The Pagoda Tree
In this brief reflective prose piece, Akutagawa Ryunosuke begins with a memory of first learning the name of the pagoda tree through a joruri performance called "Stone Pillow." From that theatrical memory he moves into recollection, art, religion, and travel, linking the tree to Kannon Bosatsu, to Kuniyoshi’s ukiyo-e, and later to the ordinary streetscape of Beijing. The essay is characteristic of Akutagawa’s light, allusive style: cultured but conversational, moving easily between anecdote and aesthetic judgment. What begins as a literary association becomes a meditation on how repeated exposure can strip an image of its old poetic aura, while leaving behind one small surviving elegance: the green seed pods of the pagoda tree.
I probably learned the name of the tree called the pagoda tree when I heard a joruri piece in the Icchu-bushi style called "Stone Pillow." Of course, I was never enough of a connoisseur to study Icchu-bushi myself. I had merely picked it up by ear from listening to my father and mother practice it. One of its lines, if I remember rightly, spoke of Kannon Bosatsu appearing "among the treetop of the old pagoda tree in the garden," or something of that sort.
"Stone Pillow" is a joruri about an old woman living alone who makes travelers sleep on a stone pillow, then kills them by dropping a huge rock suspended by a rope from above, so that she can steal their traveling money. One night a beautiful acolyte comes asking for lodging. The old woman puts this acolyte too on the stone pillow and means to kill him and take his money. But the old woman’s own daughter secretly falls in love with the acolyte and dies in his place, becoming his substitute. Then the acolyte reveals himself as Kannon Bosatsu and teaches the old woman the law of karmic retribution. The pond into which the old woman threw herself and died, they say, still remains within the grounds of Sensoji as "the Old Woman’s Pond." That, roughly speaking, is the story of the joruri. Since I had once seen this tale illustrated in one of Kuniyoshi’s ukiyo-e prints, I found "Stone Pillow" more interesting than pieces like "The Eight Views of Yoshiwara" or "Black Hair." I also remember that in that same Kuniyoshi print, the folds of Kannon Bosatsu’s robes were rendered with a technique borrowed from Western painting.
Later I saw a young pagoda tree, and felt that its somehow decorative branches and leaves were perfectly suited to the appearance of Kannon Bosatsu and the like. But when, four or five years ago, I traveled in Beijing and found myself seeing nothing but pagoda trees everywhere, I gradually stopped feeling anything that might be called poetic charm. Only the green pods of the pagoda tree still strike me as elegant.
Beijing—
Along the road where ashes are thrown away, nothing but pagoda-tree pods.
(October 1926)