After Death
In this dreamlike story, a sleepless writer imagines his own death and returns invisibly to a world that has already begun to move on. His jealousy toward a friend and his horror at his wife's remarriage gradually expose a more disturbing subject: the selfishness that survives even self-knowledge. Akutagawa turns an ordinary night beside his sleeping family into a quiet descent through shame, possessiveness, and an overactive conscience.
...Even after getting into bed, I am unable to fall asleep unless I read something. Indeed, it is not uncommon for me to remain awake no matter how much I read. Beside my pillow there are always a reading lamp and a bottle of Adalin tablets. That night too, as usual, I carried two or three books inside the mosquito net and turned the bedside lamp up bright.
“What time is it?”
It was my wife speaking from the bed beside mine; she had long since fallen asleep once already. With the baby cradled on her arm, she lay facing me and looking my way.
“Three o’clock.”
“Three already? I thought it was still about one.” I gave her a vague reply and paid no further attention to her words.
“You’re noisy. Noisy—be quiet and go to sleep.”
Imitating the way I spoke, my wife giggled softly. But after a little while she pressed her nose against the baby’s head and, before I knew it, had fallen quietly asleep again.
Still facing them, I was reading a book called Tales and Sermons for Driving Away Sleep. It was an eight-volume collection of anecdotes from Japan, China, and India, compiled by a monk around the Kyoho era. Yet it contained scarcely any story that was amusing, much less unusual. While reading the section on the five human relationships—lord and subject, parent and child, husband and wife, and the rest—I gradually began to feel drowsy. I switched off the lamp beside my pillow and soon fell asleep.—
In my dream I was walking with S through a sweltering town. The gravel pavement was barely six or perhaps nine feet wide. Every house, moreover, had put out the same khaki-colored awning.
“I never thought you would die.”
Fanning himself, S spoke to me in a manner suggesting that, though he felt some pity, he disliked showing it openly.
“You looked as if you would live a long time.”
“Did I?”
“We all used to say so. Let me see—you were five years younger than I am,” S said, counting on his fingers. “Thirty-four? To die at only about thirty-four...” He suddenly fell silent.
I did not particularly regret being dead. Yet somehow I felt ashamed in S’s presence.
“You had work still unfinished, didn’t you?”
S spoke again, rather hesitantly.
“Yes. I had begun writing something long.”
“And your wife?”
“She is well. The children haven’t been ill lately either.”
“Well, that is the main thing. Of course, I too may die at any time, but...”
I glanced at S’s face. I distinctly felt that S was pleased it was I who had died, while S himself remained alive. At that instant he too seemed to sense what I was thinking. An unpleasant expression crossed his face, and he fell silent.
After we had walked for a while without speaking, S stopped in front of a large canned-goods shop, shading himself from the sun with his fan.
“Well, I must be going.”
Several pots of white chrysanthemums stood in the dim interior of the shop. As I glanced inside, for some reason I thought, “Ah yes, S’s family home was a branch of Aokido.”
“Are you living with your father now?”
“Yes, since the other day.”
“Then, goodbye.”
After parting from S, I immediately turned into the next side street. An organ stood in the display window at the corner. Its side panel had been removed so that the inside could be seen, and within it many tubes of green bamboo were standing upright. On seeing this, I thought, “Of course—bamboo tubes would do just as well.” Then—somehow I found myself standing before the gate of my own house.
The old wicket gate and black fence looked no different from usual. Even the leafy cherry branch above the gate was just as I had seen it yesterday. But on the new nameplate were written the words, “Residence of Kushibe.” The moment I saw it, I truly felt that I was dead. Still, I did not regard it as immoral either to enter the gate or to go from the entrance into the inner rooms.
My wife sat on the veranda of the living room, making a suit of armor from bamboo sheaths. All around her lay the dry, curled sheaths. Yet the armor on her lap consisted only of the cuirass and one panel of its skirt.
“Where are the children?” I asked as soon as I sat down.
“Yesterday I sent them all to Kugenuma with their aunt and grandmother.”
“And Grandfather?”
“Grandfather must have gone to the bank.”
“Then no one is here?”
“No one but me and Shizu.”
Still looking down, my wife passed her needle through a bamboo sheath. But in her voice I immediately detected a lie, and I spoke a little more harshly.
“But there is a nameplate outside saying ‘Residence of Kushibe,’ isn’t there?”
My wife looked up at me in surprise. Her eyes wore the bewildered expression they always took on when she was being scolded.
“It is there, isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“Then that man is here?”
“Yes.”
Thoroughly dejected, my wife did nothing but fidget with the armor of bamboo sheaths.
“I don’t mind if he is. After all, I am already dead—”
I went on, as if half trying to persuade myself.
“You are still young too, so I won’t complain about such a thing. Provided only that the man is respectable...”
My wife looked up at me once more. The moment I saw her face, I felt that something irreparable had happened. At the same time, I felt the blood visibly drain from my own face.
“He isn’t respectable, is he?”
“I don’t think he is a bad man, but...”
Yet I knew clearly that my wife herself felt no respect for this Mr. Kushibe. Then why had she married such a man? Even if that might still be forgiven, she had actually found a kind of ease in Kushibe’s very baseness—and in that I felt something that revolted me from the bottom of my heart.
“Is he a man the children can call Father?”
“It’s no use saying things like that...”
“No. No excuse will do.”
Even before I shouted, my wife had hidden her face in her sleeve and was trembling violently at the shoulders.
“What a fool you are! How can I rest in death after this?”
Unable to remain still, I went into my study without looking back. Above the lintel hung a fireman’s hook, its shaft wrapped in black and vermilion lacquer. Someone had once possessed such a thing—I was trying to remember who when, before I knew it, I was no longer in a study at all but walking along a road beside a hedge of trifoliate orange.
The day was already drawing toward dusk. The cinders spread over the road were soaked through, whether by drizzle or dew. Still nursing my anger, I walked as fast as I could. But however far I went, the hedge of trifoliate orange continued stretching endlessly ahead of me.
I awoke of my own accord. My wife and the baby still seemed to be sleeping quietly. But the night was apparently beginning to pale, and the strangely subdued cry of a cicada rang pure from some distant tree. Listening to it, I feared how tired my head would be tomorrow—or rather, today—and tried to fall asleep again quickly. Yet not only was sleep slow to come, I vividly recalled the dream I had just had. My wife in the dream had been forced into a pitiable and thankless role. S might truly be like that. And I—toward my wife I had become a frightening egoist. Especially if the self in my dream was regarded as the same person as my waking self, I was more frighteningly selfish still. And it could not be said that my waking self was entirely different from the self in the dream. Partly to obtain sleep, and partly to keep my conscience from rising to a morbid pitch, I swallowed half a gram of Adalin and sank into a profound sleep....
—September 1925—