I do not expect to be appreciated a hundred years from now. Public opinion is rarely fair to art: this is as true now as it always was. Even the cultured Athenians in the Age of Pericles or the Florentines in Renaissance Italy were not ideal as audiences, for all their sincere and passionate interest in art. Future generations will undoubtedly be the same. I’m sorry to say that I have no faith that any audience a century on will be able to separate mounds of sand from nuggets of gold.
Even if the audience were ideal, art and beauty are not. My viewpoint is my own, and it reflects the times in which I live. I cannot see the future. The lens I see through is also inarguably Japanese, and there are many things that Western audiences will not understand. Is it possible to believe in beauty that transcends both time and place? True, Dante’s Inferno can still make Eastern children shudder with fear, but a deep mist spanning six hundred years of history lies between it and modern Japan.
I am just an ordinary man of letters. Even if posterity forgives my inevitable faults and the beauty of art can be said to hold universal appeal across time and place, I see no reason why my works, out of the mountains of books available, would be selected as classics. It is obvious to me that no one will appreciate my stories a century after they were written.
Sometimes I think about when I will be forgotten. Will it be twenty, fifty, or a hundred years from now? Will there be a time when my books can only be found piled up high in some dusty, out-of-the-way used bookstore in Tokyo? Or maybe the last book of mine to survive will end up at a library, too faded and worn to be read at all. But...
I think but.
But what if someone, somewhere, discovered one of my books by chance, a long time from now? Would they read it? At least a few lines? If they did, I would hope for them to catch at least a faint echo of my original, beautiful vision.
I repeat that I do not expect to be appreciated a hundred years from now. My idle daydreams are at odds with harsh reality. Nevertheless, I still imagine it. I think about a reader a century from now who will pick up one of my books and picture what I have written in their mind’s eye, like a distant mirage.
Those who claim the wisdom to know the future better than I will certainly laugh me off as a fool. I am second to none when it comes to criticizing my own self. But I don’t need to respect my idea, or myself, to feel a certain sense of pity for this imagined daydream. Or perhaps what I feel is the shared sense of sympathy that I have with all human beings.
Akutagawa Ryūnosuke
(First published on July 27th, 1919)
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