Ryunosuke Akutagawa: 10 books

Prefiguring the vital modernist voices of the Western literary canon, Akutagawa writes with a trenchant psychological precision that exposes the shifting traditions and ironies of early twentieth-century Japan and reveals his own strained connection to it. These stories are moving glimpses into a...

"Clear-eyed glimpses of human behavior in the extremities of poverty, stupidity, greed, vanity… Story-telling of an unconventional sort, with most of the substance beneath the shining, enameled surface." —The New York Times Book Review Widely acknowledged as "the father of...

Writing at the beginning of the twentieth century, Ryunosuke Akutagawa created disturbing stories out of Japan's cultural upheaval. Rashomon tells the chilling story of the killing of a samurai through the testimony of witnesses, including the spirit of the murdered man. The fable-like Yam Gruel is...

Three classic Japanese works with an active table of contents. Works and authors include:"Botchan" By Kin-nosuke Natsume"Rashomon and Other Stories" By Ryunosuke Akutagawa"Selections from Genji Monogatari" By Murasaki Shikibu

One of Penguin Classics' most popular translations—now also in our elegant black spine dress Ryünosuke Akutagawa is one of Japan's foremost stylists—a modernist master whose short stories are marked by highly original imagery, cynicism, beauty and wild humour. "Rashömon"and...

'He had the Ten Kings of Hell and their minions over in one small corner, and everything else - the entire screen - was enveloped in a firestorm so terrible you thought the swirling flames were going to melt the mountain of Sabres and the Forest of Swords.' One of the towering figures of modern...

"In a Grove" is an early modernist short story consisting of seven varying accounts of the murder of a samurai, Kanazawa no Takehiro, whose corpse has been found in a bamboo forest near Kyoto. Each section simultaneously clarifies and obfuscates what the reader knows about the murder, eventually...

The Spiders Thread is Akutagawas most well-known short story. It is an exquisite allegory about good, evil and redemption. Kandata, the wicked criminal sent to Hell for his sins, is given a chance to save himself, thanks to the Buddha remembering that he had once spared the life of a little spider....

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3 Strange Tales presents new translations of this classic Japanese author's most well-known stories: Rashomon; A Christian Death; the never-before-published-in-English story, Agni; and a bonus story, In a Grove.