INTERTEXTUALITY IN THE SHORT STORY “YAM GRUEL“ BY RYUNOSUKE AKUTAGAWA

Abstract

During his first development phase, Ryunosuke Akutagawa, one of the most prominent modern writers in Japan, creates the whole array of the short stories, based on the existent literary texts from the ancient Japanese literature. In creating these works, Akutagawa predominantely uses the intertextual narrative technique.The short story “Yam gruel“, based on the ancient anthology of Konjaku monogatari (12th cent.), represents one of the most well–known examples of the Akutagawa’s narattive method. Attracted by the description of the crude and unreastrained human nature as depicted in the Konjaku monogatari, Akutagawa retells the original story, developping psychological characterization and also giving a modern intelectual interpretation of their acts. Besides, some heroes of “Yam gruel“ resembles the characters of Gogol’s „Overcoat“. We had to mention some comments by Joichi Nagano, who as a prominet Japanese scholar, very familiar with the ancinet Japanese literature, criticised Akutagawa’s usage of the existent text as the lack of the originality. Having accepted the intertextual view on the nature of the litеrаry text, we have tried to show that there is more to the Akutagawa’s intertextuality than a mere adaptation and repetiton of the existent story. In our opinion, the stories like “Yam gruel“ should be thought of as the result of Akutagawa’s modern interpretation and original reception of the ancient poetics as seen in Konjaku monogatari.