Page:Modern Japanese Novels and the West.pdf/34

 Akutagawa Ryûnosuke (1892–1927), best known in this country as the author of Rashômon, was also fascinated by the old literature, but he took a wayward delight in perverting it to his own rather unhealthy tastes. In his reinterpretation of the ancient stories he supplied the characters with modern, often specifically Western motivations, twisting a conventional romance into a neurotic intrigue. In his story Kesa and Moritô, for example, he deliberately alters all the elements of the classical tale. The rough soldier Moritô in the original is so overcome by Kesa’s beauty that he determines to kill her husband in order to make her his wife. In Akutagawa’s version, Moritô finds on seeing Kesa again three years after their first love affair that “she was no longer beautiful…. Now her skin was lustreless; her smooth cheeks and neck had withered; only those clear, proud, black eyes … and there were dark rings around them.” He agrees to kill Kesa’s husband only for fear that she will mock him otherwise. Kesa, who in the original takes her husband’s place and is killed by Moritô because she prefers death to dishonor, in Akutagawa’s story desires to die at Moritô’s hands because she realizes that he now finds her ugly, and