Fantastic Metropolis

It’s good to be back in business with The Virtual Anthology. It initially was given a home at s1ngularity, a webzine conceived of and edited by Gabe Chouinard. That project, unfortunately, didn’t last long before it went down for doughnuts. Too bad, the enterprise had promise. Recently, Luís asked me if I’d like to move the Anthology to Fantastic Metropolis, and I took him up on it. One thing that’s good about the Anthology is that it is durable and easily moveable. Made only from air, mine of course, so necessarily hot, it can never be destroyed and it takes up no space on the bookshelf.

If you missed my explanation of it on s1ngularity, here it is again. Basically, what’s going on here is I get to play editor (a real world occurrence that might be too frightening or fraught with failure), compiling my own anthology of what I consider to be the best short stories from the literature of the fantastic. I write a little about each story in an attempt to maybe get readers interested in checking them out. You have to do the actual leg work on finding the story. I like that part. These are not formal reviews or critiques, merely my appreciations of the stories in question. If you like my taste and my selections, all the better. If you don’t, what is to be done? Either way, write into my message board on the Night Shade Books site, the Virtual Anthology thread, and let me know if you enjoyed the story I suggested or if you think I’m totally full of shit (about the selected story that is). We can start another thread for those of you who think I’m just generally full of shit.

Long live The Virtual Anthology!

He was extremely mean in nature, and his noticeably red lips, unusually youthful for his age, reminded one of an uncanny animal-like mind.

Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, considered by many to be Japan’s greatest short story writer, is primarily known in the West, if at all, as the author of the stories “Rashōmon” and “In a Grove,” adapted by Kurosawa to serve as the basis for his landmark film Rashōmon (1950), which in turn was adapted for the American film, The Outrage (1964), directed by Martin Ritt, starring Paul Newman, Claire Bloom, Edward G. Robinson and William, the Kirk, Shatner.

Akutagawa (1892-1927), more so than many of his contemporaries was heavily influenced by the styles and fictional techniques of Western writers like Poe, Baudelair, Strindberg, Dostoevsky, and Flaubert. He was, by all accounts, a perfectionist in his style and had a great affinity, like the French Symbolists he admired, for descriptions of physical sensations. He was part of a growing literary movement that centered on the magazine Shin Shicho (New Current of Thought) and was concerned with undermining the influence of the romanticists and aesthetes who were the rage in the early decades of 20th century Japanese fiction. With his contemporaries, Kikuchi Kan and Yamamoto Yuzo, he shared the mission of replacing emotion with reason. Their philosophy simply stated was that the writer should not be overly influenced by either beauty or idealism. It was a recognition of the actuality of the human condition, and the tale in question was to be recorded by the author with a detachment that disallowed emotional aggrandizement or the injection of unwarranted pathos.

This said, Akutagawa’s work often tended toward the surreal, the grotesque and the fantastic. The beauty of his short stories comes from a kind of dispassionate grace, an authorial restraint in the face of fictional situations we normally associate with intense emotion. As Borges said of Akutagawa’s writing, “Extravagance and horror are in his work but never in his style, which is always crystal clear.” One is reminded of the ghost stories of Henry James, “The Phantom Rickshaw” by Kipling, and any number of works by Thomas Ligotti. In “The Hell Screen,” Akutagawa is at his most powerful, mixing the potent mythology of ancient Japan with the stylistic concerns of modern Western writers. It is a complex story in two major movements with a subtly unreliable narrator. The author’s exacting prose comes through even in translation, and there is much to admire beyond the beauty of the writing.

“The Hell Screen” is narrated by a court flunky of the Great Lord of Horikawa. This complicates the story from the very beginning, for although he sings the praises of his boss, it quickly becomes evident from the anecdotes he tells that the Great Lord is an immoral tyrant. For instance, “Once when the construction work of the main bridge was snagged, he made a human pillar of his favorite boy attendant to propitiate the wrath of the gods.” Throughout the story, the reader gets the feeling that the narrator knows more than he is saying, and although he at times intimates that his Lord has acted immorally, he quickly sunders the revelation by putting it off to rumor. We learn that the narrator has served the Lord for twenty years, and so the reader remains uncertain as to whether his allegiance comes from habit, from fear, or perhaps a little of both.

In the court of the Great Lord there is a famous painter, Yoshihide, a perfectionist, whose art is more important to him than nearly anything else. This cranky old man will not let the Lord or accepted customs or the Gods, themselves, take precedence over his art. All who behold it are in agreement that his work is startlingly brilliant, but there is always a sense of the grotesque and melancholy about it. Whereas other great painters of antiquity were able to make the viewer of their paintings actually smell the fragrant plum blossoms on a moonlit night, Yoshihide’s painting of the five phases of the transmigration of souls adorning the gate of the Rayugi Temple, makes passersby hear the sighs and sobbing of spirits and smell the stench of rotting corpses. People both fear and hate Yoshihide for the power of his art and his overweening arrogance. Because of his crouching stance and ugly face, they call him Saruhide (monkey hide).