Translation Review - The University of Texas at Dallas

Akutagawa, Ryūnosuke. Rashōmon and 17
Other Stories. Translation by Jay Rubin.
Introduced by Haruki Murakami. New York.
Penguin Books. 2006. 268 pp. Paper $15.00.
ISBN 0-14-303984-9.
Jeffrey Angles, Reviewer
(Note: Japanese names in this review appear in
the traditional Japanese order, with the surname
first and given name next. For instance,
Akutagawa is the family name of the author, and
Ryūnosuke is his given name.)
The case of Akutagawa Ryūnosuke (1892–
1927) is proof that, as André Lefevere has
shown, the time and circumstances under which
a particular author’s work is translated greatly
shape the position that author will occupy when
stepping onto the stage of world literature.
Akutagawa is one of the most highly respected
masters of the short story, well known in Japan
for his ability to produce short, entertaining, and
marvelously crafted tales which, despite their
brevity, are rich in philosophical implications.
Although Japanese have accorded him a
prominent position within the canon in their
country, his position on the international stage
has shifted significantly over time.
Because he worked in the relatively
accessible medium of the short story, he was
among the earliest contemporary authors to be
translated into English. Several translations
appeared during the prewar period, but most
came from Japanese publishers such Hokuseido
Press, which published Glenn W. Shaw’s book
of translations Tales Grotesque and Curious in
1930. These books, however, circulated
primarily within Japan and did not contribute
significantly to Akutagawa’s fame abroad. This
all changed in 1950, when the director
Kurosawa Akira released the film Rashōmon,
which was based on two of Akutagawa’s stories.
Rashōmon took the Venice Film Festival by
storm and quickly began appearing in cinemas
around the world, helping to create a large
international market for Japanese cinema for the
first time. Kurosawa’s film catapulted
Akutagawa to international literary fame by
creating a market for new translations, including
Rashōmon and Other Stories (Boston: Tuttle,
1952; NY: Liveright, 1952), translated by the
Japanese professor Kojima Takashi. Over the
years, Kojima continued to champion the work
of Akutagawa to English-speaking audiences,
eventually producing the two thick volumes
Japanese Short Stories (NY: Liveright
Publishing Corp., 1961) and Exotic Japanese
Stories, co-translated with John McVittie (NY:
Liveright Publishing Corp., 1964). Thanks to
these widely distributed and often reprinted
translations, Akutagawa was probably the bestknown
modern Japanese author in the Englishspeaking
world of the early 1960s. Interestingly,
many of the works translated in these early
collections draw their inspiration from classical
Japanese and Chinese literature. As a result,
these early translations gave the misleading
impression that Akutagawa belonged more to
the classical world than to the twentieth century
— the era of dramatic literary change and
development in which he actually lived and
worked.
Although Akutagawa’s reputation as one of
the great authors of twentieth-century literature
has not eroded in Japan, he slowly lost ground in
America as other Japanese authors stepped into
the limelight. An entire generation of Englishspeaking
readers interested in modern Japan —
not the classical world that dominates the stories
translated in the early English collections of
Akutagawa’s works — turned to new
translations of Kawabata Yasunari, Tanizaki
Jun’ichirō, and Mishima Yukio, and Akutagawa
went to the back of the line. By the 1980s and
1990s, only a few of his stories — those that
Kurosawa had immortalized — remained well
read, and even university courses about
Japanese literature in translation rarely featured
any more than those. Part of the problem was no
doubt that the language of the translations from
the 1960s did not sound contemporary. It gave
the impression that there was “nothing new”
about Akutagawa — that there was nothing
especially modern about him, nor was there
anything more to know. Over the years, a
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