A Chronicle of Lectures
In this brief, wry travel sketch, Akutagawa Ryunosuke recounts his first lecture tour, undertaken with fellow writer Satomi Ton in Hokkaido. Rather than presenting the trip as a grand literary event, Akutagawa focuses on fatigue, awkward audiences, comic misunderstandings, unwanted hospitality, and repetitive meals. The piece moves with a light, conversational irony: a desperate telegram becomes a bureaucratic puzzle, and an ordinary omelet becomes memorable simply because the travelers have been fed the same local shellfish everywhere. Yet beneath the humor is Akutagawa’s sensitivity to atmosphere. Hokkaido’s landscape appears to him as strangely and sentimentally beautiful, and the prose closes with a haiku-like image of willow branches hanging into melting snow.
A Chronicle of Lectures
The first time I ever set out on a lecture tour was this recent trip to Hokkaido with Satomi. When admission is free, the audience naturally tends to be a mixed crowd, and that alone makes it fairly hard to talk. On top of that, we had to go around speaking in one place after another, so I ended up quite exhausted. Still, Satomi boldly turned down all the banquets after the lectures, and thanks to him that was a tremendous help.
Yamamoto Sanehiko of Kaizosha sent us a telegram while we were in Otaru. In our reply we wired back: “KURUSHII KURUSHII HETO HETO DA” — “It’s painful, painful, we’re utterly worn out.” Then the communications section at city hall telephoned us. I thought it must be about Satomi’s radio drama, so I promptly handed him the receiver. Satomi, saying things like “Ah, yes. Yes, that’s right,” was chuckling to himself. Then he said to me, “How absurd. They were asking whether it was ‘kurushii kurushii’ or ‘hetoheto da.’” Perhaps no one in the history of Otaru had ever sent such a telegram before.
I have had more than enough of lectures. For the time being, I have no desire to give another one. The scenery of Hokkaido was, strangely enough, sentimentally beautiful. As for the food, wherever we arrived, they served us nothing but surf clams, and that nearly did me in. Satomi ate an omelet in Asahikawa and was moved to the depths of his soul, saying, “So an omelet is a delicious thing, isn’t it?” From that alone, you can probably imagine how things were.
In the thawing snow, a willow trails its branches down.
June 1927