A Letter to an Old Friend
This text is Akutagawa Ryunosuke's final letter, written shortly before his death in 1927. In it, he tries to describe with unusual directness what he calls the true psychology of a person moving toward suicide, arguing that simple explanations such as illness, poverty, or distress never fully account for it. The letter is notable for its cold precision, philosophical reflection, and painful self-awareness. Akutagawa moves between practical considerations, moral argument, and a haunting account of the "vague uneasiness" that governs his mind. Read today, the piece stands not only as a personal testament but also as a major modern literary document: lucid, self-scrutinizing, and unsettling in its attempt to turn private despair into language. (QA warning)
No one has yet written, truthfully and exactly, about the psychology of the suicide himself. That is probably due either to the suicide's self-respect, or else to a lack of psychological interest in himself. In this last letter I send you, I want to convey that psychology as clearly as I can.
Of course, there is no particular need for me to tell you my motive for killing myself. In one of his short stories, Renier portrays a certain suicide. The protagonist of that story does not himself know why he is killing himself. In the human-interest columns of newspapers, you will no doubt find all sorts of motives for suicide: hardship of living, physical suffering, or mental anguish. But in my experience, those are not the whole of the motive. More often than not, they merely show the path by which one arrives at the motive. Most suicides, like the one Renier depicted, probably do not know what they are killing themselves for. It contains motives as complex as those behind any human action. But in my own case, at least, it is only a vague uneasiness. A vague uneasiness about my future, nothing more. Perhaps you will not be able to believe my words. Yet the experience of the last ten years has taught me that unless people are close to me and placed in circumstances close to mine, my words vanish like a song in the wind. So I do not blame you. ...
For the last two years or so I have gone on thinking of nothing but death. It was during this time, in a deeply sober state of mind, that I read Mainlander. There is no doubt that in abstract language he skillfully describes the road leading toward death. But I want to describe the same thing more concretely. Before such a desire, sympathy for one's family is nothing at all. This too will no doubt prevent you from withholding from me the word inhuman. And yet, if it is inhuman, then in one aspect I am inhuman.
I have a duty to write everything honestly. (I have also anatomized that vague uneasiness about my future; I believe I have set it out, in broad outline, in my Life of a Fool. Only one thing I deliberately did not write there: the social conditions around me, that is, the vestiges of the feudal age that cast their shadow over me. And why did I deliberately not write of them? Because even today we human beings still live, to some extent, under the shadow of the feudal age. What I tried to write there were the background, the lighting, and the characters outside the stage itself, and above all my gestures. Besides, one cannot help doubting whether I myself, being within those social conditions, could clearly understand them.) The first thing I thought about was how to die without suffering.
Hanging is, of course, the means best suited to that end. But when I imagined myself hanging there, I felt, extravagantly enough, an aesthetic disgust. (I remember that once, when I loved a certain woman, I suddenly lost my love because her handwriting was poor.) Drowning, too, is quite incapable of accomplishing the purpose for a man like me who can swim. Besides, even if it should succeed, it would be more painful than hanging. Death under the wheels of a train inspired in me, before anything else, aesthetic disgust. Death by pistol or knife carries the possibility of failure because my hand trembles. Throwing oneself from the top of a building would likewise surely be ugly to look at. For these reasons, I decided to die by using drugs. Dying by drugs may be more painful than hanging. But besides not provoking the same aesthetic disgust, it has the advantage of carrying no danger of resuscitation. The only problem was that obtaining those drugs was, naturally, no easy matter for me. Once I had resolved inwardly on suicide, I tried to get hold of them by making use of every opportunity. At the same time I also tried to acquire some knowledge of toxicology.
Then there was the place where I should kill myself. After my death, my family will have to live on my estate. My estate consists of nothing more than a hundred tsubo of land, my house, my copyrights, and two thousand yen in savings. I was troubled by the thought that because I had killed myself, my house might not sell. For that reason I felt envious of bourgeois people who own even a villa or two. You may find something rather absurd in words like these. Even now I myself feel a certain absurdity in them. But when I was thinking about this, I genuinely felt the inconvenience of it. There is really no way to avoid that inconvenience. I only hope to kill myself in such a way that, apart from my family, as few people as possible will see my corpse.
Yet even after deciding on the method, I remained half attached to life. So I needed a springboard from which to leap into death. (I do not, as those red-haired people believe, regard suicide as a sin. In the Agama Sutras, the Buddha in fact affirms the suicide of one of his disciples. Those pedants who trim their learning to suit the age will probably say that even this affirmation applies only in cases where there is no help for it. But from the standpoint of a third party, a case where there is no help for it does not mean only some catastrophe in which one must plainly die a still more miserable death if one goes on living. Everyone commits suicide only when, for himself, it is a case where there is no help for it. Whoever kills himself before reaching such an extreme must rather be rich in courage.) What can serve as that springboard, after all, is a woman. Before his suicide, Kleist repeatedly urged his friends to accompany him on the journey. Racine too once tried to throw himself into the Seine together with Moliere and Boileau. But unfortunately I have no such friend. The one woman I knew wanted to die with me. But in the end it became impossible for us to do so. After that I came to have confidence that I could die without any springboard. This was not because I despaired of there being no one to die with me. Rather, growing more sentimental by degrees, I came to wish to spare my wife, even if we must be parted by death. At the same time, I realized that for me to commit suicide alone was easier than for two of us to do so together. No doubt there was also the convenience that I would then be free to choose the time of my own death.
Lastly, what I devised was a way to kill myself skillfully, without my family noticing. After several months of preparation, I reached a certain confidence at any rate. (I cannot write about those details for the sake of people who bear me goodwill. Even if I did write them here, the legal crime of aiding and abetting suicide is absurd almost beyond belief. If this law were applied, how many criminals would it create? Pharmacists, gun dealers, even razor sellers, though they might say they knew nothing, would still have to come under some suspicion, so long as human intention reveals itself in human words and expressions. Not only that: society and the law themselves constitute the crime of aiding suicide. And finally, most of these criminals would have hearts that are, if anything, exceedingly kind. That at least is certain.) I have calmly finished these preparations, and now I am merely playing with death. What I feel from here on is probably close to Mainlander.
Because we human beings are human animals, we are animalishly afraid of death. What is called vitality is really only another name for animal force. I too am one of the human animals. Yet since I have grown weary even of food and sex, I must be gradually losing that animal force. The world in which I now live is one of morbid nerves, clear and transparent like ice. Last night, together with a prostitute, I spoke of her wages (!) and felt keenly the sadness of us human beings, living merely in order to live. If one could willingly sink into eternal sleep, then even if it were not happiness for ourselves, it would at least be peace. But whether I shall ever be able to kill myself resolutely remains uncertain. Only nature appears to me more beautiful than ever. You may laugh at the contradiction of my loving the beauty of nature and yet trying to kill myself. But nature is beautiful because it is reflected in the eyes of a dying man. I have seen more than others, loved more than others, and understood more than others. Even amid all my accumulated suffering, that alone gives me some measure of satisfaction. Please do not publish this letter for some years after my death. It is not impossible that, in the end, I may fail to kill myself and die instead as though of illness.
Postscript. I have read the life of Empedocles and felt how ancient is the desire to make oneself a god. As far as I am conscious of it, my memorandum is not one that makes a god of myself. No, it places me among the most ordinary of men. You surely remember twenty years ago, beneath that linden tree, when we discussed Empedocles of Etna. In those days I was one of those who wished to make a god of himself.
(July 1927, from his posthumous papers)