Rashomon and Seventeen Other Stories
Penguin Classics · 320 pages
Eighteen short stories, from reworked tales of old Kyoto to shadowed sketches of modern life.
Each story is compact and precise, and the book darkens gradually as it moves through the author's career.
For a night of rain on the eaves.
About this book
Akutagawa Ryūnosuke wrote short fiction in the early twentieth century, often reshaping old Japanese tales into tight studies of people under pressure. Here a servant shelters at a ruined city gate, a monk frets over his enormous nose, and witnesses give conflicting accounts of a crime in a bamboo grove. The later pieces turn inward, toward the writer's own unrest. What lingers is the cool, clear eye he turns on human motives.