prophecy which came true. Out of old material, with the greatest attention to detail and to the atmosphere of the period of which he wrote, Akutagawa had produced a grotesquely amusing thing, writing into it some modern psychology and the little lesson that ideals are precious only so long as they remain ideals. This new way of treating historical material in Japan attracted the attention of his countrymen and became characteristic of much of Akutagawa’s work. Of this sort of tale, “ Lice ” and the Chinese story, “ The Wine Worm ,” go one step further in grotesquery, while “ The Pipe ” turns to lighter and more wholesome humor.
In 1917, when Akutagawa published his second volume of short stories, Tobako to Akuma (The Devil and Tobacco), he had already established himself as one of the foremost writers of the day. The title story of the volume is the opening story in this book. In it we see an Oriental saturated with western literature playing with an old theme in a highly amusing and clever way. (Incidentally Akutagawa was himself an inveterate cigarette smoker.) It is one of the many stories he wrote about the early Catholic missionaries of the sixteenth century, one of them so cleverly that it fooled Japanese students of the period into believing that it was a translation from an old Latin text, nonexistent, but called by Akutagawa “ Legenda Aurea .”
Of the other stories in this volume of translations, a few comments may be of interest. Prof. Hasegawa in “ The Handkerchief ” is generally recognized as the distinguished author of “ Bushidō ,” Dr. Nitobe Inazō. “ The Spider’s Thread ” was written for a young peoples’ magazine. “ The Badger ” is one of those comic bits in which Akutagawa, making extravagant use of his wide reading, loved to play with a quaint idea in make-believe seriousness. “ The Ball ” is a recreation of a fragment of that strange and romantic period in Japanese history when, soon after the Restoration, the West was being swallowed whole, only to be cast up again in revulsion in the inevitable reaction of the nineties. The