The most famous film ever made from Ryūnosuke Akutagawa’s work takes its title and setting from one story and its entire plot from another, and almost nobody knows this.
Kurosawa’s Rashōmon gave English the phrase “the Rashomon effect” and made Japanese cinema visible in the West. The gate, the rain and the title come from “Rashōmon”. The contradictory testimonies that everyone actually means come from “In a Grove”, written seven years later. That confusion is a fair introduction to the Ryūnosuke Akutagawa books, which are about a hundred and fifty short stories, no novels, and a persistent argument that the surface arrangement of the world is a story somebody is telling rather than a description of what happened. The full canon is ranked on my best Japanese novels list. The author index lives on my Japanese authors hub.
His mother lost her mind when he was seven months old. He spent the remaining thirty-five years of his life expecting the same thing, and did not wait for it to finish. He died in July 1927, leaving a note describing what he called a vague unease about his future.
The Akutagawa Prize, the country’s front door for new writers, is named for him. This covers which Ryūnosuke Akutagawa books exist in English, which edition to buy, and where to start.
Start here
“In a Grove” and then “Rashōmon”, in that order, then watch the Kurosawa. Between them they take forty minutes and they are the best short lesson in adaptation available in any language.
“Hell Screen” if you came here from horror. It is the reason his name appears alongside Kyōka and Ranpo and it is missing from most lists of his work.
Kappa if you want a whole book rather than stories, and know that it was written months before his death and reads like it.
Do not start with the late autobiographical work. It is the best thing he wrote and it assumes you already know what happened to him.
Rashōmon and In a Grove
羅生門 Rashōmon · 1915 · 藪の中 Yabu no Naka · 1922 · translated by Jay Rubin · English 2006
“Rashōmon” is five pages. A dismissed servant shelters under a ruined gate in a ruined Kyoto, finds an old woman pulling hair from the corpses stacked in the upper story, and listens to her explain why she is entitled to. It is about the exact moment a person decides morality is a luxury he can no longer afford.
“In a Grove” is the one people mean. A samurai is found dead in a wood, and seven accounts follow: a woodcutter, a priest, a policeman, an old woman, the bandit, the wife, and finally the dead man speaking through a medium. Every account is internally coherent. None can be reconciled with the others.
Akutagawa supplies no resolution and no authorial view, and he does not hint at one. That was startling in 1922 and it has been imitated more or less continuously since, usually with an author who cannot resist telling you which version was true.
Hell Screen
地獄変 Jigokuhen · 1918 · translated by Jay Rubin · English 2006
The story a horror reader should go to first.
Yoshihide is the greatest painter in the country and a thoroughly unpleasant man. The lord he serves commissions a folding screen depicting the Buddhist hells. Yoshihide cannot paint what he has not seen, so he works from life, having his apprentices chained, dropped and menaced so that he can study their faces. Eventually he tells the lord that he cannot finish the central panel without watching a woman burn to death inside a carriage.
The lord agrees. What he arranges is worse than what Yoshihide asked for, and the narration is delivered by a servant of the household who admires the lord and is therefore the last person capable of telling you what he is describing.
It is a story about what art costs and who is made to pay it, and the account of the finished screen is one of the most disturbing passages in Japanese literature.
Kappa
河童 Kappa · 1927 · translated by Allison Markin Powell · English 2023
Written months before his death, and the strangest thing he produced.
A patient in a mental hospital, identified only by a number, describes falling down a hole in the mountains into the land of the kappa, the water spirits of Japanese folklore. He does not treat this as a delusion. Neither does the story.
Kappa society is a satire of Japan with the safety catch off. Unborn children are consulted about whether they wish to be born and are permitted to decline. Poets are venerated and starving. The factories recycle dismissed workers into food, which is described as a humane arrangement. The state religion worships a god called Life and its scriptures are unencouraging.
The comedy is savage and the despair underneath it is not disguised.
Spinning Gears and The Life of a Stupid Man
歯車 Haguruma · ある阿呆の一生 Aru Ahō no Isshō · both 1927 · translated by Jay Rubin · English 2006
Both published after his death and both essentially records of a mind coming apart.
“Spinning Gears” follows a man through Tokyo in a state of complete disintegration. He sees translucent cogwheels turning at the edge of his vision. A raincoat keeps appearing. He finds a pattern in coincidences that he knows is not really there and cannot stop reading, and the story ends with a request that somebody kill him while he is asleep.
It is one of the most exact accounts of psychosis written from the inside, and it is difficult to read knowing when it was written.
“The Life of a Stupid Man” is fifty-one numbered fragments covering his own life in the third person, ending on a man who has run out of the strength required to go on writing.
A note. These two and Kappa are inseparable from his death, and readers who find that material difficult should go in knowing what they are.
The short ones worth knowing
鼻 Hana · 1916 and 蜘蛛の糸 Kumo no Ito · 1918
“The Nose” is the story that made his career. A high-ranking priest is humiliated by the length of his nose, has it surgically shortened, and discovers that people laugh at him considerably more afterwards. Natsume Sōseki read it and told Akutagawa he had a future, which at that point nobody else had said.
“The Spider’s Thread” is the one Japanese schoolchildren all read. The Buddha lowers a single spider’s thread into hell to rescue a robber who once spared a spider, and the robber’s behavior on the way up decides the outcome. It takes four pages and it is the most efficient moral story in the language.
Which edition
Rashōmon and Seventeen Other Stories, Penguin Classics, translated by Jay Rubin with an introduction by Haruki Murakami. This is the one to buy. It is arranged thematically rather than chronologically, moves from the historical tales through the modern ones and ends with the late autobiographical work, and Murakami’s introduction is a proper essay rather than a courtesy. “Hell Screen”, “Spinning Gears” and “The Life of a Stupid Man” are all in it.
Mandarins, translated by Charles De Wolf for Archipelago, is the alternative selection. It overlaps only partly with the Penguin, which makes it worth having second rather than instead.
Kappa has been published separately in Allison Markin Powell’s translation, and the older Geoffrey Bownas version is still in circulation.
The life, and how much of it you need
Less than the mythology suggests, and more than usual.
He was born in Tokyo in 1892 and taken in by his maternal uncle after his mother’s collapse, which is where the Akutagawa name comes from. He read English at Tokyo Imperial University, was championed by Sōseki, and published steadily from 1915 until his death twelve years later.
The fear of inheriting his mother’s illness runs through everything and is not a retrospective reading imposed by biographers. He wrote about it directly, repeatedly, and the late work is explicit that he believed it had arrived.
What that background is useful for is the reading order. The early historical stories, “Rashōmon”, “In a Grove”, “Hell Screen”, are constructed, ironic and set at a distance in the Heian past. The late work drops the distance entirely. Reading them in that sequence is watching a writer run out of places to stand.
For where he sits in the tradition he shaped, my list of the best Japanese novels has the map, and the Japanese horror books page follows his darker line forward.
This page deals with suicide as biographical fact. If the subject is weighing on you, please reach out to someone. In the US you can call or text 988, and the International Association for Suicide Prevention keeps a directory of crisis centers worldwide.
