Ryunosuke
Akutagawa was born in 1892 in Toyko, whose spirit and whose
traditions he evokes with the magic of Baudelaire's Paris or Kafka's
Prague. His mother died insane when he was a child. His father,
toward whom he felt a great resentment, was a failure who gave
him up to relatives for adoption. A brilliant student of literature
at Tokyo Imperial University, he had already published his first
stories before graduating in 1916. Married two years later, he
fathered three sons and taught English to support his family.
Later he traveled to China and Russia. In 1915, he published his
arresting psychological novella Rashomon, which was to gain international
recognition and eventually become a hugely successful film by
Kurosawa. After a period of severe depression, the increasingly
unstable Akutagawa took his own life with an overdose of pills
in 1927, at age thirty five. His suicide letter, A Note to a Certain
Old Friend, is contained below. His nearly ten volumes of literary
essays, short stories, and novellas are a masterful reinterpretation
of Asian tradition and legend, marked by a profound infusion of
Western thought and literary technique.
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