Ryūnosuke Akutagawa

Ryūnosuke Akutagawa (1892–1927) was the Japanese writer who made the short story one of the defining forms of Taishō-era literature. Born in Tokyo, he began publishing while studying English literature at Tokyo Imperial University; “The Nose” won praise from Natsume Sōseki and established him in the literary world. After graduation he taught English at the Naval Engineering College, then left in 1919 to write full time for the Osaka Mainichi Shimbun.

Akutagawa often took plots from classical Japanese and Chinese tales and recast them as precise, psychologically unsettled studies of vanity, cruelty, faith, and moral uncertainty. “Rashōmon,” “Hell Screen,” and “In a Grove” place modern anxieties inside historical settings, while his later autobiographical work became more exposed and fragmented. His compressed style and shifting points of view helped define modern Japanese short fiction, and the Akutagawa Prize still bears his name.