Work Guide · 2026-05-06 · Reading time ~ 7 min
Akutagawa's Final Letter — A 1927 Note to an Old Friend
Just before his suicide in July 1927, Akutagawa Ryūnosuke wrote a memoir-letter to an unnamed old friend. The phrase 'a vague anxiety' marked the end of an era. Read in Korean on Pagera.
Pagera Editorial
"A vague anxiety about some future." With one phrase, an era closed. On 24 July 1927, Akutagawa Ryūnosuke ended his life at 35 with a fatal dose of sleeping pills. Among his last texts is "A Memoir to an Old Friend" (或旧友へ送る手記).
A Suicide Note That Isn't Quite a Suicide Note
The form is unusual. The recipient is "an old friend" — unnamed, generic. The content is unmistakably an analysis of the writer's own death. Private letter and public self-diagnosis at once. Akutagawa wanted to set down, in prose as cool as he could keep it, how a person who has decided to die looks at himself.
The piece was published posthumously, marked at its end "(Showa 2, July, posthumous manuscript)."
"A Vague Anxiety" — The Line That Defined a Generation
The diagnosis comes in one sentence: "The motive for my suicide is a vague anxiety about some future." Not poverty, not heartbreak, not illness — only an indistinct shadow cast forward.
The phrase took on outsized weight in Japanese letters. The transition from the late Taishō era into early Shōwa carried a wider shift in mood, and Akutagawa's three Japanese words named that shift more precisely than any cultural diagnosis since. Critics later wrote that "Taishō ended with Akutagawa's death," and pointed to this single line as the marker.
The Eight-Movement Structure
The text is short but tightly arranged. Roughly eight sections, in this order:
- No one has ever written honestly about a suicide's psychology — the opening provocation, attributing the gap to suicides' own self-defense.
- Two years of thinking only of death — the chronic state.
- The search for a painless method — drowning, gunshot, hanging considered and rejected; pills chosen.
- The family — guilt toward wife and children, but "not sufficient reason to stop."
- Society and the era — the English word Inhuman dropped untranslated into the Japanese.
- Strindberg, Mayer — solidarity with other suicides among writers.
- A last note on friendship — meeting a prostitute who took her "wages" (賃金!) and feeling, in that exchange, an unexpected human warmth.
- The closing — "If you wish to print this memoir — you may print it."
"Wages (!)" — The Sharpest Word in the Text
The single most cutting word in the memoir is "賃金(!)" — wages, with the exclamation mark Akutagawa himself supplies. He calls a prostitute's payment "wages," the same word used for honest labor, and italicizes it with that punctuation mark. In one stroke he names the hypocrisy of the social order, the truth of work, and his own contradictory recognition of human warmth in that very transaction.
"Iitawaru" — To Tend, to Care For
Another striking word: itawaru (劬る), used for the feeling Akutagawa wants to direct toward his family at the end. To pity, to tend, to care for. That a man writing his last prose still reaches for tenderness — not regret, not despair — gives the memoir a register entirely unlike a generic suicide note.
Why It Still Reads
The piece does not romanticize or justify suicide. It is a rare first-person attempt to document the mental circuitry of someone who has decided to die — written as honestly and as analytically as the writer could manage in his final weeks. That is why it is still cited, almost a century on, in psychiatry, suicidology, and literary criticism alike.
Read "A Memoir to an Old Friend" in Korean on Pagera.