While Watching a Locomotive
In this brief reflective essay, Akutagawa Ryunosuke watches children playing at being locomotives and turns that image into a meditation on human desire, destiny, and tragedy. The locomotive becomes a symbol of both force and confinement: it surges forward with tremendous energy, yet only along rails it did not choose. Akutagawa extends this metaphor from children to adults, from private love to political ambition, suggesting that people pursue money, honor, love, and work with the same blind momentum. His tone shifts between irony, philosophical detachment, and unease, as he considers how instinct, social convention, history, and fate shape human lives. The piece is characteristically modern in its psychological insight, yet it retains the compressed suggestiveness of literary prose. (QA warning)
…My children are pretending to be locomotives.
Not, of course, locomotives standing still. They swing their arms, say “choo, choo,” and imitate locomotives in motion. This is probably not something peculiar to my children alone. But why do they imitate locomotives? Because, naturally, they feel some power in them. Or perhaps because they too want to possess, like a locomotive, a fierce vitality. And it is not only children who harbor such a desire. Adults are exactly the same.
Only, the locomotives of adults are not literal locomotives. Yet they too charge forward, and they too run upon rails. Those rails may be money, or honor, or finally women. Whether child or adult, we all possess the desire to rush forward freely, and in possessing that desire we inevitably lose our freedom. This is not a paradox at all. It is a paradoxical fact of life. Still, the countless ancestors within us, and the social conventions of a nation in a given age, do act to some extent as brakes upon such demands. But such demands have lain hidden within us since the most ancient times…
Standing on top of a high embankment, watching the children and the locomotives running below, I could not help thinking these things. Beyond the embankment there was another embankment, and on it stood a half-withered chinquapin tree leaning to one side. That locomotive, No. 3271, is Mussolini. The rails on which Mussolini runs may perhaps be filled with light. But when one remembers that every rail ends, at last, in two or three rusted feet that no locomotive has ever passed over, then Mussolini’s life too, like our own, may in old age perhaps become helpless beyond remedy. Nor is that all—
Nor is that all: we possess a desire to rush on forever, and at the same time we are running on rails. This contradiction cannot simply be overlooked. What we call tragedy arises precisely there. Macbeth, and of course Koharu and Jihei as well, are in the end locomotives too. Koharu and Jihei may not possess a character as strong as Macbeth’s. Yet for the sake of their love they are still recklessly rushing forward. (The tragic theories of the red-haired Westerners are, unfortunately, of no use here. What creates tragedy is life itself. It is not made by aestheticians.) If we shift this tragedy into the eyes of a third party, then because all motives are never fully clear—and perhaps even the characters in a tragedy cannot hope for their motives to be fully clear—we see only aimless rushing, aimless stopping, or perhaps overturning. And so it turns into comedy. Comedy, that is, is tragedy that does not pass through the sympathy of a third person. In the end, great or small, all of us are nothing but locomotives. In that old-fashioned engine—No. 3236, with its tall smokestack—I feel my own self. In No. 3236, slowly changing its position atop the turntable.
But to what extent do the society of a given nation in a given age, and our ancestors, apply brakes to those locomotives? There I feel the brake, and yet I cannot help feeling the engine as well—the coal—the blazing fire. We are not merely ourselves. In truth, like locomotives, we too are things layered with a long history. More than that, we are assemblies of countless pistons and gears. And the rails that make us run are, just as they are unknown to the locomotive, unknown to ourselves as well. Those rails no doubt lead to tunnels and iron bridges. Because of those rails, any complete liberation is absolutely forbidden to us. Such a fact may be terrifying. Yet however one thinks about it, it is certainly the truth.
Even if only the locomotive itself is sound—even then it cannot become free. Whether a certain driver is placed aboard a certain engine depends on the will of capricious gods. Still, most locomotives do not give up running until they are rusted through and through. The outward grandeur of every locomotive must shine there, like iron freshly oiled…
All of us are locomotives. Our work can do nothing but throw smoke and sparks up into the sky. The people walking below the embankment will know from that smoke and those sparks that a locomotive is running. Or they will know that there was once a locomotive that has already passed by. If it is an electric locomotive, smoke and sparks may simply be replaced by its sound. It is for this reason that Flaubert’s words, “Men are nothing, the work is everything,” move me. Religious figures, artists, social activists—all locomotives, by the necessity of their rails, must hurtle toward somewhere. Faster still—that is all they can do.
Whenever we look at locomotives and feel ourselves in them, that is certainly not something limited to me alone. Saito Ryokuu records the locomotive crossing the mountains of Hakone as shouting, “What’s this mountain? What’s this mountain?” But the locomotive descending Usui Pass must be fuller still of delight. It always sings lightly, “Takapoko Takasaki, Takapoko Takasaki.” If the former is a tragic locomotive, the latter may be a comic one.
(July, 1927)