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영어

The Spider’s Thread, Ryunosuke Akutagawa’s first fairy tale, was published in the first edition of “The Red Bird”, a magazine intended for children. This work was written based upon The Spider Web, which was printed in the Japanese translation of “Karma” by Paul Carus. The preceded studies about this work regarded the main theme of this work as Kandata’s selfishness caused by his , which was the reason Kandata fell back to hell. However, if we take a closer look on this work, as one can notice from the expression, Kandata’s “this precious self”, rather Kandata’s arrogance seems to be the original reason of his fall to hell. Meanwhile, descending the spider’s thread to hell in order to save Kandata was Buddha’s dogmatic behavior despite Kandata did not repent at all. This means that since Buddha was so boring, in order to relieve his tediousness, he chose Kandata as a mean of cajolement; this part is implied in Buddha’s behavior in the Paradise, which does not appear in The Spider Web. After all, this study revealed that Buddha’s this kind of behavior reflects Akutagawa’s view of “spectator’s egoism”.