Ryunosuke Akutagawa

• Sep-2025
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"Akutagawa displays an insightful and keenly creative intelligence in prose so lucid its sophistication is hardly visible." -- Chris Power, The GuardianRyunosuke Akutagawa (1892 -- 1927), often called "the Father of the Japanese short story," wrote ...

• Mar-2025
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A chilling horror story of artistic obsession and the price of perfection, based on the classic tale by Ryunosuke Akutagawa!Hell Screen follows Yoshihide, a renowned but tormented artist who, despite his talent, is rude, lazy and avaricious. Known fo...

• Aug-2024
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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...

• Nov-2023
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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...

• Apr-2021
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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...

• Jun-2020
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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...

• Oct-2017
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• Mar-2017
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• Mar-2015
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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....

• Jul-2013
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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...

• Nov-2012
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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. Explore the dark side of humanity in...

• Feb-2011
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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...

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

• Sep-2009
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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 scaly,...

• Dec-2007
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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...

• May-2007
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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 ...

• Jan-2007
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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...

• Dec-1999
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"Rashomon and Other Stories" has had a profound impact on both Japanese and international literature. The stories "Rashomon" and "In a Bamboo Grove" were famously adapted into the 1950 film Rashomon by Akira Kurosawa, which brought Akutagawa's work t...

• Apr-1964
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