People of "Masks"
In this brief reminiscence, Akutagawa Ryunosuke looks back with dry wit on the literary friendships of his student years. He recalls his association with writers connected to *Shinshicho* and with the circle behind the coterie magazine *Masks*, half-jokingly blaming them for having corrupted his once “pure” self and led him into literature. The piece is marked by affectionate irony, selective memory, and a strong sense of atmosphere: a red-shaded lamp, ghost stories, a deserted rainy street in Ōkubo, and a drafty rented room in Kamakura. Beneath its light tone, the essay quietly records the passing of time, the loosening of old friendships, and the survival of literary figures who once belonged to Akutagawa’s intimate world.
In my student days I was on the closest terms with the contributors to the third and fourth series of *Shinshicho*. I had not originally aspired to be a writer at all, and the reason I ended up becoming one in the end was entirely their bad influence. Entirely? Well, perhaps it is doubtful whether it was entirely so. In those days, besides them, I also kept company with the Waseda set. There is no question that they too exerted a bad influence on my pure and innocent self.
And who were these people? None other than the gentlemen who published the coterie magazine *Masks*: Kinosuke Hinatsu, Hachijū Saijō, and Tari Moriguchi. Once or twice, together with Mr. Makoto Yamamiya, I went to visit Saijō in his sitting room, lit by a lamp with a red shade. It was in that room too that I was introduced, not only to Hinatsu and Moriguchi, but also to Mr. Kogan Yoshie, who belonged to the rank of a master. What we talked about at the time I scarcely remember now. I do remember only that one night, after ghost stories had come up, I was thoroughly dismayed on my way home through rainy Ōkubo, where not a single soul was to be seen.
After that, however, I remained out of touch for a long while with Yoshie, Saijō, and Moriguchi. Only when I was living in Ōmachi, Kamakura, Hinatsu had also moved to Hase, and so I saw him from time to time. In those days, because his eight-mat sitting room was, like mine, in a rented house, it was rather comical that even after the shōji had been completely shut, gusts of wind would still come blowing in through the wall of the alcove. Yet after I left Kamakura, I gradually grew distant from Hinatsu as well. It seems that all of them are still alive and well. Hinatsu occasionally publishes long essays on poetry in *Chūōkōron*. One imagines that in the room where he writes those manuscripts now, no wind blows in through the alcove wall any longer.
(May 1924)