A rich, heavy-drinking man known for his prodigious wine consumption arranges to be cured by a strange mountain priest reputed for unconventional healing methods. The man is instructed to strip naked, lie motionless in a scorched open field, and be bound with a cord while an unglazed jar of wine is placed beside him, forming part of the ritual. Alongside two other onlookers—a scholarly companion who has accompanied him and an eccentric priest—the man endures the searing heat and the relentless discomfort of sweat and rising thirst under the blazing sun. As the treatment progresses, the man suffers intense physical distress. The oppressive heat and his immobilization cause severe pain, dizziness, and dehydration. Amid his agony, he experiences a disturbing sensation in his throat; a soft, writhing mass creeps upward, eventually emerging forcefully in the form of a small, salamander-like creature that leaps into the jar of wine. This expelled creature, described as a worm with a flesh-colored, almost cinnabar hue, is taken by the assembled witnesses as the physical manifestation of the so-called “wine worm.” Following the procedure, the man abruptly ceases his former habit of heavy drinking. Although the expulsion of the worm is hailed as a cure by the mountain priest, its removal ushers in a slow but inexorable decline in the man’s health and fortune. Once prosperous and robust, he quickly deteriorates into a frail figure with sallow, wasted features, his former wealth squandered and his identity seemingly diminished in the process. The narrative ultimately suggests that the worm may have been integral to the man’s very nature. Three interpretations are posited regarding the true significance of the worm: one view holds that the worm was a blessing, and its removal was a deliberate but tragic loss; a contrasting perspective argues that the worm was the source of the man’s excesses and that its extraction, though seemingly curing him, merely postponed his inevitable decline; a third interpretation asserts that the man and the worm were one and the same, so that expelling the worm was tantamount to exterminating himself. The work employs vivid descriptions of scorching weather, a barren, motionless landscape, and the physically taxing process of the cure to underscore themes of self-destruction, identity loss, and the paradoxical consequences of abandoning a defining aspect of one’s character. It offers a critique on the dangers of extreme indulgence by suggesting that the cure for an excess may, in essence, strip away the very qualities that once sustained one’s life.
By Akutagawa Ryūnosuke · First published 1920 · Genre: Satire, Allegory, Magical Realism