Two short stories, Devil (「悪魔」) and The Piano (「ピアノ」), are published in the Japan Issue of Literary Imagination, in translations by Ryan Choi. Choi has also translated the newly published Hell of Solitude by Prototype Publishing Ltd. (see the note below).

Choi’s translations in Literary Imagination are without footnotes or translator’s notes — a deliberate choice, given that Akutagawa’s texts are steeped in classical and folk references — and the translations themselves are beautifully rendered.

In Devil, the setting of Portuguese missionaries in Nobunaga’s Kyoto does something specific: it makes a psychological knot that would feel overwrought in a contemporary story — the ambivalence of wanting simultaneously to corrupt and to preserve an innocent soul. The classical distance is allows the psychology to be stated without embarrassment.

Akutagawa wrote no long novels; he is known for his short stories, and his essays are equally compressed. What strikes me about him is that he seems uninterested in plot. He is interested in isolating a single facet of human psychology and holding it up to the light. Devil makes this clear: the demon’s confession — condensed in the idea that the purer the soul, the more he wants to corrupt it, and the more he wants to corrupt it, the more he wants to preserve it — is not theological abstraction, and it cannot be since theology would bring different layers of meaning. It is an exact rendering of a recognizable human ambivalence that Akutagawa refuses to resolve. The story doesn’t elaborate on what became of the demon. The reader is left standing alone with the space left open.

The Piano, written after the Great Kantō Earthquake, works differently and is perhaps the more surprising of the two: no classical frame, no folk register, just rubble, rain, and a piano half-crushed under a collapsed wall, still capable of sounding. Akutagawa moves toward the ending through color and light, used as displacement — or so I thought. The moonlight catching the keys on the first visit, the music scores in pink, light blue, pale yellow scattered among the debris, the same rubble shining in clear autumn sunlight on the second visit: none of this names what was lost when the earthquake came. It holds it, the way the piano holds its sound. A chestnut tree is pressing diagonally over it — this is the rational explanation for the sounding, arrived at late — but Akutagawa’s final sentence turns away from it. What the narrator looks at, and cannot stop looking at, is what Choi renders as:

“I was focused only on the piano in the knotweeds, the piano and the secret music it had kept since last year’s catastrophic earthquake.”

There is something quietly knowing in pairing these two particular stories. Devil reaches back into the world of Portuguese missionaries and Nobunaga’s Kyoto — Akutagawa at his most historically armored. The Piano is set in the rubble of Yokohama, a year or two after the 1923 earthquake, a narrator walking fast in the rain trying not to miss his train. One story needs its classical distance to make its psychological knot bearable; the other needs none at all — a half-crushed piano sounding by itself in the ruins is already strange enough. That the same compression, the same refusal of resolution, the same withholding of explanation operates identically in both is the discovery the pairing makes possible. You could not see it as clearly from either story alone. Kudos to the editorial choice of Paul Franz.

Reading these two stories prompted reflection on Akutagawa’s recognition — in Japan and outside it. One thing I would like to keep for further exploration: why has Ryūnosuke Akutagawa’s prose not been receptive to a larger public — not only outside but inside Japan?

Links to the original Japanese of Devil and The Piano below:

*** Devil (「悪魔」)

*** The Piano (「ピアノ」)