Ryunosuke Akutagawa

• Apr-1964
• / Science Fiction
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• Dec-1999
• / General Fiction
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The story was first published in 1915 in Teikoku Bungaku. Akira Kurosawa's film Rashomon (1950), takes only its name and some of the material for the frame scenes, such as the theft of a kimono and the discussion of the moral ambiguity of thieving to...

• Jan-2007
• / General Fiction
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Fiction. Asian Studies. Translated from the Japanese by Anthony Barnett and Toraiwa Naoko. Akutagawa Ryunosuke (1892-1927) is one of 20th Japan's great storytellers. He is best known in the West for the story "Rashomon", "Rasho Gate", which, with ano...

• May-2007
• / General Fiction
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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 ...

• Dec-2007
• / General Fiction
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In 1914, Akutagawa published his short story [i]Rashomon[/i], which won him considerable praise and he followed that up with another highly acclaimed short story, [i]The Nose[/i]. His reputation as one of the first great Japanese modernists in litera...

• Sep-2009
• / General Fiction
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Akutagawa’s magical final work is a short novel with a magic spell all its own -- poignant, fantastical, wry, melancholic, and witty The Kappa is a creature from Japanese folklore known for dragging unwary toddlers to their deaths in rivers: a scal...

• Aug-2010
• / General Fiction
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From one of the masters of the short story comes an unforgettable collection of haunting and strange tales.

• Feb-2011
• / General Fiction
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Introducing Little Clothbound Classics: irresistible, mini editions of short stories, novellas and essays from the world's greatest writers, designed by the award-winning Coralie Bickford-Smith. Celebrating the range and diversity of Penguin Classics...

• Nov-2012
• / General Fiction
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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....

• Jul-2013
• / Mystery
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"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...

• Mar-2015
• / General Fiction
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'What is the life of a human being - a drop of dew, a flash of lightning? This is so sad, so sad.' Autobiographical stories from one of Japan's masters of modernist story-telling....

• Mar-2017
• / Fantasy
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• Oct-2017
• / General Fiction
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• Jun-2020
• / General Fiction
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This anthology collects original writing and art by novelists, poets, and academics about their pets, including a killer chihuahua, a catatonic toy poodle, a contraband cat, a backyard full of endangered desert tortoises, five forgotten parakeets, an...

• Apr-2021
• / Magical Realism
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A stylishly original collection of seven newly translated stories from the iconic Japanese writerThe stories in this fantastical, unconventional collection are subtly wrought depictions of the darkness of our desires. From an isolated bamboo grove, t...

• Nov-2023
• / General Fiction
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Deftly translated by Ryan Choi, these stories and vignettes (plus two short plays) all have radical brevity in common, demonstrating that Akutagawa was an early and prescient master of what we now call flash fiction and non-fiction. With a striking e...

• Aug-2024
• / Graphic Novel
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A famous samurai murder mystery finally brought to life in graphic novel form!A sword-swinging samurai, a corpse-robbing crone and a falsely accused trans man stand at the center of these four iconic tales, once the inspiration for a classic film, no...