Rokumeikan was the, to later eyes ridiculous, center of the social phase of this effort, and Pierre Loti, fresh from the sordid little transaction in Nagasaki out of which he made his best-known book on Japan, makes quite a respectable hero there. Who could have been the original of Mōri Sensei in the character study at the end of the volume, I do not know, but I have seen so many Mōri Senseis like him during my years in Japanese schools that I cannot read it without a doubtless gratuitous, but none the less poignant, feeling of the futility of many men’s lives, or should I, in a very general sense, say, “of all our lives?”
Just before he killed himself, Akutagawa coolly set down at considerable length an explanation of the ending of his short life (naming all the suicides of Eastern and Western history, including even Christ) on highly reasoned and philosophical grounds, which do not matter much here, for the simple truth seems to be that he was at the time a physical and nervous wreck, having been all his life a high-strung and frail man. Though he mentions an unnamed woman as furnishing some immediate excuse for it (he was a normal husband and father), and though the poetess Byakuren has gone