The Millet Dream
Akutagawa Ryunosuke’s “The Millet Dream” revisits a famous Chinese tale about Lu Sheng, an ambitious young man who dreams an entire lifetime while a pot of millet is still cooking. Within that brief sleep, he experiences marriage, political triumph, disgrace, exile, restoration, old age, and death. Yet Akutagawa gives the traditional parable an arresting modern turn. The Taoist Lü Weng expects the dream’s fleetingness to cure Lu Sheng of worldly desire, but the young man draws precisely the opposite lesson: because life is temporary and dreamlike, it should be lived more intensely. Written in 1917, this compact philosophical story sets detached wisdom against youthful vitality, leaving their disagreement deliberately unresolved. Its final silence preserves the tension between renunciation and the passionate affirmation of life.
Lu Sheng thought he was dying. Darkness closed over his eyes, and the sobbing of his children and grandchildren gradually faded into the distance. His body sank lower and lower, as though invisible weights had been fastened to his feet—when suddenly something startled him, and his eyes flew wide open.
There beside his pillow sat the Taoist sage Lü Weng, just as before. The millet their host was cooking did not yet seem to be done. Raising his head from the celadon pillow, Lu Sheng rubbed his eyes and gave a great yawn. It was an autumn afternoon in Handan, and despite the sunlight shining on the bare treetops, there was already a chill in the air.
“You are awake,” said Lü Weng, biting his beard, his face contorted as though he were suppressing a laugh.
“Yes.”
“You had a dream, I suppose.”
“I did.”
“What sort of dream was it?”
“An extraordinarily long one. At first I married a daughter of the Cui family of Qinghe. I seem to remember that she was beautiful and modest. Then, the following year, I passed the imperial examination and became district commandant of Weinan. After that I served successively as Censor, Diarist, and Drafter of Imperial Edicts, and rose with astonishing speed to become Chief Minister of the Secretariat and Chancellery. But I was slandered and barely escaped execution, only to be exiled to Huanzhou. I must have remained there for five or six years. Eventually I managed to clear my name and was recalled. I became Director of the Secretariat and was ennobled as Duke of Yan, though by then I believe I was already quite old. I had five sons and dozens of grandchildren.”
“And then what happened?”
“I died. I remember being over eighty, I think.”
Lü Weng stroked his beard with a self-satisfied air.
“Then you have sampled both favor and disgrace, and known both failure and success. An excellent thing. Life is not so very different from the dream you have just seen. Surely this has cooled your attachment to it. Once you understand the principles of gain and loss and the realities of life and death, you see how trivial they are. Is that not so?”
Lu Sheng had been listening impatiently to Lü Weng’s speech. When the sage pressed him for an answer, he lifted his youthful face, his eyes shining, and said:
“It is because life is a dream that I want all the more to live. Just as I awoke from that dream, the time will come when I awaken from this one. Until that moment arrives, I want to live so fully that I can say I truly lived. Don’t you feel the same?”
Lü Weng merely frowned and answered neither yes nor no.
(October 1917)