[In the following essay, Lippit argues that Akutagawa's use of traditional existing stories allows him to shift his focus away from the problems of modern storytelling and instead deal more directly with the story elements themselves.]

Following in the path of Mori Ogai and Natsume Sōseki, writers whom he especially admired, Akutagawa Ryūnosuke (1892–1927) started his writing by rejecting the confessional self-revelation and open self-search which characterized Japan's I-novelists, including the naturalistic writers like Katai and the idealistic Shirakaba writers. Akutagawa, who was also strongly influenced by Western fin-de-siècle literature, chose the short story as his form from the start, and studied Poe, Anatole France, de Maupassant, Gautier, and Merimée, among others.

Although the short story has been the dominant form in modern Japanese literature, it was often—particularly in realistic works—meant only to be a short form of the novel. In fact, the Japanese term shōsetsu is used to refer to both the novel and the short story. Such writers of the I-novel as Shiga Naoya (who wrote major novels) and Kajii Motojiro (who wrote short fiction exclusively) excelled in using the short-story form to present situations which led to the height of the author's or protagonist's perception and to a moment of profound realization in his daily-life experiences. Precisely for this reason, however, precisely because they used the short-story form to explore openly the self and life, centering on the protagonist-author's self-search and self-expression, the form of their short stories was no different from that of the novel, except in length. For writers pursuing self-growth, the novel is definitely a more suitable form, and even Kajii, who was devoted to the genre of the short story, turned to the novel just before his untimely death.

Akutagawa, on the other hand, approached the short story in a manner completely different from the I-novelists. First of all, the short story for him was a modern form of storytelling and had to center around the story element (the lack of which characterizes the work of the I-novelists). Second, the stories had to present a self-sufficient world of their own. The art of the short-story writer, therefore, had to concentrate on creating in the works a perfectly autonomous “architectural structure,” to borrow Tanizaki's phrase (which, ironically, he used in his debate with Akutagawa).

The most characteristic feature of Akutagawa's short stories is the fact that they are based almost exclusively on other stories: classical tales, foreign tales, the works of other writers, and so forth. In other words, Akutagawa's short stories do not usually deal with human reality directly, but with materials which have already been fictionalized in tales or stories. On the rare occasions when he dealt with situations in his own experience, they were almost invariably limited to those in his childhood. He did deal with historical situations, learning much from Mori Ogai, but even there his interest was not in dealing with the actual human experience, but in the use of stories which had already been told in history.

The borrowing of old stories or the use of someone else's stories, immediately and on a superficial level, frees the writer from having to confront the epistemological question of how to know, grasp and present reality, a question which has been vital to modern fiction. The reality in Akutagawa's works is one or two steps removed from the reality of the author and the reader, and the reality in his twice-told tales is replaced by the “story,” temporarily solving the problem of the relation between reality and art. Moreover, the story element, which he made central, helps to create the structure of the works and to make them self-contained. Their perfection can be evaluated in terms of the narrative structure, that is, by the art of storytelling and the extent to which the story presents a world complete in itself.

The borrowing of old stories also exempts the author from confronting directly the question of self-expression in his works. He is a storyteller, one whose business is to mediate between the readers and the story. Not only does the story give shape and boundaries to the world of his works, but it also defines the author's identity in relation to his works as a storyteller, both inside and outside the works. Akutagawa was amazingly unconcerned with the question of the relationship between the author and the work. He often appears openly as a narrator in his works (as in “Rashomon”), and the author as narrator is surprisingly free from self-consciousness in his intrusion into the world of the story.

Thus, the use of existing stories, particularly old stories, whose credibility the author did not have to defend, enabled Akutagawa to circumvent dealing directly in his works with the two vital problems of modern fiction, reality and self, and to avoid the deadlock which the I-novelists reached in dealing with these problems. In Akutagawa's short stories, the question of reality and fiction and that of their relation to the search for the self in literature are temporarily suspended because of the dominance of the story itself. In that world of story, the questions of reality and the self are converted into technical or aesthetic problems of narration.

This does not mean that Akutagawa lacked concern with the problems of reality and self or that he tried to avoid dealing with them. By borrowing stories and taking the reader away from the immediate reality, Akutagawa sought to present symbolic situations relevant to all human reality. A self-avowed literary cosmopolitan, Akutagawa was confident of the universal validity of his works, confident that his works transcended the particular time and place in which they were set. Most of Akutagawa's works deal with complex psychological situations that exist in human relations, and they often reveal his fundamental skepticism about human life and belief in the relativity of human relations. In other words, Akutagawa's borrowing of the stories was a device for dealing with the modern human situation and psychology. The borrowed story provided the distance of time and space which helped give universality to the situation with which he was dealing. In this sense, the story provided only a convenient framework.

Moreover, Akutagawa's consistent use of old stories, stories twice or thrice told, reveals his belief in or reliance on archetypal literary themes and patterns of human life. Often in his stories, the narrator evades the responsibility even for being the witness or providing firsthand information on the story. By relying on the archetypal patterns of his stories, Akutagawa was able to expand his imagination to present his own story. In fact, his short stories are characterized by the exceptional integration of storytelling with the presentation of modern psychological reality.

In depending on earlier literary works, Akutagawa was certainly not alone among Japanese authors; such dependence has been one of the major techniques of Japanese (and Chinese) literature. Japanese fiction in particular, including the monogatari, setsuwa and short fiction of Saikaku and Ueda Akinari, has relied extensively on the use of earlier works as source materials. In utilizing earlier works, therefore, Akutagawa was only revitalizing a deep-rooted tradition of Japanese fiction, and in doing so, he countered the dominant trend of his time which treated the short story as a form of direct self-search and self-expression or as the presentation of a slice of life, a form without a story. In the Western short story too, the development of the modern genre involved liberal borrowing from earlier stories as, for example, in the case of Edgar Allan Poe, often regarded as the father of the modern short-story genre.

Furthermore, Akutagawa was far from indifferent to the question of self-expression or the author's ego. Indeed, he admired and envied Shiga Naoya and Goethe, both of whom openly exposed their internal lives as the materials for their literature and the subject of their literary pursuit. Considering himself a poet, Akutagawa was strongly inclined toward the pursuit of self-exultation and self-transcendence. His persistent concern with egotism, particularly the egotism of the artist, was reflected in various ways in his works, but most often in the recurring theme of conflict between the decadent pursuit of art and beauty and the humanistic acceptance of the self as part of humanity. “Jigokuhen” (“The Hell Screen,” 1918) is the most brilliant dramatization of the conflict. By assuming the role of a storyteller, therefore, Akutagawa was only wearing a mask which would hide the author's ego in the archetypal drama contained in the stories. In fact, it can be said that the development of modern fiction is the history of the authors' search for the appropriate masks in which to confess.

Mishima Yukio, who is the proper successor to Akutagawa in this respect, reveals plainly the mechanism of the confession of a mask. Unlike Mishima, however, Akutagawa was never successful in dramatizing the self in different personae; not only was the short-story form decidedly unsuitable for it, but also the narrative structure in which the narrator assumed the role of storyteller imposed inherent limitations on such dramatization.

The plot controversy between Akutagawa and Tanizaki, which took place in the last year of Akutagawa's life, sheds considerable light on these issues. In this dispute, Akutagawa, almost negating his entire literary achievement, advocated the writing of stories without a story and the expression of the author's “poetic spirit” as the purpose of literary expression rather than the creation of an autonomous world of fiction with architectural beauty. The dispute took place at a point when Akutagawa's confidence as a storyteller was deeply shaken and he had come to doubt whether storytelling was an adequate form to provide the mask for the search for the self and the meaning of life. … Although it would be too simple to take his last work, “Aru ahō no isshō” (“A Fool's Life,” 1927), as a straight confessional, autobiographical work, the change of his literary stance and form of expression, the open and direct dealing with himself at the time of his mental crisis, only impresses us the more with his earlier effort to hide his vulnerable self under the mask of a storyteller.

Such critics as Saeki Shōichi have pointed out that Akutagawa's failure as a storyteller in his later years was due mainly to his failure to clarify the relation between the narrator and the author himself. Such modern writers as Henry James, Mauriac and Jean-Paul Sartre have long cast doubt on the ontological legitimacy of the author assuming the role of narrator, and in contemporary fiction, the narrator has become nothing but a fictional character. Akutagawa's turning to the story without a story, therefore, was only the result of his doubt about having the author assume the role of narrator and of his recognition of the problems which became acutely felt in the modernist era. Akutagawa was thus anticipating, in his later years, the direction which modern fiction itself would take.

In this sense, Akutagawa's early works present a happy union of storytelling and the presentation of the psychological or inner reality of human beings, a union between the architectural beauty of a self-sufficient, artificial world of art and the human condition. In other words, Akutagawa found in his stories, his twice-told tales which borrowed from earlier works, a means of overcoming the dichotomy between art and life, a dichotomy which was the major literary and aesthetic concern of the fin-de-siècle writers.

Akutagawa was an indefatigable experimenter in his expression and in his effort to develop the poetics of the short story. Each story, therefore, reveals not only his unending search for new materials, but also his awareness of the problems of narration. One of the genres he successfully developed was stories for young adults, the most representative of which is the famous “Kumonoito” (“The Thread of the Spider's Web,” 1915). He wrote about eleven such stories, all during the middle period of his writing career (1918–1924), a period in which he was especially concerned with the relations between art and life.

The Taisho period (1912–1926) was a time when stories for children were seriously pursued as a new genre. Such writers as Ogawa Mimei and Suzuki Miekichi turned completely to children's literature and led the movement to raise the genre to the level of art. Other writers, including Uno Koji, Kubota Mantaro and Sato Haruo, were also devoted to the genre. Akutagawa wrote the stories for young adults under the influence of Suzuki Miekichi, who was one of the pupils of Sōseki. Akutagawa's dowa (Tales for Children), like most of his other works, were based on a wide range of old and legendary stories, including Buddhist, classical Chinese and Japanese tales, and Western fairy tales. Since they were ostensibly written for young adults, however, they enabled Akutagawa to express more openly his own ethical views and attitude toward life, and his lyrical appraisal of innocence and purity.

“Toshishun,” which was published in 1920 in Akai Tori (The Red Bird), a journal of children's literature edited by Suzuki Miekichi, is not only one of the masterpieces of children's literature but also occupies a significant place in Akutagawa's literature. The work is an adaptation of a tale, or ch'uan-ch'i, of T'ang China entitled “Tu Tzu-chun,” which falls into a major category of supernatural tales in the ch'uan-ch'i genre. Although Akutagawa followed the basic plot and story of “Tu Tzu-chun,” essentially retelling the story to young adults, by changing several key elements in the story he converted the Chinese tale into a quest-story of his own.

The original Chinese story is about a young man, Tu Tzu-chun, who dissipated his inheritance. A good-for-nothing wastrel who neglected all his duties, he is deserted by his relatives and friends when he loses his money. At this point he meets at the city gate an old man who gives him money to restore his former life of dissipation. When he again wastes his money within a few years, the same old man appears and gives him a still larger amount of money. He intends to do something good with the money, but the minute he receives it he resumes his decadent life. When he receives money for the third time, Tu Tzu-chun is determined to use it to promote public welfare, and after attending to his worldly affairs in this way, to place himself at the old man's disposal. After spending a year helping orphans and widows and contributing to the social good in other ways, he goes on the appointed day to see the old man at the appointed place. The old man takes him to his mansion on a mountain which penetrates deeply into the clouds. In the mansion there is a cauldron for making holy medicine. The old man, returning in his Taoist's clothing, tells Tu Tzu-chun not to utter a single word at the trials he is about to experience, for whatever he experiences will not be real.

Subsequently, Tu Tzu-chun is tortured by soldiers, attacked by ferocious animals, and tortured by monsters and ogres who boil him and cut up his limbs. Through all this, Tu Tzu-chun utters not a single word. Next his wife is brought before him and cut up inch by inch. Tzu-chun survives this too without saying anything. After this, Tzu-chun is killed and sent to hell. Having gone through the torture of hell, he is sent back to this world as a daughter of a family in Sung-chun. She is a mute woman who suffers pain and illness silently. A man marries her, and they have a son. Angered by his wife's remaining silent even when she sees their son, the husband bangs the son's head against a stone, cracking it. When she sees this, she feels love in her heart and utters, “A!” in spite of herself.

Tu Tzu-chun finds himself once more at the cauldron beside the old man. The old man is grieving and tells him that he failed to become immortal. He tells Tzu-chun that he was successful in repressing such human feelings as joy, anger, sorrow, fear and desire, but not love. He then sends Tzu-chun back to the world. Tzu-chun is ashamed of his failure to assist his benefactor and once more tries to seek him out to offer his services, but he can never find him again.

In the original Chinese tale, the life of man, searching vainly for unattainable immortality, is portrayed as absurd. The tale is filled with obvious Taoist ethical teachings. Tu Tzu-chun is not selected by the old man for the test because he is a Taoist interested in becoming an immortal, nor is he selected because he requested it. He goes through the test simply because he is “told” to do so. In the story, he is asked to find the old man deep in the mountains, and when he arrives, he is asked by the old man to sit down and neither to move nor to utter a single word. In other words, when he was put to the test, he knew nothing about the nature of the test and was therefore following the Taoist principle of purposelessness, or the Buddhist principle of mindlessness. The test was a direct experiment on human nature, and only human will, not intention, would help one succeed in it. In addition, Tzu-chun was selected because he had been a spend-thrift, a parallel of the prodigal son whose return was especially blessed because he had sinned.

The nature of the old man's test, therefore, can be understood as an ironic statement on the vulnerability of the human will, which is so closely connected to human relations with others. Success in the test—or rather, the attainment of immortality—lies in the elimination of all the human attachments which detain man so powerfully on the mortal level. The achievement of immortality, therefore, requires the filtration of all human sediments, enabling the protagonist to reach the realm of “non-man” and the ultimate “silence.”

Tu Tzu-chun's being mute in the test is a second mask laid over the first, which is created by his conversion into a woman. Being a mother, he experiences the maternal human nature of love for his/her child. Being mute, however, he/she experiences an initial non-attachment to worldly matters. She grows up

With incomparable beauty, but mute. Her family treated her as a born mute. There were indecent relatives who intimidated her in many ways, but she made no response.

In other words, being mute is a mask which protects her from responding to human experiences. Unfortunately, the mask is ripped asunder at the moment when she sees her child dashed to his death.

Although Akutagawa's “Toshishun” appears to follow “Tu Tzu-chun” quite faithfully, it differs from its source story in two fundamental respects. The first difference is in Toshishun's motive for leaving the human world; the second is in the attitude of the sennin (old man) toward Toshishun's attempt to become an immortal sennin himself.

In the original story, Tu Tzu-chun becomes ashamed of his wasteful life, and when he is made rich for the third time, he spends money for public welfare. Toshishun, to the contrary, never becomes ashamed of his life of luxury; nor does he spend any of the money he receives for the social benefit. Moreover, Akutagawa describes in detail the gorgeousness of Toshishun's life and the decadent beauty in which he indulges himself. This does not exist in the original. When the pensive Toshishun is asked by the old man whether it is the luxurious life itself that he has become tired of, he answers positively no and refuses to live a life of poverty. It is not a distaste for luxury that made him dissatisfied with life, but the fact that he had “given up on man.” He then asks the sennin to make him his pupil and to train him to be a sennin of high virtue, to enable him to transcend human life. Tu Tzu-chun, on the other hand, wishes to place himself at the Taoist's disposal, to assist him in making an elixir, in order to return the favor the Taoist did for him. Moreover, this takes place after Tzu-chun has established himself as a virtuous and respectable social existence, restoring his respect as a human being. Although both Tzu-chun and Toshishun were disillusioned by people who were nice to them when they were rich and deserted them when they were poor, Tzu-chun's return of the favor is fundamentally different from Toshishun's despair over humanity as far as the motive for leaving the human world is concerned.

From the start, Akutagawa's “Toshishun” presents the languid, melancholy air of a decadent life, and Toshishun is portrayed as a man who, disillusioned with the pursuit of beauty and luxury, searches for the meaning of life. Akutagawa's opening narration conveys this sense immediately:

It was a spring day; nightfall was approaching. At the west gate of Lo Yang, the capital of T'ang, a young man was gazing vacantly up at the sky.

Then he describes a busy street of this gorgeous, prosperous city, contrasting it with the lonely, pensive Toshishun who stands leaning against the gate, looking vacantly at the sky. When the old man appears before Toshishun, he asks him what he is thinking. Toshishun just answers him, “Me? I was thinking about what I should do, since I do not even have a place to sleep tonight.” In the original, the old man hears Tzu-chun's complaint about his cold-hearted friends and relatives, and offers him money.

Akutagawa's Toshishun is, indeed, a decadent hero, who, turning his back on morality, has stoically pursued a life of beauty and luxury and become disillusioned by his pursuit. He is presented as a quester-hero, who, having seen and been disgusted with everything about men and life, desires to transcend human life, to be above human beings. He is not a naive Tzu-chun who is simply weak at the temptation of luxury and a lazy life and has just learned a lesson about the selfishness of people. Through his experiences, Tzu-chun turns into a morally and socially respectable man, even an honorable man who does not forget to show his gratitude by returning the favor done him. What Toshishun learns is disillusionment with human life.

Akutagawa wrote two other works which contain the story of a man who was made rich instantly by meeting a wizard. The first of these, “The Sennin” (1914), also takes place in China. One of his earliest works, it is a story about a street magician who endures poverty and rigorous training for the moment of glory when his skill in his art will reach its height and the audience will throw him money in excitement. At the end of the story, the protagonist, his performance over, is walking on the deserted street, his magic tools on his shoulder, wet in the evening drizzle. He meets an old man to whom he tells his life's sufferings and hardships, and the old man, who is a wizard, makes him rich instantly. In another story of the same title written in 1922, an honest idiot who wishes to become an immortal works without pay for a greedy doctor who promises to make him one at the end of a long period of service. Although the doctor has no power to make him an immortal, the doctor's wife suggests at the end of the promised years of service that he try flying, and the idiot flies away as an immortal. It is evident, therefore, that the theme of “Toshishun” was one with which Akutagawa was consistently concerned.

Akutagawa was obsessed with the theme of the “condensed life,” a life comprised of moments of intense feeling. His often-quoted saying that life is not worth a line of Baudelaire's poetry indicates not only his ideal of art for art's sake, but also his desire for a short but brilliant life. “Fireworks in a dark sky” was how he envisioned his own life. Indeed, many of Akutagawa's protagonists risk the destruction of their social and moral integrity for the sake of brilliant, intense moments of experience. One of Akutagawa's masterpieces for young adults, “Torokko” (“The Truck,” 1922), describes a boy who pursued the excitement of coasting downhill in a truck (a coal-car on rails). He offers to help miners push the truck up the hill for the thrill of coming down. After the pursuit of excitement, he finds out that he has come too far away from home to return in the daylight. The story ends with a brilliant description of the boy running back home in fear, barefooted in the twilight, and of his outburst of crying when he finally reaches home.

Akutagawa's Toshishun pursues a life of luxury and beauty at the risk of his social and moral destruction, and his gorgeous, decadent life is not the result of his weakness as in the case of Tu Tzu-chun. He has no intention of living the long and dull life of a morally upright, socially respectable philanthropist. When he becomes disillusioned with the life he envisioned, he desires to leave human life, to go beyond human experience. His request to the sennin to make him a sennin too, therefore, is a quest for an above-human existence, not an effort to return the wizard's favor. The ordeal he goes through—the same maintenance of silence in the face of physical and mental agony—is clearly a trial through which a quester-hero must pass to attain his ideal. The tortures which Toshishun has to bear are much more simple than those to which Tu Tzu-chun is subjected. The wife does not appear at all, and he is not reincarnated as a woman. Although both heroes break their oaths because of concern for loved ones, in Toshishun's case it is the torturing of his parents in hell that he finally cannot bear and that causes him to break his silence.

The ending of “Toshishun” is also fundamentally different from that of the original. Both stories are about the failure to attain immortality, the transcendence of human life, because of human love. Although both Tzu-chun and Toshishun fail in the face of human love, however, Toshishun's happiness with his failure contrasts sharply with Tzu-chun's shame. Above all, the sennin in Akutagawa's “Toshishun” tells Toshishun that if he had not said anything when his parents were in agony, he would have killed Toshishun instantly. The Taoist monk in “Tu Tzu-chun,” on the other hand, laments over Tzu-chun's failure and sends him back to the world. Tzu-chun tries again to transcend human existence, while Toshishun is reborn as a new human being with a new vision of life. He decides to live truthfully as a human being, and the sennin assists him in doing so by giving him a house with a plot of land for farming.

“If you had remained silent, I was determined to take your life instantly. I imagine you no longer wish to be a sennin. You have already become disgusted with the life of a rich man. Then what do you think you would like to be from now on?”

“Whatever I become, I intend to live an honest life, a humane life.” In Toshishun's voice there was a tone of cheerfulness which hitherto was absent.

“Do not forget your word. Then I will not see you again from today.” Tekkanshi [the sennin] began walking away while saying this, but he suddenly stopped and turned to Toshishun, adding cheerfully,

“Oh, fortunately I just remembered that I have a house at the southern foot of Taizan [Taishan]. I will give you the house together with the plot of land next to it for farming. Go and live there. Just now peach flowers must be in bloom all around the house.”

Toshishun attains his desire to be human, and his quest for a meaningful life ends with his regaining trust in humanity. Here immortality is the negation of humanity, and Toshishun learns the value of being human through his effort to become immortal. The sennin, representing the point of view of the story, maintains that it is not worthwhile to attain immortality by negating humanity.

The dichotomy between immortality and humanity is the central theme of both the Chinese and Japanese stories. The Taoist monk in “Tu Tzu-chun” tells Tzu-chun that he successfully conquered all human feelings except love. Tzu-chun's failure is that of a common Chinese pursuing immortality. His trial is not a heroic quest because the tale lacks the grandeur to portray him as a hero. Indeed, it emphasizes Tzu-chun's awareness of a sense of shame when he is thrice financed by the old man, but only to add to his personality the element of human dignity, a virtue perhaps, but one of common mortals. His failure shows the existence of an unbridgeable gap between the realm of mortals and the realm of immortals. The harder human beings try to attain the unattached immortal realm, the more they realize their unbreakable ties to their human surroundings. This is why the Taoist monk finally sighs:

“Alas, how hard it is to find the talent with the potential to become immortal! I can make my medicine once again, but you will have to go back to the human world. I wish you well.”

Both the Taoist monk and Tu Tzu-chun consider the pursuit of immortality to be positive, and there is no moral statement in “Tu Tzu-chun” with regard to humanity. But Akutagawa, by contrast, tells us that it is not human to conquer love, and that we should be human.

Akutagawa's “Toshishun” thus is a story of a quest for the meaning of life, a quest which leads to humanity itself. Humanity is weighed against immortality and art, or the decadent life which pursues art for art's sake. Toshishun's attempt to attain immortality was doomed from the start, for the sennin would not have granted it in any event, even if he had remained silent until the end. Therefore he did not fail the trial, but passed it. His quest was actually for humanity, and his attempt at immortality was a necessary part of his quest.

It is worth noting here that in a Ming version of “Tu Tzu-chun” which appears in Hsing shih heng yen (Lasting Words to Awaken the World), collected by Feng Meng-lung in 1627, Tzu-chun does finally attain immortality with his wife in the most glamorous manner, even after failing the test. The change may be attributable to the storytelling tradition in which the storyteller always attempts to satisfy his audience, mainly unsophisticated merchants and commoners, with a happy ending. Indeed Tzu-chun's attainment of immortality in the Ming version appears more ludicrous than instructive. The Taoist monk, instead of retaining his identity as a symbol of higher transcendence, becomes Lao Tzu, the Taoist god commonly known to lay followers of the Taoist religion. Consequently, the story is degraded to a mere instance of Taoist didacticism, advising people to give away their belongings to achieve immortality. Compared to the T'ang tale, the Ming version lacks tragic intensity.

In contrast to the original “Tu Tzu-chun,” Akutagawa's “Toshishun” has a clear message for the reader: To learn the value of being human is the meaning of life; to be human means to be true to one's feelings and to accept the life of emotions. The humble recognition of joy and sorrow, and submission to love as the substance of human life is what saved Toshishun from the life of decadence and inhuman immortality. The sennin in the story is a moral teacher. Among art, immortality and life (humanity), humanity receives the highest value. When he wrote “Toshishun,” Akutagawa had just finished writing “The Hell Screen,” whose central theme is the conflict between art and life. The painter in the story sacrifices love and human life for the sake of art. The work of art which was produced through this negation of humanity, however, stands as a brilliantly true work of art. Akutagawa condemns the artist as a human being, but never dismisses the value of his art, which demands perfection and purity in the sacrifice of human emotion. In “The Hell Screen,” therefore, the dichotomy between art and life is left unsolved. In “Toshishun,” the conflicts presented are among the selfish pursuit of beauty (art), the transcendence of life (immortality), and humanity (life). Akutagawa clearly states that the aspiration for humanity is more valuable than the other two.

Akutagawa was torn between art and life throughout his life. Unlike Tanizaki, who chose to live in a way that would serve his art, and Shiga Naoya, who used art to attain a higher realization of life, Akutagawa despaired of life in human society from his early years and wished to live the condensed life of a line of poetry, while remaining aware of and torn by the sacrifice of humanity such a life would demand.

In one of his later works, “Shūzan zu” (“The Autumn Mountain,” 1921), Akutagawa even considers art to be an illusion; a masterpiece of art is certainly the product of man's imagination dreaming of the ideal, perfect beauty, but the actual work may not exist at all. The conflict between art and life presented in the case of “The Hell Screen” no longer exists here. Art is meaningful not because of itself but because man aspires for it. The question of realism Akutagawa raised in “The Hell Screen,” the question of the artist's need to see reality in order to paint it, is also dismissed here. The significance of art is reduced to the point of denying art, for art without visible work is no longer art. “Toshishun” reflects Akutagawa's turning toward life, moving away from his belief in art for art's sake.

The central theme of “Toshishun” is indeed a theme in Akutagawa's own life as an artist. In the place of realism and confession, Akutagawa used an old tale to dramatize his own search. He thus converted the classical Chinese tale into a short story which contained his own quest and his own clear message. By confining the work clearly within the framework of the ancient tale and directing it to young adults, Akutagawa was able to avoid being didactic despite the existence of a moral. In “Toshishun,” Akutagawa successfully combined brilliant storytelling with the presentation of a symbolic situation in which the quest of modern man can be dramatized. In his search for a method to dramatize his quest for reality and self, Akutagawa revived the tradition of storytelling in fiction, a tradition which had been lost in the era of modern realism and naturalism.