Misanthrope from Japon

RASHOMON (119 pp.) -- Ryunosuke Akutagawa--Liveright ($2.50).

For a satirist, bile is almost as necessary as ink. Some, like Dean Swift, swim in it; others, like John Marquand, barely wet their prose in it; a few end by drowning in it. Japan's Ryunosuke Akutagawa was one of the hapless few; in 1927, sunk in pessimism and possibly near madness, he took an overdose of veronal and died. He was only 35, but the more than 100 short stories he wrote have since established him as Japan's most corrosive modern satirist.

Last year. U.S. filmgoers made his acquaintance in the sardonic and powerful Japanese movie. Rashomon. Filmed with stylized elegance and thrumming with barbaric force, Rashomon nonetheless softened Akutagawa's savage original, In a Grove, with a benign ending. Readers with hardy digestions can now compare the two and sample five other Akutagawa short stories of lesser scope, all of which combine a bitter misanthropy with a craft that is as spare and durable as bamboo.

Heap of Lies. In a Grove takes the form of testimony before a police commissioner. The body of a samurai, presumably murdered, has been found in a forest glade. In turn, a bandit, the samurai's wife, lesser witnesses, and the dead samurai himself (through a medium) tell what they know about it. Up to a point, the stories almost fit. The bandit has stalked the samurai and his wife through the forest, decoyed him with a promise of buried loot, trussed him up and raped his wife before his eyes. But when it comes to the samurai's death, each tells a different version. The bandit insists that the wife egged him into killing her husband by promising herself to the victor. The wife insists that she killed her husband to spare him the shame of her dishonor, and tried to kill herself but lost her nerve. The samurai's story is that his wife begged the bandit to kill him and that the bandit, shocked by such faithlessness, ran away, while the samurai, heartbroken, committed suicide. The film introduced a "true" version told by a passing woodcutter, but Akutagawa lets the reader be both judge and jury.

In his kindliest tale, Yam Gruel, Akutagawa turns philosopher. A middle-aged samurai lives only for his annual sip of yam gruel, his favorite delicacy. When he finally gets a chance to gorge himself, the mere idea satiates him. ("Aman sometimes devotes his life to a desire which he is not sure will ever be fulfilled. Those who laugh at this folly are, after all, no more than mere spectators of life.")

Cool as Fuji. In another, more typical Akutagawa story, an unemployed servant is horrified to find an old hag yanking the hair from a dead fishwife to make a wig. "If she knew I had to do this in order to live, she probably wouldn't care." the hag explains. "Are you sure?" asks the servant mockingly. "Then it's right if I rob you. I'd starve if I didn't." And he strips off her clothes and kicks her roughly down among the decaying corpses.

As the light of mercy never shines on Akutagawa's parade of adulterers, murderers and bigots, he sometimes seems as cool and distant to human frailty as the grey shale that lines the heights of Fujiyama. But the sources of his own nihilism are made poignantly clear in a poem he penned a few months before his suicide:

Among bamboos and flowering dates, Buddha's long been fast asleep.

And with the withered wayside fig, Christ is also dead, it seems.

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