Akutagawa Ryūnosuke was one of the first prewar Japanese writers to achieve a wide foreign readership, partly because of his technical virtuosity, partly because his work seemed to represent imaginative fiction as opposed to the mundane accounts of the I-novelists of the time, partly because of his brilliant joining of traditional material to a modern sensibility, and partly because of film director Kurosawa Akira's masterful adaptation of two of his short stories for the screen.

Akutagawa was born in the Kyōbashi district Tokyo as the eldest son of a dairy operator named Shinbara Toshizō and his wife Fuku. He was named "Ryūnosuke" ("Dragon Offshoot") because he was born in the Year of the Dragon, in the Month of the Dragon, on the Day of the Dragon, and at the Hour of the Dragon (8 a.m.). Seven months after Akutagawa's birth, his mother went insane and he was adopted by her older brother, taking the Akutagawa family name. Despite the shadow this experience cast over Akutagawa's life, he benefited from the traditional literary atmosphere of his uncle's home, located in what had been the "downtown" section of Edo.

At school Akutagawa was an outstanding student, excelling in the Chinese classics. He entered the First High School in 1910, striking up relationships with such classmates as Kikuchi Kan, Kume Masao, Yamamoto Yūzō, and Tsuchiya Bunmei. Immersing himself in Western literature, he increasingly came to look for meaning in art rather than in life. In 1913, he entered Tokyo Imperial University, majoring in English literature. The next year, Akutagawa and his former high school friends revived the journal Shinshichō (New Currents of Thought), publishing translations of William Butler Yeats and Anatole France along with original works of their own. Akutagawa published the story Rashōmon in the magazine Teikoku bungaku (Imperial Literature) in 1915. The story, which went largely unnoticed, grew out of the egoism Akutagawa confronted after experiencing disappointment in love. The same year, Akutagawa started going to the meetings held every Thursday at the house of Natsume Sōseki, and thereafter considered himself Sōseki's disciple.

The lapsed Shinshichō was revived yet again in 1916, and Sōseki lavished praise on Akutagawa's story Hana (The Nose) when it appeared in the first issue of that magazine. After graduating from Tokyo University, Akutagawa earned a reputation as a highly skilled stylist whose stories reinterpreted classical works and historical incidents from a distinctly modern standpoint. His overriding themes became the ugliness of human egoism and the value of art, themes that received expression in a number of brilliant, tightly organized short stories conventionally categorized as Edo-mono (stories set in the Edo period), ōchō-mono (stories set in the Heian period), Kirishitan-mono (stories dealing with premodern Christians in Japan), and kaika-mono (stories of the early Meiji period). The Edo-mono include Gesaku zanmai (A Life Devoted to Gesaku, 1917) and Kareno-shō (Gleanings from a Withered Field, 1918); the ōchō-mono are perhaps best represented by Jigoku hen (Hell Screen, 1918); the Kirishitan-mono include Hokōnin no shi (The Death of a Christian, 1918), and kaika-mono include Butōkai (The Ball, 1920).

Akutagawa married Tsukamoto Fumiko in 1918 and the following year left his post as English instructor at the naval academy in Yokosuka, becoming an employee of the Mainichi Shinbun. This period was a productive one, as has already been noted, and the success of stories like Mikan (Mandarin Oranges, 1919) and Aki (Autumn, 1920) prompted him to turn his attention increasingly to modern materials. This, along with the introspection occasioned by growing health and nervous problems, resulted in a series of autobiographically-based stories known as Yasukichi-mono, after the name of the main character. Works such as Daidōji Shinsuke no hansei (The Early Life of Daidōji Shinsuke, 1925) and Tenkibo (Death Register, 1926) also partake of this introspective mode. It has been speculated that the difficulty Akutagawa had reconciling his formal artistic impulses with this confessional approach contributed to the "vague uneasiness" that clouded the last part of his life. This sense of desperation is reflected in such works as Kappa (1927) and the essay Bungeiteki na, amari ni bungeiteki na (Literary, Much Too Literary, 1927). Akutagawa killed himself at his home in Tokyo by taking an overdose of sleeping medicine, an act that does not seem to have come as a surprise to those who knew him well, despite the general sensation it created. Among his posthumous manuscripts were Aru ahō no isshō (A Fool's Life) and Haguruma (Cogwheels), the latter of which may indeed (as Donald Keene remarks in his literary history) be his masterpiece.

Akutagawa's longtime friend, Kikuchi Kan, established the Akutagawa Prize in 1935 to help keep the writer's memory alive. In this he succeeded admirably, for now the Akutagawa Prize is the literary award most coveted by new writers. It might also be noted that for the past twenty years Akutagawa has been the author most frequently represented in textbooks for Japanese high school students.

• Autumn Wind and Other Stories. Trans. Lane Dunlop. Rutland, Vt.: Charles E. Tuttle, 1994.
• Cogwheels. Trans. Cid Corman and Susumu Kamaike. Hygiene, Colo.: Eridanos Press, 1987.
• Eminent Authors of Contemporary Japan. Comp. Eric S. Bell and Eiji Ukai. Tokyo: Kaitakusha 1930-31.
• The Essential Akutagawa. Ed. Seiji Mizuta Lippit. New York: Marsilio Publishers, 1999.
• Exotic Japanese Stories: The Beautiful and the Grotesque. Trans. Takashi Kojima and John McVittie. 1964. New York: Liveright, 1972.
• A Fool's Life. Trans. Will Petersen.1970. Hygiene, Colo.: Eridanos Press, 1987.
• The Heart Is Alone: A Selection of Twentieth Century Japanese Short Stories. Ed. Richard N. McKinnon. Tokyo: Hokuseido, 1957.
• Hell Screen. Trans. Takashi Kojima. Hygiene, Colo.: Eridanos Press, 1987.
• Hell Screen and Other Stories. Trans. W.H.H. Norman. 1952. Westport, Conn: Greenwood Press, 1971.
• Hell Screen, Cogwheels, A Fool's Life. Trans. Will Petersen. New York: Marsilio Publishers, 1988.
• Japanese Literature, New and Old. Trans. Ryozo Matsumoto. Tokyo: Hokuseido, 1961.
• Japanese Short Stories. Trans. Takashi Kojima. 1961. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1970.
• Kappa. Trans. Seiichi Shiojiri. 1949. Tokyo: Hokuseido Press, 1951.
• Kappa. Trans. Geoffrey Bownas. 1971. Boston: Tuttle Publishing, 2001.
• Rashomon and Other Stories. Trans. Takashi Kojima. Tokyo: Charles. E. Tuttle Co., 1952, 1988. New York: Liveright, 1999.
• Rashomon and Other Stories. Trans. Glenn William Shaw. Tokyo: Hara Pub. Co., 1973.
• The Spider's Thread and Other Stories. Trans. Dorothy Britton. Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1987.
• Tales Grotesque and Curious. Trans. Glenn William Shaw. Tokyo: Hokuseido, 1930.
• The Three Treasures and Other Stories for Children. Trans. Takamasa Sasaki. Tokyo: Hokuseido, 1944.
• Tokyo Stories: A Literary Stroll. Ed. Lawrence Rogers. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2002. Contains “Shitamachi” and “The Death Register.”
• Tu Tze-chun. Trans. Dorothy Britton. Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1965.

• Keene, Donald. Dawn to the West. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1984.
• O'Brian, James A., ed. Akutagawa and Dazai: Instances of Literary Adaptation. Cornell University Press, 1983.
• Ueda, Makoto. Modern Japanese Writers and the Nature of Literature. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1976.
• Yu, Beongcheon. Akutagawa: An Introduction. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1972.

 

 

Akutagawa Ryunosuke's 'The Spider Thread': Translation and Commentary: Pretty much as the link states. A paper that was first published in Edogawa Women's Junior College Journal in 1999.

Kicking giants: A brief introduction with (very) short excerpts from two works.

Oto no Volunteers: Audio versions of eight stories, in Japanese, as recorded by a group of volunteers calling themselves the Hayamimi Net. The MP3 files are freely downloadable.

Wabei Translation: Contains translations of 13 short works by Akutagawa.