From the Bookshelf of On Paths Unknown…

Rashōmon and Seventeen Other Stories

Ryūnosuke Akutagawa,

Jay Rubin (Translator)

Start date: December 14, 2021

Discussion: JAPAN's AKUTAGAWA

Why we're reading this: It contains Spinning Gears, Akutagawa's last story, and the famous "In a Grove", besides which, Akugawata…more
[close] It contains Spinning Gears, Akutagawa's last story, and the famous "In a Grove", besides which, Akugawata is a must-read author.

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JAPAN's AKUTAGAWA

Hellscreen
By Traveller · 15 posts · 13 views

last updated Jan 22, 2022 05:27AM

Shifting Gears
By Traveller · 2 posts · 8 views

last updated Jan 17, 2022 02:25PM

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What Members Thought

Jun 08, 2017 BrokenTune rated it it was ok

Shelves: reviewed

DNF @ 39%

These stories are not bad but I just can't muster any real enthusiasm for them.

It is not helped by the stories being unconneced and by themselves not being great examples of the short story format.

Of course, they were not written as short stories in the Western literary sense. It's just that the way they are written is boring me stiff.

Maybe I'll pick this up again at a later date, but right now, this is not working for me. ...more

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Jan 18, 2022 BJ Lillis rated it it was amazing

Shelves: japanese

I read this collection with the always enlightening group over at On Paths Unknown.

This is an exceptionally well-organized collection, 18 stories in four thematic sections, each of which holds together beautifully, giving a clear sense of Akutagawa’s range and evolution. It is a dark book, cruel even, though not without a sense of humor. Hell Screen, a horrifying highlight, is seared into my brain. Even the lighter stories, funny little fables like The Nose or The Spider Thread and character stu I read this collection with the always enlightening group over at On Paths Unknown.

This is an exceptionally well-organized collection, 18 stories in four thematic sections, each of which holds together beautifully, giving a clear sense of Akutagawa’s range and evolution. It is a dark book, cruel even, though not without a sense of humor. Hell Screen, a horrifying highlight, is seared into my brain. Even the lighter stories, funny little fables like The Nose or The Spider Thread and character studies like Green Onions, have a bitterness, a lack of warmth that left me not particularly eager to finish the collection. In the last section, in a series of autobiographical pieces written on the eve of his death at 35, the author turns that bitterness inward, on himself. It is hollow and sad. Still, this is great literature, however bitter. The kinds of stories that stick. Rashomon and In a Bamboo Grove, by far the best known stories here due to the deservedly famous 1950 film (named after the former and adapted from the latter), were excellent but not the highlights—always a refreshing surprise when a collection is called "x and other stories".

The translation is by Jay Rubin, famous for his Murakami translations, and Murakami was enlisted for the intro (although someone had quite literally torn random pages out of the introduction of my public library copy, so I was able to read only some of it. It was not entirely uninteresting). Rubin’s translation is very readable, if rather suspiciously similar in tone to his Murakami translations—or perhaps just written into rather generic English. But that may be unfair—the best stories here hit very hard, and they can’t have been easy to translate. The footnotes were much appreciated, just generous enough without overstaying their welcome (although here again my mysterious library vandal had torn out pages—the actual stories were not touched, which made me wonder if some highly knowledgeably reader had torn pages out of the notes and introduction in a rage, disagreeing with Murakami and Rubin’s interpretations; or perhaps someone just really, really needed clean, dry paper—could this have been early Covid times?—and conscientiously avoided the stories’ themselves). ...more

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