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Paper short abstract

This paper examines Akutagawa Ryūnosuke’s creative practice through translation and adaptation. Focusing on marginal notes in his English dictionariy, it challenges the binary opposition between imitation and originality by foregrounding language itself as a generative force.

Paper long abstract

This presentation examines the continuity between translation and adaptation as creative practices in the works of Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, taking as its starting point marginal notes discovered in his personal books, particularly in English–English dictionaries. These handwritten entries, which imitate the enumerative and fragmentary structure of dictionary definitions, reveal a form of creative pleasure rooted in direct engagement with language itself. As such, they offer rare material evidence of Akutagawa’s creative process prior to and beyond the production of literary texts.

Akutagawa’s literary works frequently originate in acts of reading and take shape through the adaptation of preexisting texts. Stories such as The Mine Cart (Torokko) and Hell Screen (Jigokuhen) exemplify this practice: while their narrative sources are clearly identifiable, the act of rewriting generates new ethical tensions and sensory dimensions. These cases foreground the problem of adaptation as an intermediate zone between translation and original creation. Moreover, Akutagawa’s texts themselves continue to circulate through processes of quotation and reconstruction, as seen in David Peace’s Patient X, which reappropriates Akutagawa’s works within a contemporary literary framework.

Akutagawa’s interest in translated Chinese literature, together with the possibility that he inserted his own creative writing into groups of translated texts, indicates his affirmative stance toward the strange and indeterminate worlds that emerge through translation. Rather than treating translation as a secondary or derivative act, Akutagawa appears to have valued the unique imaginative space opened by linguistic displacement, where authorship becomes unstable and new meanings arise beyond clear attribution.

This concern resonates with Akutagawa’s late work Cogwheels (Haguruma), which depicts a subject increasingly invaded and overwhelmed by language. Rather than presenting language as an instrument controlled by the author, Akutagawa’s writings reveal moments in which language itself generates new orders and incorporates the subject within them. By combining close readings of adapted literary works with an analysis of material traces such as dictionary annotations, this paper repositions Akutagawa’s oeuvre as a set of linguistic practices that transcend the binary opposition between imitation and creation.