著者

江口 裕子

出版者

東京女子大学

雑誌

東京女子大学附属比較文化研究所紀要 (ISSN:05638186)

巻号頁・発行日

no.18, 1964-12

---

The present essay is a sequel to my previous one on Akutagawa and Poe, which dealt with their technique of short story writing. The purpose here is to investigate the nature of their common preference for the strange, the mystical and the bizarre as subjects, and to make clear the differences as well as the similarities between the two writers by analyzing some of their macabre writings. Both wrote of mystery, terror and strange fantasies. They were both deeply preoccupied with the mystery of human existence-death, life after death, madness and such psychological abnormalities as dual personality, hallucinations, obsessions and nightmares. From his early years, Akutagawa was fond of ghostly tales and was well acquainted with the writers of Gothic romances, of whom Poe was one. It was Akutagawa who first discovered and introduced to Japanese readers Ambrose Bierce, one of Poe's successors in America. It is not, therefore, surprising that Akutagawa seems to have been more or less indebted to the writers of the Gothic tradition for the mood of his writings. He customarily endeavored to write for a weird, thrilling effect, but meanwhile impressing his readers by the use of artistic verisimilitude. His earlier works, however, prove that he failed in his attempt to make them realistic and truly believable; they seem to be little more than products of his calculating intellect and craftmanship. On the contrary, the superiority of Poe's writings is not merely a matter of literary art, but of making a full use of his own inner experience to enrich his literary world. The secret of Poe's tales of mystery and terror lies in the excellent blending of his imagination and analytical faculty, a blending which enabled him to reach far into the abyss of the human mind in its conscious or subconscious conditions, and to present the tragic drama of the mind under such critical conditions, as for instance, the awareness of going mad. There is a powerful realism in his tales. No stock characters of the conventional Gothic romance-ghosts, witches, devils and vampires-appear; rather, in most cases, the plot, the characters and the situations all belong to real life, and terror is explored on the basis of human and realistic phenomena. When Poe adds artistic verisimilitude to this basic realism, his works are at their best. It was only in his later years, when Akutagawa confronted the gruesome reality of his own diseased mind and presented the states and processes of its disintegration as they really were, that he could write with impressiveness. In my opinion, Akutagawa rivaled Poe for the first time in Haguruma, where he too created the "terror of the soul" which was Poe's special province.