Moral Tales
In this short, sharp reflection, Akutagawa Ryunosuke reinterprets the familiar folktale of Kachi-Kachi Mountain not as a simple children’s story, but as a dark and sophisticated moral parable. He emphasizes the tale’s hidden violence: a husband unknowingly consumes his murdered wife, deceived by a shape-shifting tanuki. From that grotesque image, Akutagawa draws a broader lesson about the beast that lives inside human beings and the ease with which civilized people may be led into cruelty. Yet he also sees grandeur in the story’s structure, where one beast destroys another and humanity survives. Blending irony, severity, and philosophical suggestion, the piece turns an old folktale into a meditation on instinct, savagery, and moral awareness.
Have you ever heard a story like this? A story about a human being eating human flesh. No, I do not mean the stories of the Russian famine. This is a Japanese story, a story from long, long ago in Japan. The one who ate it was an old man, and the one who was eaten was an old woman.
Why do I say he ate her? Because it was part of a tanuki’s evil scheme. The old tanuki killed the old woman, then disguised itself as her, and instead of feeding the old man tanuki meat, it fed him the flesh of his own wife.
Of course you know this story. Yes, that old fairy tale. The tale of Kachi-Kachi Mountain. Oh? You are laughing. But it is a terrifying story. A husband ate his wife’s flesh. And all because of a single beast. Can there be anything more horrifying than that?
No, it is not merely horrifying. It is an ingenious moral tale. If we are not careful, we too may end up eating human flesh, all for the sake of the beast within us.
And yet the ending is a happy one. The tanuki is destroyed by the rabbit.
Look at the tanuki carrying the bundle of firewood that has caught fire on its back; look at the tanuki drowning together with its mud boat. It is the rabbit that destroys the tanuki. And the rabbit too is, after all, just another beast. Is there any story with meaning deeper than this?
Whenever I recall that tale, I feel something solemn. Beast is destroyed for beast’s sake, and there humanity prospers. If Zarathustra had heard this story, he too would surely have smiled.
You are still laughing, I see. Laugh, then. Go on and laugh. Your ears must be tanuki ears.
(December 1922)