Ryūnosuke Akutagawa Books In Order

Kappa

Ryunosuke Akutagawa 1892 1927 is known primarily as the author whose books formed the basis of Kurosawa’s Rashomon. Originally published in 1927, Kappa was published just before he committed suicide, at the age of 35. Patient No. 23 tells his story to anyone in the asylum who will listen. On his way home through a valley, he falls into a deep abyss while chasing a nimble creature with a face like a tiger and a sharp beak. The creature was a Kappa, and when he awoke he was in Kappaland. One man’s initiation into the rites of this parallel world becomes the vehicle for a savage and funny critique of contemporary Japanese life and customs.

Rashomon

This fascinating collection gave birth to a new paradigm when Akira Kurosawa made famous Akutagawa’s disturbing tale of seven people recounting the same incident from shockingly different perspectives. Writing at the beginning of the twentieth century, Ryunosuke Akutagawa created disturbing stories out of Japan’s cultural upheaval. Whether his fictions are set centuries past or close to the present, Akutagawa was a modernist, writing in polished, superbly nuanced prose subtly exposing human needs and flaws. ‘In a Grove,’ which was the basis for Kurosawa’s classic film Rashomon, tells the chilling story of the killing of a samurai through the testimony of witnesses, including the spirit of the murdered man. The fable like ‘Yam Gruel’ is an account of desire and humiliation, but one in which the reader’s sympathy is thoroughly unsettled. And in ‘The Martyr,’ a beloved orphan raised by Jesuit priests is exiled when he refuses to admit that he made a local girl pregnant. He regains their love and respect only at the price of his life. All six tales in the collection show Akutagawa as a master storyteller and an exciting voice of modern Japanese literature.

The Beautiful and the Grotesque

From one of the masters of the short story comes an unforgettable collection of haunting and strange tales.

Ever since his death in 1927, Ryunosuke Akutagawa has been hailed as one of the greatest short story writers in world literature. Most famous for his story Rashomon and the Kurosawa movie it inspired, Akutagawa’s wide range of fiction is beautifully displayed in this newly reissued collection of his stories. With characteristic lyricism and great style, the stories here capture the strange world of Akutagawa, from the slow, gentle death of a haiku master ‘Withered Fields’ to a vicious, marauding gang and their bloody fight with samurai ‘The Robbers’, and the sly tale told from a dog’s perspective of his escape from home ‘The Dog, Shiro’. Throughout these stories, Akutagawa captures the often confused spirit of a Japan undergoing great change and confronting modernity at the turn of the last century. But these stories remain timeless classics, and any reader, whether a fan of Akutagawa or someone discovering him for the first time, will find wonderful delight in these unusual stories. Previously published in a Liveright edition as Exotic Japanese Stories.

Cogwheels

Disaster movies have been around from the very beginning of film. This fun, thrilling, unique genre has always captivated audiences around the world and spawned millions of fanatical disaster devotees. Indeed, some of the most successful movies in history have been disaster films. There hasn’t been a book devoted exclusively to the disaster genre in some thirty years! Until now…
This is a new, comprehensive roadmap of the genre. The book: is a history of the genre; includes reviews of all the disaster films; articles on the films and the genre; includes full details about directors and the stars of the genre; written in a humorous, even satirical, style; includes posters and photos and original illustrations. Each chapter is devoted to a specific ‘type’ of disaster: aeroplanes, earthquakes, avalanches, volcanoes, ships, meteors, fire, storms, radiation, viruses, mad bombers, killer bees, wild animals, aliens, and includes full information and reviews of each film in that category.

Mandarins

‘Extravagance and horror are in his work but never in his style, which is always crystal clear.’ Jorge Luis Borges

‘In Akutagawa’s spare, textured prose…
he brings us clear eyed glimpses of human behavior.’ The New York Times Book Review

In Mandarins, Ryunosuke Akutagawa blends a sense of sad inevitability with subtle irony. Reflective and often humorous, these tales reveal an enormous amount about Japanese culture, while the inner struggles of the characters always strike the universal.

A Fool’s Life

Fiction. Asian Studies. Translated from the Japanese by Anthony Barnett and Toraiwa Naoko. Akutagawa Ryunosuke 1892 1927 is one of 20th Japan’s great storytellers. He is best known in the West for the story ‘Rashomon’, ‘Rasho Gate’, which, with another of his short stories as primary source, ‘Within a Grove’, was the inspiration behind Kurosawa’s film Rashomon. Akutagawa read widely in world literature. He graduated from Tokyo University with a thesis on William Morris. His mentor was the great novelistNatsume Soseki, who had lived in London at the turn of the century. Akutagawa’s writings include reworkings of motifs and tales of China’s and Japan’s past, modern fables, essays, and a few autobiographical fictions which, like A Fool’s Life, follow his intense engagement and difficulty with the world. He ended his brief life the month after completing A Fool’s Life. Anthony Barnett is a poet and music historian. His books include the collected The Resting Bell 1987 and selected Miscanthus 2005. He wrote a Masters on the Theory and Practice of Literary Translation at University of Essex in 1978. Hewas visiting scholar at the Center for International Programs, Meiji University, Tokyo in 2002. His other translations include Albiach, O. Berg, Delahaye, Giroux, Lagerkvist, Vesaas, Zanzotto. His writing is most recently surveyed in Ian Brinton’s volume Contemporary British Poetry: Poetry Since 1990. Dr Toraiwa naoko is Professor of English at Meiji University. She received her doctorate from University of Sussex and divides her time between Japan and England.

Rashomon and Seventeen Other Stories

This collection features a brilliant new translation of the Japanese master’s stories, from the source for the movie Rashomon to his later, more autobiographical writings.