Short Fiction

Short Fiction

By Akutagawa Ryūnosuke.

Translated by Glenn W. Shaw, Eric S. Bell, Ukai Eiji, and Tada Yoshinobu.

Table of Contents

1. Titlepage
2. Imprint
3. Foreword
4. Introduction
5. Short Fiction
   1. Rashōmon
   2. Tobacco and the Devil
   3. The Nose
   4. The Handkerchief
   5. Lice
      1. I
      2. II
      3. III
      4. IV
   6. The Wine Worm
      1. I
      2. II
      3. III
      4. IV
   7. The Pipe
      1. I
      2. II
      3. III
      4. IV
      5. V
      6. VI
      7. VII
      8. VIII
   8. The Badger
   9. The Spider’s Thread
      1. I
      2. II
      3. III
   10. Story of a Fallen Head
       1. Part I
       2. Part II
       3. Part III
   11. Mōri Sensei
   12. The Ball
       1. I
       2. II
   13. Tu Tzuchun
       1. Part I
       2. Part II
       3. Part III
       4. Part IV
       5. Part V
6. Colophon
7. Uncopyright

Imprint

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This particular ebook is based on transcriptions from various sources and on digital scans from various sources.

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Foreword

This edition of Akutagawa Ryūnosuke’s Short Fiction was produced from several translations of his short stories.

“Rashōmon” and “Lice” were translated by Glenn W. Shaw and originally published in 1920 and 1921 in the magazine Eigo Seinen. “Tobacco and the Devil,” “The Nose,” “The Handkerchief,” “The Spider’s Thread,” “The Wine Worm,” “The Badger,” “The Ball,” “The Pipe” and “Mōri Sensei” were also translated by Shaw and first published in Tales Grotesque and Curious in 1930.

“The Story of a Fallen Head” was translated by Eric S. Bell and Ukai Eiji; “Tu Tzuchun” was translated by Eric S. Bell and Tada Yoshinobu. Both translations were first published in Eminent Authors of Contemporary Japan, in 1930.

Hendrik Kaiber

Santa Maria, Brazil, March 2026

Introduction

Akutagawa Ryūnosuke was born in Tokyo on the first day of March, 1892, and drank poison and died in Tokyo early on the morning of July 24, 1927. Of the thirty-five years of his life, lived almost entirely in that same Tokyo, he spent some eighteen mostly in school as a young prodigy and some eleven mostly at his desk as the fashioner and polisher of perhaps 200 overwrought short stories, of which this book contains eleven, translated into English as nearly word for word as possible.

His father, a man named Niihara Toshizō, is said to have given him the name Ryūnosuke (Dragon-helper) because he was born at the dragon hour on a dragon day in the dragon month of a dragon year. But his father’s part in the story ends there. His mother was unwell, and he was given in infancy, in the Japanese way, to her childless elder brother, Akutagawa Shōdō. His adoptive mother’s great uncle is reported to have been a man of fashion in the latter days of the old Edo period, but beyond this very frail hint, no home influence has been suggested as contributing to his genius.

When in the third year of primary school, bright young Ryūnosuke picked up Tokutomi Roka’s book of sketches, Shizen to Jinsei (Nature and Man) and read it with a pleasure that is said to have turned him to literature. He went into the First High School in Tokyo on recommendation without examination, passed through the school an honor student and entered the Imperial University of Tokyo, where he studied English literature, graduating in 1916. His graduation thesis was entitled, “Wiriamu Morisu Kenkyū” (A Study of William Morris).

He was like Morris in his surrender to the fascination of the Middle Ages, but he had none of the practical reforming tendencies of that artist socialist. He has been more aptly compared to Flaubert for the seriousness with which he took his art and the preciousness of his style. And the post-bellum point of view has been expressed by a Japanese social worker who, at his death, compared him, as a man with a keen sense of humor and knowledge of human nature and “an arbiter of elegance in the vicious society in which he lived,” to Petronius.

He says of himself while at the University that he did not attend classes very well and was an idle student, but we may take this for the expression of a sincere wish to be more like some of his hardier classmates, for Kikuchi Kan, one of them and today the literary Croesus of Japan, says that Akutagawa went to his classes faithfully and had the confidence of his professors.

Writing some time after 1921, Kikuchi said of his friend Akutagawa that, when he thought of him as he was during their school days together, the first thing he always saw was the bright spot his red lips made in his pale white face. Akutagawa was very quiet and self-contained as an