Mr. Akahiko Shimaki
Written in September 1926, this remembrance records Akutagawa's last meeting with the tanka poet Akahiko Shimaki, who had died earlier that year. Its dry comedy—the meager mandarins, the alley beside the magazine office, and Shimaki's sharp turn of phrase—gradually gives way to the knowledge that pain mistaken for neuralgia was cancer. Akutagawa then recalls dreaming of Shimaki's funeral and composing an unfinished poem. The closing verse links Shimaki's thoughts of death with Akutagawa's own illness. The translation preserves all six prose recollections, both poems, the concluding reflection, and the original date.
The last time I saw Mr. Shimaki was, I believe, at New Year this year—1926. That evening Mr. Saito treated me to dinner, and we talked about the Six Secret Teachings and the Three Strategies, about dementia praecox, and such things. The place where he treated me was none other than Kagetsu, in front of Tokyo Station. Afterward Mr. Saito and I took a comparatively empty suburban train and set out for the offices of the literary magazine Araragi. I remember that in the carriage sat a schoolgirl who somehow resembled a Chinese girl and looked exceedingly delicate.
Before entering the offices, we stood on the left side of the alley, beside a mountain of empty bottles, and relieved ourselves. Let me make clear, as a precaution, that the proposal did not originate with me. I merely followed the lofty instruction of my senior, Mr. Saito.
In the downstairs tatami room at the offices, Mr. Shimaki, Mr. Hirafuku, Mr. Fujisawa, Mr. Takada—or so I think—the proprietor of Kokin Shoin, and others sat in a circle talking. To put it kindly, the room had an austere, desolate air. Even the mandarins served with the tea were extremely small. In those mandarins especially, I felt an intimacy characteristic of Araragi. (It is also true, however, that my hyperacidity prevented me from eating even one.)
Mr. Shimaki was considerably wasted, which made his two eyes seem unusually large. The subject of conversation was probably the collected works of Takashi Nagatsuka, then in the course of publication. When the talk turned to a certain gentleman, Mr. Shimaki said with a wry smile, “A vulgar fellow, isn't he?” He placed particular force on the word “vulgar”; it was a highly distinctive way of speaking. Not only had I never met this gentleman, I had never read his work. Yet once Mr. Shimaki said that, the man immediately began to seem vulgar to me.
Then, still sitting with his back to us, Mr. Shimaki pulled up the tail of his shirt and had Dr. Saito give him an injection for neuralgia. (This was because Mr. Shimaki was wearing a Western suit.) The second injection seems to have hurt. Putting a hand to his lower back, he called out almost jokingly, “Saito, that one really bites.” What was taken for neuralgia was in fact nothing other than the pain of the cancer that was later to kill him.
Two or three months afterward, Tsuchiya Bunmei informed me of Mr. Shimaki's death. I then read Mr. Saito's “An Account of Akahiko's Last Hours,” published in Kaizo. Mr. Saito says that Mr. Shimaki's end was a magnificent and peaceful death. Yet to me, ill myself at the time, it brought no small sense of desolation. Perhaps that impression had remained with me. In a dream toward dawn, I attended Mr. Shimaki's funeral and joined a great many people in composing poems. “...the persimmon-village man, round of eye and stout of waist, is now no more”—this alone remained sharply in my memory after I awoke. I had not forgotten the first five syllables; in all likelihood, I had simply never composed them. Whenever I recall this dream, I still cannot help feeling lonely.
To which sky will the soul journey, I wonder—dwelling on what is of no use to me.
This is not merely Mr. Shimaki's reflection. It is also how I feel as I write these words in the midst of illness.
(September 2, 1926)