A Study of Akutagawa Ryunosuke’s “Shigo”：Focused on ‘my’ Afterlife in the World of the Dream

Abstract

Akutagawa Ryunosuke’s “Shigo” depicts ‘my’ afterlife as a return to the real world through a dream to meet ‘my’ remarried wife and friend S. Typically, “Shigo” has been read as an illustration of Freud’s theory that a dream is the fulfillment of desires and a passage to the unconscious. Therefore, in relation to this novel the focus has been on ‘my’ dream, not on ‘me’. However, as you can guess from the title of the work “Shigo”, which means “After Death”, the author’s main focus is not only the dream world, but also ‘my’ existence after death. It seems that the world of the afterlife has not yet been sufficiently considered in relation to the novel. For example, there is the question of why ‘my’ wife and friend S treat ‘me’ in the usual way, even while they recognize that ‘I’ have died. Ultimately, the question of why the dream is used to depict the afterlife has not yet been clarified. Therefore, in this paper, I will attempt a new reading of this work by re-examining the details of the dream world and the posthumous world of ‘me’, which have not been fully discussed in previous analysis.