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she has not the courage to kill herself. Such complexities of modern psychology undoubtedly gave new life to the old tale, though they were hardly faithful to the spirit of the original. Unlike Mori and Tanizaki, who moved from West to East, Akutagawa, after beginning his career with stories drawn from the old collections, ended it with autobiographical fiction little marked by Eastern themes.
The cases of Mori Ōgai, Tanizaki Jun’ichirô, and Akutagawa Ryûnosuke represent three possible resolutions of the conflict between the traditional literature and Western influence. Even a man as devoted to Japanese ideals as Mori could not pretend after he had been exposed to the techniques and intelligence of Western literature that he wrote like a novelist of a hundred years before. But the distinction between East and West was rapidly becoming blurred, even in the mind of a man as sensitive as Tanizaki. In his novel The Makioka Sisters, the most Japanese of the sisters shows to her best advantage in Western clothes and is fond of playing the piano; on the other hand, the sister who is condemned for her excessively un-Japanese ways is a skilled performer of the traditional dances. The two worlds have become inseparably mingled.
