Product Description

Ryünosuke Akutagawa (1892-1927) is one of Japan’s foremost stylists - a modernist master whose short stories are marked by highly original imagery, cynicism, beauty and wild humour. ‘Rashömon’ and ‘In a Bamboo Grove’ inspired Kurosawa’s magnificent film and depict a past in which morality is turned upside down, while tales such as ‘The Nose’, ‘O-Gin’ and ‘Loyalty’ paint a rich and imaginative picture of a medieval Japan peopled by Shoguns and priests, vagrants and peasants. And in later works such as ‘Death Register’, ‘The Life of a Stupid Man’ and ‘Spinning Gears’, Akutagawa drew from his own life to devastating effect, revealing his intense melancholy and terror of madness in exquisitely moving impressionistic stories.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #6398 in Books
• Published on: 2006-03-30
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 320 pages

The New York Times
In the spare, textured prose of these six short stories, [Akutagawa] brings us clear-eyed glimpses of human behavior.

From the Publisher
A Liveright book.

About the Author
Akutagawa Ryunosuke, short-story writer, poet, and essayist, one of the first Japanese modernists translated into English. He was born in Tokyo in 1892, and began writing for student publications at the age of ten. He graduated from Tokyo University in 1916 with an English Literature degree and worked as a teacher before becoming a full time writer in 1919. His mother had gone mad suddenly just months after his birth and he was plagued by fear of inherited insanity all his life. He killed himself in 1927. Haruki Murakami (Introducer) has written eleven novels, eight volumes of short stories and numerous works of non-fiction, as well as translating much American literature into Japanese. His most famous novels are Norwegian Wood, The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, and Kafka on the Shore. Jay Rubin (Translator) has translated several of Murakami's works into English and is also the author of Haruki Murakami and the Music of Words. He has been professor of Japanese Literature at the Universities of Washington and Harvard.

Customer Reviews

A troubled & troubling world, but a fascinating one
Just to avoid any potential confusion, it should be noted that there are two separate volumes containing a selection of Akutagawa's shorter fiction in English translation, both entitled "Rashomon and Other Stories". Firstly, there is a slender but excellent volume of six tales translated by Takashi Kojima, originally published in 1952 but reissued in 1999. This contains the bulk of Akutagawa's most widely known and most accessible short stories: as well as the title story, the selection includes "In a Bamboo Grove", "Dragon", "The Martyr", "Yam Gruel" and "Kesa and Morito".

Secondly, there is a more recent and much more comprehensive collection of eighteen short stories translated by Jay Rubin, and issued as a very handsome Penguin Modern Classics edition in 2006 with a fascinating introduction by Japanese literary lion Haruki Murakami, as well as copious background notes by the translator. Again we get the popular Heian Period tales "Rashomon", "In a Bamboo Grove" and "Dragon", but also the chilling "Hell Screen" - arguably Akutagawa's masterpiece. Then there is a group of three unexpectedly moving tales set around war-torn seventeenth-century Nagasaki, including the surprisingly touching story "O-Gin" involving failed (or is it failed?) martyrdom. Another fascinating collection of three stories under the heading of "Modern Tragi-Comedy" shows that Akutagawa was capable of surprising (though admittedly dark) comedy: try the touching but determinedly anti-romantic "Green Onions", for instance. Finally, a collection of six autobiographical tales gives us very different perspectives on Akutagawa's own life, from childhood to his tortured, barbiturate-addicted twilight years before his eventual suicide. Two of these, both posthumous manuscripts, are utterly fascinating and unsettling, both in terms of style and content: "The Life of a Stupid Man", which consists of 51 short, hallucinatory, almost haiku-like episodes which must make up one of the shortest but most effective autobiographies ever written; and the haunted confessional "Spinning Gears", written just before Akutagawa's suicide, in which his disintegrating mind starts to see portents and supernatural connections everywhere around him, all pointing him towards the grave - the really unsettling aspect of this is that the reader obviously knows that this would become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

"Hell Screen", the other long vision of hell in this collection, makes a good contrast: written at the absolute height of Akutagawa's powers, it is a stylistic triumph, and powerfully communicates his pessimistic view of human nature in its depiction of an artist who is prepared to sacrifice everything and everyone he loves to his art, and his nobleman patron who is equally ruthless and inhuman, with perhaps the most movingly "human" part in the tale being given to a pet monkey.

Although Akutagawa's vision was unquestionably a dark one, both collections show his lighter, more humorous side too. The Penguin Modern Classics collection probably has the edge in terms of comprehensiveness, but Akutagawa's stories are surprisingly habit-forming, and readers may well find themselves wanting to acquire both volumes.

Lucid Rubin translation of brilliant Akutagawa pieces with introduction by Murakami
After having read the late important work, Kappa, recently, I came away with the impression that Akutagawa was a writer whose work is both hard to read and possibly incoherent - incoherent to me, at least. Kappa me seemed an inferior Gulliver's Travels, and most of the time I just couldn't work out what the author was trying to say. Was it just nonsense?

This volume of short pieces has changed my mind. Maybe it's the translation, maybe not. The duty this time has fallen to Jay Rubin, translator of many of Haruki Murakami's novels into English. These are all new Rubin translations, many of them translated into English here for the first time. These pieces are lucid and easy to read, but not similar enough to the translations of Murakami to make me think Rubin is merely imposing his own style on these texts. Unless the text was difficult when originally published, there is no reason to translate older texts from one language into an archaic version of a second language. When these texts were written, though they were full of obscure (to the Japanese at least) Western references, they were in natural Japanese. The translations, accordingly, should be in natural English. Rubin also surprises in his amazingly learned, insightful introduction and his copious, illuminating notes.

It maybe the subject matter rather than the translation which makes this an altogether different read than Kappa. Kappa is a flight of fantasy, albeit with a serious allegorical purpose. These texts are all, more or less, ground in reality. There is a section of tales about old Japan. Two of these, Rashomon and In the Bamboo Grove, both vivid and thought-provoking tales, formed the basis of Kurosawa's famous 1950s film. Other tales in this genre are highly comical (see The Nose, an adaptation of an old folk tale appearing in a much more original state in Royall Tyler's edition of old Japanese tales, published by Pantheon). Hell Screen is a much more organised story dealing with the sacrifices an artist makes for his work.

The last section features works that, when pieced together in this way, form an autobiographical narrative of Akutagawa's (tortured) life. Rubin wisely includes the caveat that the autobiographical value of these pieces should be taken with a pinch of salt. The standout piece here, and in the whole book, is Spinning Gears. Written and set in the final weeks of Akutagawa's life, the piece is a paranoid descent into hell that is, despite it's melancholy subject matter, immensely readable. You can see how suicide closely followed: there is no other route for Akutagawa to take by this stage. His closing plea for somebody to be kind enough to strangle him in his sleep is upsetting and at the same time reasonable.

This edition also benefits from a candid introduction by Murakami himself. Interestingly, Murakami rates Akutagawa as his third favourite of the great early C20 Japanese writers, after Soseki and Tanizaki.

I think that Akutagawa bears some similarity to Murakami, but whereas Murakami shines in his novels, Akutagawa never managed to sustain a narrative this far. If we are to go by this volume, though, his work is singular and of immense literary value.

Excellence
This book is a collection of short stories written by the eminent Japanese author, Ryunosuke Akutagawa (1892-1927). These six stories tend to revolve around moral ambiguities. 1) In A Grove is the story of a murder, whose witnesses all tell different, often mutually exclusive stories. 2) Rashomon is the story of a discharged servant who must choose between death and a life of crime and dishonor. 3) Yam Gruel tells the story of Goi, a samurai whose life falls to pieces as he dreams of the rare delicacy yam gruel, and who finds that having is not always as wonderful as wanting. 4) The Martyr reaches back to the 16th Century, to tell the story of a model Christian young man, who is excommunicated when he refuses to recognize a child attributed to him, but the truth he hides is not what everyone thinks. 5) Kesa And Morito is a tale of lust and betrayal. 6) The Dragon is the story of Hanazo, or priest who sets out to play a joke, but learns the power of belief.

These stories are quite varied from each other, and all are excellently written. In A Grove is confusing (as is life), while Rashomon is somewhat depressing, and The Martyr is uplifting. But, all the stories are excellently written, and quite interesting. I highly recommend this book.

To demonstrate the excellence of these stories, let me submit to you the following line from The Martyr: "For the sublimity of life culminates in the most precious moment of inspiration. Man will make his life worth living, if he tosses a wave aloft high into the starry sky, o'er life's dark main of worldly cares, to mirror in its crystal foam the light of the moon yet to rise."