A Socialist
In "A Socialist," Akutagawa Ryunosuke traces the quiet, painful drift of a man who once lived with absolute ideological conviction. The protagonist begins as a fervent young socialist, defying his father and dedicating himself to meetings, pamphlets, and political thought. Yet marriage, work, children, and domestic comfort gradually pull him away from the movement he believed still burned within him. Akutagawa does not portray this change as simple betrayal; instead, he examines the uneasy compromise between idealism and ordinary life, and the self-deceptions that make such compromise bearable. The story is subdued, ironic, and deeply humane, ending with the suggestion that even a failed revolutionary life may unknowingly influence others in ways the man himself never sees.
He was a young socialist. His father, a minor government official, had even tried to disown him for it. But he did not yield. That was because his passion was fierce, and also because his friends encouraged him.
They formed a certain group, put out pamphlets of some ten pages or so, and held public lectures. He too, of course, appeared regularly at their meetings and from time to time published his essays in those pamphlets. It seemed that hardly anyone outside their circle read his essays. Even so, he had a certain confidence in one of them, "Remembering Liebknecht." Though it lacked rigorous thought, it was rich in poetic passion.
Before long he finished school and came to work for a magazine publisher. Yet he did not neglect to attend their meetings. They continued, as before, to debate their issues with enthusiasm. More than that, like men slowly chiseling through stone to reach underground water, they were beginning, inch by inch, to move toward action as well.
By this time his father no longer interfered with him. He married a woman and came to live in a small house. His house really was small. But far from being dissatisfied, he felt quite happy. His wife, a little dog, the poplar tree in front of the house, these things gave his life a kind of intimacy he had never known before.
Because he now had a family, and because he was also pressed by the urgent demands of his work, little by little he began to neglect going to their meetings. Yet his passion had by no means faded. At least, he believed that the man he was in the present had not changed in the least from the man he had been a few years earlier. But they, his comrades, did not see it as he did. The young men who had newly joined their group in particular made no attempt to hide their criticism of his idleness.
Naturally, this only drove him farther and farther from their meetings. Then he became a father, and grew still more attached to his home. Yet his passion was still directed toward socialism. He did not neglect his studies beneath the lamp late at night. At the same time, however, he gradually began to feel dissatisfied with the dozen or so essays he had written before, especially "Remembering Liebknecht."
They too had grown cold toward him. To them he was no longer even worth criticizing. Leaving him behind, or rather leaving behind several people more or less like him, they steadily pushed their work forward. Whenever he met an old friend, he would complain as if only now realizing it. But in truth, he too had before he knew it come to be satisfied with the peace of an ordinary man.
Some years after that, he came to work for a certain company and won the trust of its executives. As a result, he now lived, at any rate, in a larger house than before and was raising several children. But as for his passion, perhaps only God knew where it now resided. Sometimes, reclining in a wicker chair and enjoying a cigar, he would think back on his youth. It was not that this failed, in its own way, to make him melancholy. And yet the Eastern spirit of resignation always came to his rescue.
He was indeed one of the defeated. Yet his "Remembering Liebknecht" had moved a certain young man. That young man was from Osaka; after dabbling in stocks, he had lost the family fortune he had inherited. He read the essay, and through it became a socialist. But of course the man himself knew nothing at all of this. Even now he sits back in his wicker chair, enjoying a cigar, and thinking of his youth, humanly, perhaps all too humanly.
December 10, 1926