Yam Gruel

4 Pages 908 Words

Yam Gruel by Ryunosuke Akutagawa
Commentary

The story “Yam Gruel” is about a man under the name of Goi, who is supposedly so ordinary that he’s name was not even recorded for any relevance to this story. This story is set in the Heian Period, during the time of courtiers. He was just a plain, simple man, frequently ridiculed by other samurai and disrespected by commoners because of his “red nose” and plain manner of clothing. Now, one may wonder where the title of this story was taken from. Well, it was taken from Goi’s obsession of yam gruel, which is a special, very expensive delicacy consisting of yam and a rare root. Samurais of his status can only attain this type of delicacy one day out of the entire year at a special celebration in which is everyone is invited therefore the portion of one’s yam gruel is barely enough to attain satiety. At the celebration of Fujiwara Mototsune, Fujiwara, a very wealthy man, overheard Goi say that he hadn’t had enough yam gruel and decided to invite him over to his mansion to eat as much yam gruel as he wanted, which Goi agreed to of course which everyone teased and laughed about. So of the two went and traveled to Fujiwara’s place for the principle of satisfying Goi’s graving of yam gruel. They travel so far just for the sake of satisfying Goi’s cravings of yam gruel once and for all. However, when they finally traveled all that distance and the servants went to so much travel acquiring and preparing the yam gruel, Goi lost his desire to eat it and so he only ate a little portion of the entire amount that was prepared and the rest was given a the fox, the messenger who sent word to Fujiwara’s mansion to send men to meet them.

Now this story may seem a bit silly but it’s deeper than it seems. You see, all his life Goi wanted to satisfy his craving of yam gruel, that was the only objective he seemed to have in life, in his simple, common life. He thought that b...