Still, I am unable to love the outward appearance of my father and mother…. How much more so should he be ashamed to find fault with that of his own parents. A gentleman should be ashamed to judge people by their appearance. I do love them, but I am unable to love their outward appearance.
He kept a “Diary without Self-Deceit” in imitation of the writer Kunikida Doppo on its lined pages he recorded passages like this: ‘I am unable to love my father and mother. But he would never admit to himself that he harbored such envy and jealousy because he was contemptuous of their abilities. He envied them - sometimes to the point of jealousy. This piece of furniture was not so much a desk as a symbol of the entire household, a symbol of the constant struggle to keep up appearances. Actually, with its green baize surface and shiny silver-colored drawer pulls, the desk had a nice, neat look to it at first glance, but the cloth was worn thin, and the drawers never opened smoothly. Shinsuke still remembers the stink of varnish from the used desk they bought him.
Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, “Daidouji Shinsuke: The Early Years” from Rasōmon and Seventeen Other Stories Not only was he also shy, but his heart would start pounding at the slightest provocation - say, at the sight of a sharpened butcher’s knife. He was a weirdly skinny little boy with a huge head. This was his secret - the lifelong secret that he could never tell another soul and that carried with it a certain superstition. Of course, the poplars still harbor the lonely sound of the wind in their thick gloomy branches… And now that he has made peace with that loneliness - or, rather, now that he has learned that he has no choice but to make peace with that loneliness- he can look back twenty years and see the schoolhouse where he was so tormented standing before him in a rose-colored twilight. But what he got in return was a desolate loneliness. In fulfillment of his long-standing dream, he became the author of several books. Otherwise, the course of his life would have been far more painful than it is today. At least it enabled him to develop a personality that could endure loneliness. Middle school was a nightmare for him, but it was not necessarily a misfortune. An ‘arrogant’ person is one who refuses to compromise his beliefs in deference to others. A ‘frivolous’ person is one who prizes the beautiful over the useful. A ‘bookish’ person is one who prizes the power of the mind over the power of the flesh. Many are the criticism that have been leveled at me, but they fall into three groups. Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, “Daidoji Shinsuke: The Early Years” from Rasōmon and Seventeen Other Stories Shinsuke thus quite naturally learned everything he knew from books - or at least there was nothing he knew that didn’t owe something to books. Each was a kind of transformation for him…. And even when the book wasn’t open before him, he was imagining scenes from it…Imagining? His imaginings were even realer than reality to him… but he had gone on endlessly laughing and crying over books. He read the novel over and over again in the dim glow of the lamp. Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, “Absorbed in Letters”” from The Beautiful and the Grotesque If what I am writing I do not write now, I do not know whether I shall ever write it! To the utmost limits will I go on to write. Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, “Rashōmon” from Rasōmon and Seventeen Other Stories A lowly servant sat beneath the Rashōmon, waiting for the rain to end…but in fact the man had no idea what he was going to do once that happened…Rather than say that the servant was ‘waiting for the rain to end,’ it would have been more appropriate to write that ‘a lowly servant trapped by the rain had no place to go and no idea what to do.’
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