'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. Introducing Little Black Classics: 80 books for Penguin's 80th birthday. Little Black Classics celebrate the huge range [...]

The acclaimed author of Occupied City, Tokyo Year Zero, and The Red Riding Quartet now gives us a stunning work of fiction in twelve connected tales that take up the strange, brief life of the brilliant twentieth-century Japanese writer Ry?nosuke Akutagawa. Haunting and evocative, brutal and surrea[...]

Writing at the beginning of the twentieth century, Ryunosuke Akutagawa created disturbing stories out of Japan's cultural upheaval. Whether his fictions are set centuries past or close to the present, Akutagawa was a modernist, writing in polished, superbly nuanced prose subtly exposing human needs [...]

From the literary giant of Japan, who is often referred to as the "Godfather of the Japanese short story," and after whom the most coveted literary prize of Japan is named, the Akutagawa Prize, comes this collection of three of his greatest short stories. Akutagawa is probably best known for his sto[...]

This collection of short stories includes "In a Grove," a psychologically sophisticated tale about murder, rape, and suicide; "Rashomon," the story of a thief scared into honesty by an encounter with a ghoul; and "Kesa and Morito," the story of man driven to kill someone he doesn't hate by a lover w[...]

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.[...]