Ryunosuke Akutagawa is probably best known outside Japan for "Rashomon" but "Kappa" is considered to be his masterpiece by fans and scholars. Narrated by a "mental patient" and introduced as a tale ...

This story is based on a Buddhist worldview in which people continually reincarnate after death. Those with the worst behavior end up in hell. And paradise is the final destination attainable only by ...

We are not sure of the exact date, but we know it happened on a Thursday in the fall of 1915. That morning, Ryunosuke Akutagawa was extremely excited, but also nervous and perhaps even a bit queasy.

“How can any of us escape this world of ours, except for faith, madness or death?” wonders the protagonist of David Peace’s 10th novel, a fictional imagining of the life of Ryunosuke Akutagawa ...

An icon of a desk calendar. An icon of a circle with a diagonal line across. An icon of a block arrow pointing to the right. An icon of a paper envelope. An icon of the Facebook "f" mark. An icon of ...

I first came to Ryunosuke Akutagawa by way of Akira Kurosawa's 1950 film Rashomon, which conflates a 1915 story of the same name with In a Bamboo Grove (1921). The latter work is a remarkable example ...

Peace’s treatment reads rather like a cover version in which the singer has added a load of unnecessary oohs and ahhs. By Johanna Thomas-Corr Shortly before his suicide in 1927, the Japanese writer ...

Aki Asahina, a part-time doctor who won the prestigious Akutagawa Prize for literature on July 17, confessed that he never read novels and never intended to become a writer. Nearly 10 years ago, when ...