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｢The Man of the West｣ for Ryunosuke Akutagawa - Focused on a phrase from Ch. 36 “Christ’s Lifetime” - Lim, Hoon-Sik ｢The Man of the West｣, Ryunosuke Akutagawa’s final literary work, is a chronicle of Jesus’ life examined by Akutagawa himself. In Chapter 36, “Christ’s Lifetime”, of this book, there is a contradictory phrase called ascend from the Heaven to the earth. In this thesis, I want to investigate this phrase in order to reveal the correlation between Akutagawa and Jesus in this novel. In the book, Jesus abandoned his own life, and ascended into the Heaven according to an order of the Holy Spirit, which can be said as a travel way from the earth to the Heaven. However, Jesus experiences a transformation afterwards. In other words, in the past, He abandoned the earth, and had proceeded only to the Heaven due to His priority to the Heaven over the earth. In contrast, the conceptual transformation, in which He began to miss the life in the earth, happened afterwards. However, it was merely a transformation of concept only; Jesus’ steps were heading to Heaven. Therefore, we can say that Jesus’ reality was failed to be transformed. I compared Jesus’ such traces with Akutagawa’s lifetime. Most of early and middle periods of Akutagawa’s literary works contain historic novels, including ｢Rashomon｣, essentially his first work. It is especially well-known that the ｢Hell Screen｣ nicely presents his artistic view, “art for art’s sake”. His such artistic attitude was a process only to achieve his idealistic goal, the creation of an art, by caring less about his own life. However, Akutagawa’s firm belief on art began to falter from 1919, and he reflected on himself about his writing only historic novels until that time. Hence, he wrote ｢Autumn｣ in 1920 as a modern novel but his transformation from writing historic novel to modern one was not successful. It can be noted that Akutagawa’s such traces are similar to Jesus’ in ｢The Man of the West｣. As we know from the examination so far, Akutagawa’s concept toward the Jesus was expressed in such a contradictory phrase. In other words, such phrase is a “summed” expression of combining before and after of conceptual transformation in “Christ’s Lifetime”. Ultimately, Akutagawa identified his lifetime with Jesus’ in the 36th chapter, “Christ’s Lifetime”.