This study focuses on 「Yopa (妖婆)」and 「Ageunisin (アグニ の 神)」written by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa (1892-1927), examining how a Gothic story of an urban myth has been expressed in the form of literature and what the current Transfiguration of the two works ha ...
This study focuses on 「Yopa (妖婆)」and 「Ageunisin (アグニ の 神)」written by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa (1892-1927), examining how a Gothic story of an urban myth has been expressed in the form of literature and what the current Transfiguration of the two works has been functioned. Ryūnosuke is well known as a writer of pure literature, but few people know the fact that he liked spooky stories and wrote a lot of Gothic short stories. Actually, he is a great writer of ghost stories. He collected western Gothic fantasy novels from his school days and was appealed to goblins pictures, even trying to draw gapa, goblins. The products of his efforts as well as a hobby are「Yopa」and「Ageunisin」. Classified as Ryūnosuke's mysterious stories,「Yopa」and「Ageunisin」are about grotesque events happened in metropolitan cities of Shanghai, China and Tokyo, Japan. Gothic stories have been making a lot of talks and rumors related to human imagination. Human beings dream and admire an escape from ordinary lives. It is a natural desire for people to have a glimpse of a new world different from the human world and experience it. For this reason, a lot of Gothic stories have been generated and spreaded to the present. It is worth studying the two works of urban myths in the respect of their expanding the imagination of literature and reading today's cultural phenomenon. It has been widely studied that Gothic stories just like modern animations, cartoons, sci-fi and fantasy novels, can freely modify the real world and the virtual reality, easily switching back and forth the two worlds. How did Ryūnosuke construct the mysterious urban myth? How were the grotesque events formed as Gothic stories looking away from the real world? From this respect, this study takes a first step to find out the unclear reality of the Gothic stories. In Korea, there has not been a paper focusing on Transfiguration and its current implication of Ryūnosuke's Gothic stories. Moreover, nobody has attempted to do a full-scale study of the writer's ideas and theories, nor has there been any comparative analysis between his Gothic stories and the previous ones. Even though「yopa(妖婆)」will be made into a movie and can be an experimental novel valued for the speaker's eloquence and dramatic story lines, it received a harsh assessment from Sato Haruo(佐藤春夫) who called it 'a complete failure’. However, Miyasaka Satoru says that「yopa(妖婆)」was so experimental at the time that it was not regarded as a success but it should be reassessed in the respect of daring to challenge strict literature limits set by Ōdaka. About 「Ageunisin (アグニ の 神)」, Ōdaka points out its similarities with 「Yopa (妖婆)」and Hamano.Takuya (浜野卓也) criticizes Ryūnosuke's depicting Exoticism and Shamanism. J. Rubin categorizes Ryūnosuke as an experimental writer attempting ‘a crucial test for technique’. This study analyzes the current terms of the Transfiguration, focusing on those evaluations of Miyasaka Satoru and J. Rubin. Ryūnosuke, regared as a prophet of the time, is a writer who thinks ‘mannerism is a crime,’ and makes every effort to create newness overcoming obstructive closure of the era. The attraction of Ryūnosuke literature is its modernity. In the world of the 21st century, such modernity and his foresight have been revalued and his works are reassessed and rediscovered internationally. As a result, it is likely that the urban Gothic stories can be a genre of literature, thanks to Ryūnosuke's inspiration and originative imagination. This study has a signification from the respect that this is the first attempt to do a comparative analysis on his two Gothic stories and their current Transfiguration and shows that the works of Ryūnosuke, known as a national writer, deserve to be categorized as a genre of the world’s literature.