Ryunosuke Akutagawa

Ryunosuke Akutagawa wrote the stories that became Rashomon and killed himself at thirty-five, and Japan's most important literary prize carries his name. His mother went irrecoverably mad when he was an infant and he was raised by an uncle, a fact he returned to constantly and feared inheriting. He studied English literature at Tokyo Imperial University and wrote short stories almost exclusively, more than 150 of them, many reworking classical Japanese tales into modern psychological studies. In a Grove, published in 1922, gives four irreconcilable accounts of the same killing and refuses to say which is true; Kurosawa combined it with the story Rashomon in 1950 and gave the language a word for contested testimony. After the Great Kanto earthquake of 1923 he walked through the ruins with Kikuchi Kan and wrote about what he saw, including the vigilante killings of Koreans that followed the rumours of poisoned wells - his account is among the contemporary records of it, and he was clear that the rumours were false and that respectable people had believed them. His last years were spent in insomnia, hallucination and fear of his mother's illness. He took veronal in July 1927, leaving a note describing a vague uneasiness about the future. The Akutagawa Prize was founded eight years later. His son Yasushi became a well-known composer. Kurosawa's film took the setting and the title from one story and the plot from another, which is why the two are permanently confused. The vagueness Akutagawa named in his suicide note has been read since as a diagnosis of the whole late-Taisho generation.

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