鼻 — is the monk's obsession with his nose meant to be comedic, tragic, or both?

Question

鼻 by 芥川龍之介 — 禅智内供 spends the whole story anxious about his long nose, finally gets it shortened, and then is MORE miserable because people now laugh at him differently. Is the tone supposed to land as dark comedy, or is it a straight tragedy about vanity/self-consciousness that just happens to have an absurd premise?

Accepted Answer

Both, deliberately — Akutagawa is using an absurd, almost comic premise (a monk fixated on nose length) to make a very sincere point about human nature: that other people's reactions to our flaws matter to us more than the flaws themselves, and that even 'fixing' the problem doesn't fix the underlying insecurity, because the real issue was never really the nose. The comedy is the delivery mechanism, but the theme underneath (what the narrator calls 傍観者の利己主義, the selfishness of bystanders enjoying others' misfortune) is completely serious.