal family - talk about backing kings into corners.

On another note, re: the question of Czentovic's character sketch feeling authentic. Did it feel like an authentic character sketch of a human being? No, not really. Did it feel like the authentic gossip-inflected back story that could have grown up around the character portrayed, in the flesh, as the story went on? Absolutely. Another sign, to me, of Zweig's total control over his narrative.

And there, I guess I found things to say after all :)

Thanks Traveller, I have really loved your comments too, you have a lot of insight into...well, books in general, I guess :) Also, The King of Elfland's Daughter looks really good! I hadn't heard of it, but it looks like a great christmas read! (I'm very into theming my books to the seasons, in an abstract sort of way at least).

(view spoiler)[One of the reasons I kind of want to read A Visit again is to pay more attention to this idea that, as you suggest, "the humans or quasi-humans have to keep making images of it, in the form of tapestries ostensibly, perhaps some other means too, to add to it and keep it in existence." Because Margaret being in the floor seems very important, but I didn't relate it, in my read, to the tapestries the mother is making. But there is something similar. And only at the end, with the part about the house becoming threadbare or damaged based on...neglect, I guess? (which is how it happens in ordinary, mortal houses, after all!) Also, there is the house reflected in the river. That too felt like an image that was more than just poetic. I think this thread is very important no matter how you interpret the story in the broader sense.

Another thing I have been thinking about is the title, "A Visit". Visits, of course, have endings, although one can think one is on a visit and not be, I suppose. There is a line in the beginning: "Margaret's very coming there had been a product of such elaborate arrangement, and such letters to and fro, and such meetings and hopings and wishings". This line suggests so strongly, to me, that Margaret is not dead or a ghost, because ghosts don't write letters to and fro to arrange their entry to the spirit realm, at least in any of the stories I've ever read before! And too, that line, which tells us that Margaret really wants to be here and has been looking forward to it, and also that her being here was not destined or a given, but something which was *arranged* with effort, is part of what gives the story its otherworldly feeling, by undercutting more fantastical interpretations towards the beginning, so that despite the fantastic nature of the house from the get go, it was a decent number of pages before I was sure that this wasn't just a college girl coming back for the holiday with her rich friend. (Which it is that, of course; Margaret is a "friend from school", we cannot discount the mundane at the beginning just because we have read the fantastical at the end more recently.) (hide spoiler)]

A Visit. What a story! I loved this. I almost feel like this story, Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lives in the Castle form a kind of trilogy of house stories. Looking at just the novels, it feels like Jackson is just interesting in houses and how they can be used to contain or reflect or manifest personality, but in a way I don't fully understand, adding A Visit to the mix makes the three stories feel, to me, almost like a coherent set of some kind. Certainly Hill House and A Visit seem to work in counterpoint.

(view spoiler)[At the moment in the tower that the old lady grabs Margaret's hands, and she hears the voices calling her back, I was convinced that she was dead, or dying, and fully expected the rest of the story to vindicate that position. But by the end, I felt that it was really more of a fantasy story. It made me think of a couple of stories in Karen Tidbeck's Jagannath, one is called Augusta Prime and the other I think Aunts, that are a kind of exploration (at least how I read them) of Fairie in the fairytale sense, where a fairy or fairies whisk a human off to a ball in a beautiful mansion with twinkling lights that is outside of time and space, except Tidbeck asks what it would really be like to live in a fairy universe that existed outside of time on some kind of soft edge of the human reality. I really love the Tidbeck stories, and this story (which of course predates them by many decades) gave me a similar feeling, of existing in a kind of timeless space manifest in architecture. (hide spoiler)]

I guess I don't really feel like I have much insight into this story. I almost want to just read it again right away though!

Traveller wrote: "Ha, and now that I've caught you by the ankle, BJ, please, before you run off again, won't you tell us what your take is on "A Visit", purl-eeze"

No more running off for a while, I'm safely back home with my books where I belong :) But I haven't read A Visit yet. If I don't get to it this weekend, I'm sure I'll get to it this weekend.

*edit If I don't get to it today, I'm sure I'll get to it this weekend!