Narrative
The Nose
鼻
Ryūnosuke Akutagawa · 1916
Synopsis
Zenchi Naigu, a respected priest of Ike-no-o in the Heian period, has a nose that hangs five or six inches below his mouth; at meals, a disciple has to hold it up for him with a small board, according to a literary summaries site. He feigns indifference, secretly observes himself, scrutinises other people's noses and searches the Buddhist scriptures for someone who resembles him. A disciple back from Kyoto brings a remedy from a Chinese doctor: boil the nose, then trample on it.
Context
The story appeared in January 1916 in Shinshichō, the magazine of students at his university, shortly after the author's first published story; it takes up a tale from the Uji shūi monogatari, an anonymous collection of the thirteenth century. Natsume Sōseki, whom the author admired, wrote him a letter of praise and, according to an introduction by Standard Ebooks, predicted a place apart for him if he wrote twenty or thirty stories of this kind. Jay Rubin translated it into English for a collection published by Penguin in 2006.
Who it is for
A short story of a few pages, for readers who want to approach the author through a brief, ironic tale.
Prizes and reception
Collected in French in Rashômon et autres contes, in the translation by Arimasa Mori published by Gallimard as early as 1965.
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