芥川竜之介の作品にみる感傷主義 -「羅生門」「秋」「西方の人」 をめぐって -

Abstract

In 「Rashomon」, one of Ryunosuke Akutagawa’s first stories, a servant who has sentimentalism due to loss of his or her job judges an old woman’s corpse-defilement behavior as <unforgivably evil>. That is unreasonable and illogical judgment resulted from the servant’s impulsive emotion full of sentimentalism. However, pressing hard the reason of her such an evil behavior, the servant realizes that her principle of survival is merely a sophistry of selfish excuse and hypocritical self-justification. Then finally, the servant acquires a selfish courage by taking advantage of her sentimental principle of survival. In other words, it is the servant’s hypocritical action to justify his or her misdeeds by utilizing her principle. 「Autumn(Aki)」, written in a modern style during Akutagawa’s mid-life, deals with the sisters’ mutual conflict caused from the marriage progress with a man in between them. Realizing that Teruko, her younger sister, loves a man with who she wants to marry, Nobuko marries with different man as if she makes a concession for her sister with sentimental judgment. After that, Teruko sends a sentimental letter to Nobuko, expressing gratitude and an apology for her. However, when they meet together after one year, Nobuko still has affection to Teruko’s man, and therefore younger sister is very jealous of her sister. Eventually, it turned out besides the sentimentality that Nobuko’s marriage for her sister was hypocritical, gratitude as well as an apology in Teruko’s letter was also hypocritical. In 「The Man of the West(Seihonohito)」, Akutagawa’s last work, Jesus weeps as his friend Lazarus dies. On this part, Akutagawa states that Lazarus is resurrected by Jesus’ sentimentalism, and it is contradiction that Jesus who does not take care of His Mother, Virgin Mary, expresses condolence for Lazarus’ death. In order to comprehend this Jesus’ sentimentalism full of contradiction, Akutagawa mentions that it is important to understand <Genius Egoism>, which was a criticism to Jesus’ hypocritical behavior. As considered above, by giving prominence about a hypocritical character inherent in human’s sentimentality, Akutagawa felt displeasure about and disdained such <Hypocritical Sentimentalism>, and tried to struggle against it.