Akutagawa is best known for two stories, Rashomon and In A Bamboo Grove, which were conflated by Akira Kurosawa into the film Rashomon. Those two open the first section of this book, which collects stories set in Japan’s classical era. Though the stories in this section are all excellent, the highlight is Hell Screen, the story of “the greatest painter in the land” who is commissioned to paint a picture of hell. With wonderfully measured prose, the story builds to a dark, inevitable conclusion.

The second set of stories, which take place in Japan’s Tokugawa period, between 1600 and 1868, is less successful. However, Loyalty is notable for its depiction of mental illness that links it to Akutagawa’s later stories.

It’s the third section, which the narrator has titled Modern Tragicomedy, that is my favourite. Not only are the settings modern but the style is modernist. The word Kafka-esque is over-used but it’s certainly true of the amusing and bizarre Horse Legs, in which a man who dies by mistake is returned to life with the legs of a horse because nothing else is available. Meanwhile, in Green Onions, Akutagawa creates an amusingly authentic story of a couple on a date without letting us forget that he’s writing the story in a hurry to meet a deadline.
Full review: http://www.26books.com/?p=380

My voyage into Japanese fiction began with the works of Haruki Murakami. (If you have not read his work, do so.) So, when I saw he wrote the introduction to this collection of stories by Ryunosuke Akutagawa, I was intrigued. Akutagawa wrote in the early 20th century and set the tone for much of the Japanese fiction that was to follow. Within this collection is an engrossing set of stories and tales that capture the reader quickly and consistently. The opening stories, set farther back in Japanese history, have a fable-like quality. As the stories move forward in historical setting, the fables transcend to studies of people and the lives they lead. The final six stories are more autobiographical, and suffer some from this. Yet, even these slightly over-introspective pieces force a different perspective on the reader. Within this collection, the stories range from an unemployed man exploring where the bodies are buried in a city gate, to a monk who predicts a dragon will emerge from a pond, to an artist who places art above the lives needed to create that art, to a man who is forced to use horses legs, to the artist’s life as a collection of paragraphs. In them all there is a magic that is real or perceived, and each causes the reader to stop and think about what was read and what it means to that reader.

My voyage into Japanese fiction is really just beginning. This book was the first of such I’ve read beyond Murakami’s work. But it is reason enough to propel me into a reading much more. ( )