A Tokyo education
Born in Tokyo in 1892, he was raised in the household of his maternal uncle after his mother became ill. He took the Akutagawa family name and grew up reading Japanese and Chinese literature. At Tokyo Imperial University he studied English literature and worked with other young writers on a literary magazine.
Rashōmon drew on a medieval account of a ruined gate. The Nose brought encouragement from the novelist Natsume Sōseki, whose recognition mattered to the young writer. Akutagawa taught English and later wrote for the Osaka Mainichi newspaper, which sent him to China. He died in 1927, leaving a body of short fiction whose experiments range from historical narratives to closely observed episodes of modern anxiety.
A translator in Osaka
Glenn W. Shaw translated eleven stories for Tales Grotesque and Curious, published by Hokuseido in 1930. His introduction is dated at Osaka three years after Akutagawa’s death. In Tobacco and the Devil, an apparently scholarly inquiry into when tobacco arrived in Japan gives way to a tale about missionaries and a devil travelling from the West. The narrator grows more entertaining as the certainty of his evidence diminishes.
