The city of Tokyo achieved a great leap with its foundation in the science and technology, after the Great Kanto Earthquake. There, from 1920s to 1930, what flowered was modern city culture as is revealed "general public", "consumption", "new media", "mode" and so on. Under these circumstances, "Haguruma"(="The cogwheel"), which is one of the most famous works of Ryunosuke Akutagawa, was published as his post-humous work. The elements which indeed symbolize modern city culture in those days are inlaid in the text of this work.
In this paper, I stated some of the characteristics of city space which may be imagined from the text by extracting and analyzing expressions which concern modern city culture in "Haguruma". It may be summarized as follows. Concrete things and the space called the city composed by them both have their substance reduced to nothingness with only the functions of "the city", "anonymity", momentary "transformation" remaing. Therefore, on the point of function, either "substitution", or "the exchange" is possible in them, which appear in the text irrespective of context. Also, the empty aspect of the meaning produced in them are given meaning by the work of consciousness based on the hero's "association" and are dragged into his context. Therefore, the city space which appears in "Haguruma" is very much subjective.
As for these characteristics, they strongly express all of the aspects of city modernism at that time. In the debate on modernist literature, "fast change", "undecidedness" and "surface" are treated as characteristics of the moderm itself. However, this invites confusion since the meaning of "subject" is smothered. In this sense, "Haguruma" has an interesting position. To examine this work from the point of view of modernism is a problem for the future.