7/03/2012
Ryunosuke Akutagawa and the Today's Japanese 芥川龍之介と今日の日本人の共通点 Tube. Duration : 10.63 Mins.


First of all I am a great fan of Japanese literature. My favorite authors are Akutagawa, Dazai, Mishima, Shiga, Tanizaki, Nakagami, etc. I copied their works when I was younger in order to write better Japanese as a native speaker of Japanese. My most favorite works of Akutagawa are The Life of a Stupid Man (Aru Aho-no Issho) and The Spinning Gears (Haguruma). Those pieces were written in 1927, and shortly afterward the author committed suicide. He died with sleeping pills. It is generally said, as the author mentioned before his death, that it was one of the most important evidence to show his critical feelings of his attempting suicide. Both of the works have the same taste, which are full of the authors negative emotions. Just like Dazais (another charismatic author who also killed himself some twenty years after Akutagwa) short piece Ha (Leaves), this is a collection of snap shots of the feelings. Let me tell you what this Ha is written about for a reference. This piece begins with a shocking and somewhat weird sentence: I was about to kill myself. But then, for some reason, he gives it up when he remembers somebody gave him a nice kimono. Another phrase goes like I spent my days as if being dragged along. The narrator I is depressive anyway, who becomes clinically sad when he finds that he accepted anything as a fact even when he saw a stone crawling on a road, which turned out that it was just that a little boy was pulling it along with a string for fun. Now back to ...

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