Machine

Many such thoughts and ideas

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After reading a collection of short stories from Ryunosuke Akutagawa I am excited to delve into No Longer Human by Osamu Dazai. Dazai was heavily inspired by Akutagawa and sights his fascination with suicide beginning after Akutagawa took his own life. While my beliefs are unfounded I believe this is why Dazai took his life with a woman as a posthumous story from Akutagawa mentions having a woman who said she would die with him, although she ultimately did not. Interestingly, in this same story Akutagawa walks away from a fan in the middle of his sentence because the fan called him sensei which he hated being called because he felt he did not deserve the title. Akutagawa surely would have hated Dazai had they ever met as much of his final works describe how much he hated himself and how he could not repent for the sins he had committed (he does not detail these sins, although he confesses that he had considered doing so but decided against it for both his sake and his family’s). He even compares himself to Yoshihide from his work Hell Screen who is a man who committed many sins for his art and suffers a terrible fate as a result.

This comparison made sense to me after reading his suicide note in which he describes visiting a morgue with his friend. He was visiting because he needed to see some cadavers for a story he was working on at the time. The friend makes a remark about how the morgue is running out of cadavers and Akutagawa thinks “If I needed a corpse, I’d kill someone without the slightest malice.”. Although Akutagawa does not tell us when he had this experience we know the suicide note comes from 1927 while Hell Screen was originally published in 1918 nearly ten years earlier. It seems as though Akutagawa unintentionally modeled Yoshihide after himself, and only realized this fact years later. Although, it is also unclear how much mental illness played a role in his work as he was an untreated schizophrenic, which is part of what ultimately led him to commit suicide.