KJCKorea
Journal Central

This study aims at considering the grotesque aspect within the space of a tattooer Seikichi’s upstairs room and Rashomon's loftfocusingon Akutagawa’s <Rashomon>and Tanijaki’s <Shisei>. These two works are not the writer’s first one but they can be considered as the first real work on the point of that those take a role of compass to promote understanding writers’ works. And each work has a common point that there is the grotesque space like the top of door and the upstairs room. In <Rashomon> of Akutagawa, the grotesque of loft; the top of door shows us that the moral sense about the human’s good and evil can be changed by an individual egoism. In <Shisei> of Tanijaki, the grotesque setup of Seikichi’s upstairs room that overlooked Hukagawa Sagacho’s Ohokawa had to exist for the space to carry through the theme that the writer’s alter ego; the hero had the ideal beauty’s body tattooed infusing with his soulful art and kneeled in front of the transfigured woman. Therefore the grotesque setup of Akutagawa and Tanijaki’s novels acts as a factor that they pursued the art-for-art and the love-of-beauty literature. It is difficult to say that Akutagawa and Tanijaki’s two texts characterize the overall aspect of the Japanese grotesque but each work takes a very important role of the grotesque literature connected from the old faith that words have a mysterious power to the modern animation considering on characteristics of Akutagawa and Tanijaki’s the anti-natural, the art-of-art and the love-of-beauty literature.

Akutagawa Ryunosuke, Tanizaki Junichiro, Grotesque, Rashomon, Shisei