Akutagawa ryunosuke biography of donald

When I first started studying Japanese, I bought a book called Breaking into Japanese Literature by Giles Murray, which presents short stories by two authors who helped define modern Japanese literature: Natsume Soseki and Akutagawa Ryunosuke.

I was too intimidated when I first bought the book five years ago to dive too deeply into it. But I picked it up again lately and began reading Akutagawa’s In a Grove (藪の中; yabu no naka), a story about a murder told from seven different perspectives. If that sounds familiar, it’s because you probably know the story as Kurosawa Akira’s famous film Rashomon. (Kurosawa took the title and main symbol of Rashomon from another story by Akutagawa.)

The story is typical of Akutagawa’s style. Elliptical and haunting, it leaves the reader without any firm answers. As Dr. Murray wrote about the author in his book:

His stories are perfect expressions of the decadent aesthetic, with the gorgeous and the grotesque, the splendid and the sordid, intertwining in highly polished prose.

Regarded as a master of the short story, Akutagawa’s influence extends far beyond his short, tragic life span.

Akutagwa Ryunosuke’s early life

Akutagawa was born in 1892 in what is now the town of Asaichichou in Chuuei Ward in Tokyo. It was only a few decades earlier that the Shogunate had collapsed. Japan embarked on a breakneck sprint toward modernization.

12 years later, Japan would defeat Russia in the Sino-Japanese War and enter the world stage as the budding superpower of Asia. It was a time when the traditional and the modern were constantly in conflict. Japan was redefining what it meant to be Japanese.

Almost as if crafted to match the times, Akutagawa’s early life was one of personal turmoil. His mother, Fuku, suffered from what is only described as “madness.” Relatives too

As we near the end of our discussion of Ryunosuke Akutagawa’s The Mandarins this month, Michael Orthofer dwells a little on our ideas of the author and his work.

Earlier posts can be found here: a look at the titular story, Mandarins; the approach to storytelling in Evening Conversation; a conversation on the literary influences in The Handkerchief—Editors.

As we slowly wind up the discussion, moving towards The Life of a Fool and Cogwheels (which I figure will be the appropriate notes to end on), I’m still struck by how much a proper (?) sense of the author eludes me. Try as I might, Akutagawa remains something of a mystery-man to me. And though I’m generally not big on worrying about the author behind the texts I find myself looking for more of a hold here—in part because even after reading this collection, which comes after I’ve read quite a few different Akutagawa translations over the years, I still don’t feel I know him or his writing that well.

The most obvious manifestation of this is that I’m not very confident I could recognize an Akutagawa-story just from the writing alone. Just when there seem to be some common elements, I come across a completely different story…Unpredictability of this sort is good too, but I find it somewhat frustrating as well. Quite a few of these Akutagawa stories are based on older stories, and they, in particular, have a very different feel from the contemporary ones. (Jay Rubin’s chronological presentation of the stories in his Rashomon-collection—”according to the time of their setting rather than the order of their publication”—is looking better to me all the time—though even that hasn’t made Akutagawa completely straightforward.) Kesa and Morita, with its soliloquies (with only very limited stage-direction to go with them) appeals to me, but I find it hard to fit in with many of the others; once again I

Japanese writer (1892–1927)

The native form of this personal name is Akutagawa Ryūnosuke. This article uses Western name order when mentioning individuals.

Ryūnosuke Akutagawa (芥川 龍之介, Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, 1 March 1892 – 24 July 1927), art nameChōkōdō Shujin (澄江堂主人), was a Japanesewriter active in the Taishō period in Japan. He is regarded as the "father of the Japanese short story", and Japan's premier literary award, the Akutagawa Prize, is named after him. He took his own life at the age of 35 through an overdose of barbital.

Early life

Ryūnosuke Akutagawa was born in Irifune, Kyōbashi, Tokyo City (present-day Akashi, Chūō, Tokyo), the eldest son of businessman Toshizō Niihara and his wife Fuku. His family owned a milk production business. His mother experienced mental illness shortly after his birth, so he was adopted and raised by his maternal uncle, Michiaki Akutagawa, from whom he received the Akutagawa family name. He was interested in classical Chinese literature from an early age, as well as in the works of Mori Ōgai and Natsume Sōseki.

He entered the First High School in 1910 and developed relationships with classmates such as Kan Kikuchi, Kume Masao, Yūzō Yamamoto, and Tsuchiya Bunmei [ja], all of whom would later become authors. He began writing after entering Tokyo Imperial University (now the University of Tokyo) in 1913, where he studied English literature. While still a student, he proposed marriage to a childhood friend, Yayoi Yoshida, but his adoptive family did not approve the union. In 1916 he became engaged to Fumi Tsukamoto [ja], whom he married in 1918. They had three children: Hiroshi Akutagawa (1920–1981) was an actor, Takashi Akutagawa (1922–1945) was killed as a student draftee in Burma, and Yasushi Akutagawa (1925–1989) was a composer.

Following graduation, Akutagawa taught briefly at the Naval Engineering School