Impressions of My Favorite Books
In this reflective essay, Ryunosuke Akutagawa traces how his reading tastes changed over time: from Chinese classics he loved in childhood, to ornate European fiction, then to powerful modern writers, and finally to works marked by a quieter, deeper strength.
As a child, my favorite book above all was Journey to the West. Even now it remains one of my favorites. I do not think the West has a single allegorical tale that can match it. Even Bunyan's famous Pilgrim's Progress is no rival to Journey to the West.
Another of my favorites was Water Margin, and I still read it to this day. At one point I had all the names of its 108 heroes memorized. Even then, I found books like Water Margin and Journey to the West far more interesting than Oshikawa Shunrō's adventure novels and the like.
Before entering middle school, I was devoted to Tokutomi Roka's Nature and Life, Chogyū's Thoughts on the Heike, and Kojima Usui's On Japanese Landscape. At the same time, I read and reread Natsume's I Am a Cat, Kyōka's Furyūsen, and Ryokuu's Arare-zake. So I can hardly laugh at others: I too had a phase like the one described in the Bungei Club's Young Men of Letters register—my "Tolstoy, Tsubouchi, and Ōmachi Keigetsu" period.
After graduating from middle school I read all kinds of books, though none in particular that I could call a constant favorite. In general, I liked dazzling novels by writers such as Wilde and Gautier. That probably came from my temperament, but it was also surely a reaction against my weariness with Japanese naturalist fiction. Yet around the time I graduated from higher school, for some reason there was a major turn in my tastes and way of seeing things, and I came to dislike those writers I had mentioned—Wilde and Gautier—quite intensely. It was around then that I became devoted to Strindberg. In that state of mind, any art that lacked a Michelangelo-like force felt like rubble to me. I think this was influenced by books I was reading then, such as Jean-Christophe.
That feeling continued even after I graduated from university, but little by little my worship of blazing force faded. Since about a year ago, I have been most drawn to books with a quiet strength. By "quiet," however, I do not mean merely calm: if there is no force, I have little interest. In this respect, novels by Stendhal and Mérimée, and in Japanese literature Saikaku, are books that are both enjoyable and instructive to me now.
As an aside, I recently took out Jean-Christophe and tried reading it again, but it did not move me as it once had. I wondered whether books from that period had simply gone stale for me; but when I opened Anna Karenina and read a few chapters, it felt as precious as it did in the old days.