“Nagasaki” in Akutagawa Ryūnosuke’s Taishō-Era Literary Imagination

Anri Yasuda discusses how Nagasaki’s history as an international city, and especially the region’s Christian presence, shaped its image in popular cultural discourse as a city that embodied a blend of western and Japanese influences. One of Japan’s most famous writers, Akutagawa Ryūnosuke (1892–1927), in his so-called Kirishitan (Christian) works, explored and perpetuated the image of Nagasaki as a Christian city, and also, as a place somehow both simultaneously Japanese and Western. He was always fascinated with Nagasaki’s juxtapositions of past and present, tradition and modernity. Yasuda elucidates how Nagasaki fit into the early-twentieth century Japanese literary imagination, and how the “Christian” image of the city was ready-made decades before the bombing, as was the idea of the “international” aspect of modernity, both ideals which drove Nagasaki’s reconstruction process. The notions of the “international” and the “modern” in Nagasaki that had fascinated Akutagawa in the Taishō era breathed life into the city’s revival and its urban image during the decades following the atomic bombing.