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Thread for discussion of 'Shifting Gears'.

I finally made it all the way to the end of the volume. I really liked this book, but at the same time, I’m not sure I enjoyed it. I think the stories are excellent, but I was not particularly eager to pick it up at any given moment, and I had to sort of force myself to finish it. I’m glad I did though, because the set of autobiographical stories in the last section was very interesting.

I’ve said before that I thought this collection was very cold and rather cruel. Reading Shifting Gears and The Life of a Stupid Man, its hard for me not to feel like the writer is just turning that coldness and cruelty inwards, directing it against himself. (And here, I am talking about the narrator, I have done no research about Akutagawa and am simply reflecting on the character he is presenting in these stories. The fact that that character appears, at least from the footnotes in this volume, to have been very close indeed to his own point of view and life, is incredibly sad, but at the same time I don’t want to put all this weight on Akutagawa the man, who I never met and do not know.)

In any case, the derision with which Akutagawa treats the “crazy girl�� is, in my view, the poison he cannot see. He obviously feels so much shame around his affairs, but if he could muster a little more compassion for the women around him, perhaps then he would be able to muster a little more compassion for himself. But he cannot, or at least does not, and by the end of the volume he is spiraling into paranoia and darkness.

Another thing I found interesting about these autobiographical stories was the role of literature in them, Japanese and western. It was clear that Akutagawa lived for books, that he read ravenously. He is not name-dropping to name-drop, the books he mentions clearly are proper allusions; their content is very much relevant. And yet, I never got a sense of what he got from literature, really, or even what he wanted to get from literature. It was just this incredible appetite for books, behind which lay…I don’t know.

Of course, there must have been something, but I didn’t get a sense of what that was from these stories. Was it pleasure? Beauty? A sense of detachment or distraction? Feeling close to other people? Feeling distanced from other people? Or was reading and writing simply a compulsion. It is certainly striking that Akutagawa (the character, anyway) never stops writing in these stories, no matter how delirious or confused he becomes.

This, too, contributed to the overwhelming feeling of emptiness and waste that this collection gave me, despite that every single story was good, and that Akutagawa was obviously an exceptionally gifted writer with keen insight into…something…but what?