Pride, cruelty, self-interest, and conflicting accounts of events.
Ryūnosuke Akutagawa (1892–1927) was a Japanese short story writer. He began publishing while studying English literature at Tokyo Imperial University. His story “The Nose,” published in 1916, received praise from the novelist Natsume Sōseki. After graduation, he taught English at a naval engineering school before joining the Osaka Mainichi Shimbun newspaper in 1919.
Akutagawa often adapted older Japanese and Chinese tales to examine pride, cruelty, and self-interest. “Rashōmon” follows a dismissed servant considering how he will survive. “Hell Screen” concerns a painter commissioned to depict the torments of hell. In “In a Grove,” witnesses give conflicting accounts of a killing. His stories frequently leave motives uncertain and show how people explain or excuse their own actions.
From a quick encounter to a longer story.
In a ruined Kyoto gate, a hungry servant encounters a stranger whose desperate act forces him to decide what survival permits.
A moonlit song outside a village house becomes the first chapter in a legend about Japan’s shape-shifting badgers.
A Buddhist priest’s determined campaign to shorten his extraordinary nose brings him the attention he thought he wanted, and also a new humiliation.
On a crowded war-bound ship in 1864, a plague of lice gives two samurai factions something more urgent to fight about.
Years after leaving school, a former pupil remembers the aging English teacher his class turned into an object of relentless laughter.
Wounded in a cavalry clash during the Sino-Japanese War, a Chinese soldier rides alone through the Manchurian fields with death suddenly close.
At Tokyo’s dazzling Rokumeikan ball in 1886, a seventeen-year-old Japanese woman dances for the first time with a visiting French naval officer.
A university professor receives a bereaved mother whose composed manner appears to embody the ideal he has made of Japanese restraint.
A powerful daimyo’s magnificent gold pipe is the perfect emblem of status—until court attendants discover they can simply ask for one.
From Paradise, the Buddha offers a single spider’s thread to a robber suffering at the bottom of Hell.
A Chinese landowner who can drink without ever growing drunk submits to an eccentric monk’s treatment for the creature said to live inside him.
When a devil disguised as a missionary plants a mysterious crop in sixteenth-century Japan, one cattle dealer makes a wager to learn its name.
Impoverished in Tang-dynasty Loyang, Tu Tzuchun is offered a second fortune by an enigmatic old man—but begins to want something different.
