Chapter 261: The Writer's Past

Setagaya Ward, Tachikawa Detective Agency.

"Akiwara-sensei, this is Yoshikawa-sensei's situation."

A man wearing a black suit handed over a document, and Akiwara Yuto took it and looked at it carefully.

Yoshikawa Yuichiro, one of the main representative figures of aesthetic literature, a professor at the University of Tokyo's Faculty of Letters, had many disciples under him, and had founded several journals under the banner of the University of Tokyo.

As a writer, he had a high position in the literary world and often interacted with big figures in the political world.

However, his private life was very chaotic, and he had even been married three times and had been infatuated with prostitutes.

It was said that he often brought male friends home to stay overnight, and his reputation was very poor.

After Akiwara Yuto finished reading these materials, he thought of a writer from his past life, that is, Tanizaki Jun'ichiro, who was known as the "devil" of literature.

Tanizaki Jun'ichiro was one of the representative writers of modern aestheticism and was even nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature 7 times.

But like Murakami Haruki, he had always just been a runner-up.

However, unlike his achievements in literature, Tanizaki Jun'ichiro's private life was considered by the public to be one of the signs of a writer's moral corruption.

When he was in his 20s, he fell in love with a prostitute, but the prostitute refused him because she was kept by someone else, and introduced her second sister to him.

So he also married the prostitute's sister.

But after his own child was born, Tanizaki Jun'ichiro disliked his wife for being too much of a "virtuous wife and good mother", so he got together with the prostitute's third sister, that is, his own sister-in-law.

In order to marry his sister-in-law without worries, he introduced his wife to the poet Sato Haruo.

Thus, Sato Haruo and his wife began to associate under his nose and developed feelings.

But unexpectedly, the sister-in-law refused Tanizaki Jun'ichiro's proposal out of guilt. This made him regret it, so he found Sato Haruo again and said, "Let's break up, stay away from my wife."

Sato Haruo was heartbroken and could only constantly publish love poems in the newspaper.

However, the relationship between Tanizaki Jun'ichiro and his wife had also declared a breakup at this time.

6 years later, the three met again by accident, so they jointly wrote a divorce declaration, and Tanizaki Jun'ichiro gave his wife to Sato Haruo in the declaration.

This letter was called the "Wife-Giving Statement" and caused a huge sensation in society.

After the divorce, he found two more wives, and it was still bloody: the third wife he liked had a husband at the time, so he could only settle for marrying the second one.

But after the third wife divorced, he divorced the second wife and married the other one.

But for the sake of his literary creation, he forced the other party to "have an abortion".

He could be counted as the "scum among scum".

Compared to Tanizaki Jun'ichiro, Dazai Osamu, who kept looking for mistresses, could be counted as a "pure love warrior".

After all, although Dazai Osamu kept finding new lovers, he never divorced his wife, and even left a suicide note before dying saying he loved her the most.

After Akiwara Yuto finished reading the introduction of Yoshikawa Yuichiro, he thought of another thing and inquired.

"Have Arakawa Shinji, the author of *On the Theory of Human Nature Being Evil in Luo Shengmen*, and Yoshikawa Yuichiro met recently?"

Before this, this book review had praised him on the surface but criticized him in secret in its content. And it was after this that Ichimura Kenta came to the door to act as a "guest".

Yoshikawa Yuichiro said seriously, "According to my investigation, the two have a teacher-student relationship and meet once a week."

Hearing this, Akiwara Yuto frowned.

All the clues had been connected; undoubtedly, this matter of "apprenticeship" was pushed by Tanizaki Jun'ichiro.

But he was already so old, did he still want to play this oppression game like He Tian Xin?

Speaking of which, if he just ignored the other party, what could he do?

He pondered for a while and decided to turn a blind eye to Yoshikawa Yuichiro later.

The other party was old, and his status in pure literature was also very high; he had no confidence in retaliating against the other party, and instead would be accused of not respecting "elders".

And currently, it seemed the other party couldn't hinder him much.

Besides *Luo Shengmen*, he still had many other excellent works that hadn't been published. He didn't believe that after they were sent out, all book reviewers would turn a blind eye!

"Let's do this for now," Akiwara Yuto thought for a moment, then let Asano Aiko pay the remaining payment.

Immediately after, he and Asano left.

Returning home, Akiwara Yuto thought about what work to write next, and after thinking for a while, he decided to continue writing Akutagawa Ryunosuke's short story—*In a Grove*.

This story tells of a samurai taking his wife Masago on the way to Wakasa, encountering the bandit Tajomaru. As a result, the samurai was tied up, and the samurai's wife Masago was humiliated by the bandit.

The result of the incident was: the samurai died, Tajomaru was caught, and Masago fled to Kiyomizu-dera.

The story looks very simple, but the narrative is very unique—using others' words to organize a narrative fog, that is, using 7 people related to the incident to construct this story.

But the most strange thing is the samurai's cause of death: the medium says the samurai committed suicide, and Tajomaru and Masago each admit they killed the samurai.

So in the end, no one knows who killed the samurai.

This work looks very simple, but it is actually full of satire on the samurai class.

Putting it here, it just fits his state of mind.

However, this work actually had a lot to do with China in history.

When creating, Akutagawa Ryunosuke himself traveled to various parts of China as an inspector for the *Osaka Mainichi Shimbun*.

Before setting off, he believed that China should be prosperous and flourishing based on the praise of his good friend Tanizaki Jun'ichiro and the classics he loved to read.

So he was so excited that he even wrote to other friends that he was going to find the "greatness" of China.

But unexpectedly, after he came over, he found that China was full of war, poverty, and chaos everywhere.

When he was in Shanghai, he saw prostitutes openly flirting with him, and saw citizens defecating everywhere.

After seeing an American soldier step over an old lady's vegetable basket and walk away, he took the initiative to give the old lady money, but didn't expect to be chased and asked for more money.

After being influenced by these situations, his longing for the ancient civilization was shattered, and he even wrote quite a few bad reviews, collected into *China Travelogue*, which wrote:

"What does modern China have? Politics, academics, economics, art, aren't they all degenerating? Especially mentioning art, since the Jiaqing and Daoguang eras, is there any work worth being proud of?"

"I don't love China, and I can't love it even if I want to. After witnessing this kind of national degeneration, if one still holds love for China, then one is either a decadent sensualist or a shallow admirer of Chinese taste."

In later generations, many people took this sentence out, saying he was a part of anti-China.

However, in Lu Xun's view, Akutagawa Ryunosuke was truly a "friend".

Lu Xun once said a sentence, the meaning is roughly as follows: anyone who praises China as beautiful and prosperous is nothing but wanting to gain benefits or even full of malice. On the contrary, those who dare to criticize China's ugliness are our true friends.

Not only that, he also became the earliest translator of Akutagawa Ryunosuke.

And both of their works were full of deep criticism of human nature.

While recalling history, Akiwara Yuto finished writing this *In a Grove* and stuffed the manuscript paper into an envelope, preparing to send it to Toei's traditional literary journal *Jewel*.

Because of his disgust for Ichimura Kenta's "guest" incident, he no longer intended to cooperate with the other party's *Yuno*.

But what surprised him was that this work of his, which he was full of confidence in, received a rejection letter... ===== CHAPTER 262 =====