Recent Reading: Short Stories & Novellas

Cogwheels [1927] by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa – ★★★★

This short story is one of the last ones that Akutagawa wrote before his tragic death, and it certainly feels very personal and autobiographical (especially with its hints on depression and anxiety). In this story, our narrator, a famous writer, is invited to Tokyo to attend a wedding of his acquaintance. What follows is his running around Tokyo in a slowly increasing feverish delirium, as his mind starts drawing all sorts of unlikely parallels. Interestingly, I found many thematic similarities between this short story and the one above by Daphne du Maurier (Don’t Look Now). Both stories concern themselves with narrators that think they are close to madness, eerie premonitions, nightmarish visions and unsettling coincidences.

The Country of the Blind [1904] by H. G. Wells – ★★★★

“In the Country of the Blind, the One-Eyed Man is King“. Deep in Ecuador’s Andes, there lies one mysterious land of the blind. Its people are afflicted by one terrible and common-to-all disease – inexplicable blindness, even though the valley itself…”has in it all that the heart of man could desire – sweet water, pasture, and even climate…” One seeing man, Nunez (nicknamed “Bogota”), then comes to this strange kingdom and the consequences of his visit surprise even him. Wells was probably influenced in some way by the mysterious Inca civilisation, who seemingly had no writing system to speak of, apart from knot-records, and whose architecture/building capabilities still astonishes many. The people in the story are cut off from the outside world and has no notion of sight whatsoever (“there is no such thing as “see”), living in a superstitious belief that the end of their rocks is also the end of the world. This classic tale takes a horrific turn, and could also be read as a powerful satire on the humanity’s guidance by limited knowledge and on the sheer power of conformity.

The Veldt [1950] by Ray Bradbury – ★★★★

This short sci-fi story from the author of Fahrenheit 451 [1953] is all to do with the advances in modern technology and what horrors these may bring in future to families. In distant future, George and Lydia Hadley is a happily married couple with two highly strung children, Peter and Wendy. They installed a new nursery at their “self-sustaining” home with reality-generating technology whereby a room may appear as though it opens to real worlds with no barrier between the viewer and the scenery. This function soon proves to be too realistic for its owners, while the children’s addiction to their nursery grows. This sounds like one of those “domestic horrors” which Ira Levin (The Stepford Wives) could have penned as well, and Bradbury undoubtedly wanted to show how humans may feel “redundant” in future and what could be the consequences of a home entertainment technology taking over one’s home and family life. This story may be short, but it is impactful, especially since it was written in 1950.