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Ryūnosuke Akutagawa: 47 works in the original Japanese, with translation

Ryūnosuke Akutagawa (1 March 1892 – 24 July 1927), also known by his art name Chōkōdō Shujin, was a Japanese writer active in the Taishō period who is regarded as the "father of the Japanese short story". He died by suicide at the age of 35 through an overdose of barbital, and Japan's premier literary award, the Akutagawa Prize, is named after him.

Works in the library

Cultural notes (selection)

御釈迦様 The Spider’s Thread

Refers to Shakyamuni Buddha. Whenever the narrator mentions the Buddha, he consistently uses the highest honorific forms such as「御～様」,「御～になる」, and「いらっしゃる」, and the whole story ends sentences with「ございます」, so it reads like a Buddhist tale told to children. This tone is very hard to preserve in translation.

羅生門 Rashōmon

The common name for the Rashōmon, the main gate of Heian-kyō, standing at the south end of Suzaku Avenue and facing the Suzaku Gate at the north end. Decayed and abandoned, with corpses left there, it became a familiar setting for ghost stories. Akutagawa drew this story from the Konjaku Monogatarishū.

禅智内供 The Nose

The story draws on "The Nose of the Priest Zenchi of Ikeo" in Book 28 of the Konjaku Monogatarishū, whose protagonist is the priest Zenchin. Akutagawa changed the name to Zenchi. Both the long nose and the mealtime details have their source in the original tale.

洛陽 Tu Tze-chun

This refers to Luoyang, the eastern capital of Tang-dynasty China, not an elegant name for Kyoto in Japan. In classical Japanese literature, Kyoto is often called "Raku" (as in "jōraku," going up to the capital). Akutagawa based the story on a Tang tale, and its setting is the west gate of Luoyang city.