The Life of a Stupid Man and Other Stories

In 1927, Ryūnosuke Akutagawa — thirty-five years old, the most celebrated short story writer in Japan — took an overdose of barbiturates and died. He had been suffering from hallucinations, insomnia, and a pervasive anxiety he could not name. His final work, written in the weeks before his death, was a sequence of autobiographical fragments he called ‘The Life of a Stupid Man’ — and it is one of the most devastating pieces of literary self-examination ever written.

This Penguin Modern Classics collection gathers Akutagawa’s essential work: ‘Rashōmon’ and ‘In a Grove’ — the two stories that Akira Kurosawa adapted into his landmark 1950 film — alongside the later masterpieces that show the full range and power of his art. These are stories of extraordinary psychological precision, written in a style that is simultaneously spare and luminous, and they have lost nothing of their force in the century since they were composed.

The father of the Japanese short story, at the height of his powers and at the end of his life. Essential world literature. Jim Rubin’s translation. Published by Penguin Modern Classics.