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The Story of a Head That Fell Off

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 May 2025

Akutagawa Ryunosuke  and
Jay Rubin
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Akutagawa Ryunosuke (1892-1927) is known primarily for his stories set in other times and places, but even at their most exotic or fantastic, his works deal with urgent modern themes. His Edo-period samurai stories emphasize the horror of violence and the emptiness of vengeance. “Shogun” (The General, 1924), a well-known portrait of a victorious general resembling Nogi Maresuke (1849-1912), the “hero” of the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05, is a bitter satire of a man responsible for the death of thousands. “The Story of a Head That Fell Off,” set against the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-95, is an intense cry against the absurdity of war that unfortunately remains as relevant in our barbaric twenty-first century as it was in Akutagawa's day.

Type
Research Article
Information
Asia-Pacific Journal , Volume 5 , Issue 8 , August 2007 , e5
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BYCreative Common License - NCCreative Common License - ND
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is unaltered and is properly cited. The written permission of Cambridge University Press must be obtained for commercial re-use or in order to create a derivative work.
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 2007

References

Notes

[1] Empress Dowager: Cixi (1835-1908), the powerful “Last Empress” of China.

[2] Strange Tales of Liaozhai: The collection of supernatural tales is Liao zhai zhi yi by Pu Songling (1640-1715), which has been partially rendered into English as Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio, tr. John Minford (London: Penguin Books, 2006), and Strange Tales of Liaozhai. Story 72, “A Final Joke” (in Minford's edition), tells how a certain man named Jia literally laughed his head off many years after receiving a near-fatal wound. It gave Akutagawa the idea for this story according to Kono Toshiro et al., eds., Akutagawa Ryunosuke zenshu, 24 vols. (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1995-8) 3:394.