Kaku-san and Appetite
This brief prose sketch by Ryunosuke Akutagawa is a witty, affectionate, and slightly grotesque portrait of the writer Koji Uno. Akutagawa moves between praise and mockery with remarkable ease, presenting Uno as both intelligent and deeply sensitive, yet never pompous or self-deceiving. The piece then shifts into comic physical description, turning Uno’s face into the object of a mock-culinary fantasy, where admiration becomes appetite. That mixture of elegance, irony, and playful cruelty is characteristic of Akutagawa’s shorter literary portraits. The closing verses heighten the humor by transforming Uno into a semi-legendary, absurdly rustic figure. Though light in tone, the piece is finely controlled, revealing Akutagawa’s eye for personality, performance, and the strange charm of human particularity.
Koji Uno is an intelligent man. At the same time, he is also a highly sensitive man. To be sure, an inherently comic spirit may sometimes deceive others. But he is a man who only in the rarest cases ever deceives himself.
Moreover, even when he is not displaying his comic spirit, Uno Koji is not the sort of man who, like those who possess both abundant sensitivity and intelligence, is apt to become stubbornly worked up. He does not become worked up even over the very act of displaying his comic spirit. At times this may give Uno Koji the look of a monster. Yet it is also true that therein lies a peculiar charm—the sort of charm one finds, for example, in a spiritual chameleon.
Uno Koji’s real name is Kakujiro (or perhaps Tsugujirō). That somewhat dark complexion of his is unmistakably Kakujiro’s. Especially when he is playing the shamisen, Uno is no longer Hiro-san at all, but Kaku-san.
While I am on the subject of his face, I should add that every time I looked at Uno’s face I invariably felt a certain appetite. That face would do very well cooked from the cheeks to the ears like cold beef. A slice of meat laid on a plate would be faintly red, with patches of white fat here and there. But if you turned it over for a quick look, the skin of the cheeks, gone gooseflesh, would still have those shaggy sideburns clinging to it—so I once imagined. Of course, if I were actually to put it in my mouth, whether it would let me finish a drink as expected is highly doubtful. No doubt, however much seasoning one sprinkled over it, the smell of tobacco soaked into those sideburns would rise with a reek like the smell of mutton.
Come now, children, bring sharp sickles— Uno-maro of the birdlime, cut the grassy sideburns, and go feed the horses.