The Nose

The basic premise of Ryūnosuke Akutagawa’s “The Nose”—a Buddhist priest with an outlandishly large nose who undergoes a grotesque procedure to shorten it—is inherently humorous, if not utterly absurd. While the third-person narrator maintains a neutral tone, the humor emerges from the details, such as the wooden slat used to hold up Zenchi Naigu’s nose during meals, and the revolting globs of fat that his disciple extracts from the appendage during the procedure. The neutrality of the narrative voice highlights the seriousness with which Zenchi treats his own condition; others may laugh at it, but he is incapable of laughing at himself.

The third-person narrator attends closely to Zenchi’s inner monologue throughout the story, allowing the contradictions of the priest’s character, as well as his moments of self-delusion, to pass without explicit commentary. The opposition between external appearance and inner conditions functions as the central axis of the tale. However, this is not a case of a simple binary opposition where Zenchi’s authentic identity can be pinned down. In other words, this is not a story about a particularly vain priest, nor is it one about the process of coming to accept the inner self as more authentic than appearances. If Zenchi must come to terms with any truth about himself, it is the fact that his appearance is central to his identity, whether he likes it or not, and that there are aspects of his self that are not under his control.

The residents of Ike-no-o use the phrase “Zenchi Naigu’s nose” as a kind of shorthand: “[E]veryone […] knew what you were talking about” (52). Significantly, however, the content of this apparently common knowledge—the “what” that the villagers are talking about—remains unarticulated. On the most basic level, the “what” is, of course, the nose itself. The narrator describes it as “[u]niform in thickness from base to tip […] like a sausage dangling down from the middle of his lip” (52)—a sausage or, perhaps, an elephant’s trunk or a phallus. Yet, the narrator suggests that the nose’s appearance is only part of what people mean when they talk about it. The villagers of Ike-no-o deliberately prioritize some shared attitude about the nose over Zenchi’s wisdom or his place in Buddhist hierarchies—that is, the meanings that are explicitly denoted by his name.

Zenchi’s nose thus functions as an open secret, drawing attention to itself while also concealing its meaning—for both the villagers and for the priest himself. It is a part of his body that both does and does not belong to him, in the sense that it has a life of its own in the public discourse of Ike-no-o. His frustration with the assumption that he became a priest because his nose made him unattractive to women further indexes his sense that his own reputation is beyond his control. The best he can do is pretend to be beyond worrying about his nose, but the more he pretends not to worry about his nose, the more paranoid he becomes that the wrong person will figure out how much he does care.

Zenchi’s inability to control people’s responses to his nose and the meanings they give to it, as well as his own sense of being at the mercy of his appearance, undermines his sense of self-possession, leading to his desire to conceal “the harm it was doing to his self-esteem” (53). Given the story’s Buddhist elements, however, the problem is not that Zenchi’s self-esteem is suffering but that he has attributed too much reality to the existence of a self. Indeed, one of the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism—and one of the central themes of “The Nose”—is the idea of The Self as the Source of Suffering. The fact that, in this story, the ego is embodied as an absurdly phallic and hugely inconvenient facial protuberance introduces a second theme, namely, The Role of Irony in the Pursuit of Enlightenment.

Zenchi’s early attempts to minimize his nose foreground the idea that the self is the source of suffering. When he is in a crowd of people or reading literary and sacred texts, he suffers from a kind of confirmation bias that leads him to fixate on noses at the expense of anything else. Thus, he not only essentializes his own identity, feeling that his nose is the one thing that sets him apart from others, but also the identity of others, in his belief that finding just one other person with a similar appearance, living or textual, would alleviate his suffering.

Indeed, after a very short period of relief that his nose is now closer to being normal, Zenchi experiences a great deal of turmoil and even more paranoia about being recognized. The narrator suggests that his “inner malaise” is a way of registering the “spectator’s egoism” of others (57). The narrator theorizes that, as much as people tend to sympathize when others experience challenges, they are disappointed when those others are able to overcome those challenges, and that disappointment can turn to resentment—the resentment that Zenchi now feels, without being able to articulate its cause.

Much remains ambiguous at the end of the story, including the mechanism through which Zenchi’s nose regenerates itself. Whether he has fully escaped the “spectator’s egoism” of those around him also remains unexplored, since the story closes with his assumption that, now that his nose has returned to its original shape, he will no longer be laughed at. The irony of the situation, however, is clear: His nose was the thing that had provoked laughter in the first place, or so he thought.