Ryūnosuke Akutagawa
Life and career
Ryūnosuke Akutagawa was born in Tokyo in 1892 and died in 1927. He studied English literature at Tokyo University and taught before becoming a full-time writer in 1919. His work includes short fiction, poetry and essays, and helped bring Japanese modernist writing to English-language readers. Tales Grotesque and Curious offers an entrance through brief narratives whose unsettling situations invite close attention to the relation between a teller’s perspective and a reader’s judgment.
A judgment made unstable
Akutagawa's compact narratives often establish a recognizable moral situation and then disturb the reader's position within it. Vanity may seem ridiculous until the reactions of other people reveal a cruelty of their own. An apparent ethical choice may be inseparable from hunger, fear or the wish to protect one's standing. Historical settings and supernatural incidents provide different ways to test these pressures. The strangeness serves close observation of conduct rather than replacing it with an exotic atmosphere.
Tales Grotesque and Curious
Glenn W. Shaw's English translation contains eleven stories. The Nose turns an unusual physical feature into a social predicament; Rashōmon tests conduct in desperate circumstances; The Spider's Thread compresses an ethical question into a fablelike form. The Handkerchief, The Ball and Mōri Sensei offer further changes of setting and emphasis. Reading several together makes the range clearer than any single example can: grotesque imagery, irony and the withholding of information do different work in different tales.
Reconsider the first verdict
Before the last paragraph of a story, identify the person you feel most ready to judge. Afterwards, ask whether the ending changed that judgment or exposed the assumptions that supported it. Notice how much the narrator allows you to know about motives. A brief narrative can leave less room for explanation while making each qualification more consequential. Shaw's English wording is also part of this encounter, mediating the stories' voices for a different readership.