Ryûnosuke Akutagawa

Ryūnosuke Akutagawa (芥川 龍之介), art name Chōkōdō Shujin (澄江堂主人), was a Japanese writer active in the Taishō period in Japan.

He is regarded as the "father of the Japanese short story", and Japan's premier literary award, the Akutagawa Prize, is named after him.

He took his own life at the age of 35 through an overdose of barbital.

Ryūnosuke Akutagawa was born in Irifune, Kyōbashi, Tokyo City (present-day Akashi, Chūō, Tokyo), the eldest son of businessman Toshizō Niihara and his wife Fuku.

His family owned a milk production business.

His mother experienced mental illness shortly after his birth, so he was adopted and raised by his maternal uncle, Dōshō Akutagawa, from whom he received the Akutagawa family name.

He was interested in classical Chinese literature from an early age, as well as in the works of Mori Ōgai and Natsume Sōseki.

He entered the First High School in 1910 and developed relationships with classmates such as Kan Kikuchi, Kume Masao, Yūzō Yamamoto, and Tsuchiya Bunmei, all of whom would later become authors.

He began writing after entering Tokyo Imperial University (now the University of Tokyo) in 1913, where he studied English literature.

While still a student, he proposed marriage to a childhood friend, Yayoi Yoshida, but his adoptive family did not approve the union.

In 1914, Akutagawa and his former high school friends revived the literary journal Shinshichō ("New Currents of Thought"), where they published translations of William Butler Yeats and Anatole France along with works they had written themselves.

Akutagawa published his second short story "Rashōmon" the following year in the literary magazine Teikoku Bungaku ("Imperial Literature"), while still a student.

The story, based on a twelfth-century tale, was not well received by Akutagawa's friends, who greatly criticized it.

Nonetheless, Akutagawa gathered up the courage to visit his idol, Natsume Sōseki, in December 1915 for Sōseki's weekly literary circles.

In November, he published the work in the literary magazine Teikoku Mongaku.

In 1916 he became engaged to Fumi Tsukamoto, whom he married in 1918.

In early 1916 he published "Hana" ("The Nose", 1916), which received a letter of praise from Sōseki and secured Akutagawa his first taste of fame.

It was also at this time that Akutagawa started writing haiku under the haigo (pen name) Gaki.

Akutagawa followed with a series of short stories set in Heian period, Edo period or early Meiji period Japan.

These stories reinterpreted classical works and historical incidents.

Examples of these stories include: Gesaku zanmai ("Absorbed in Letters", 1917) and Kareno-shō ("Gleanings from a Withered Field", 1918), Jigoku hen ("Hell Screen", 1918); Hōkyōnin no shi ("The Death of a Christian", 1918), and Butōkai ("The Ball", 1920).

Akutagawa was a strong opponent of naturalism.

An example of this is his story "Hōkyōnin no Shi" ("The Martyr", 1918) which is set in the early missionary period.

The portrayal of women in Akutagawa's stories was mainly shaped by the influence of three women who acted as his mother figures.

Most significant was his biological mother Fuku, from whom he worried about inheriting her madness.

Although Akutagawa was removed from Fuku eight months after his birth, he identified strongly with her and believed that, if at any moment he might go mad, life was meaningless.

His aunt Fuki played the most prominent role in his upbringing, controlling much of Akutagawa's life as well as demanding much of his attention, especially as she grew older.

The women who appear in Akutagawa's stories, much like his mother figures, were for the most part written as dominating, aggressive, deceitful, and selfish.

He published Mikan ("Mandarin Oranges", 1919) and Aki ("Autumn", 1920) which have more modern settings.

They had three children: Hiroshi Akutagawa (1920–1981) was an actor, Takashi Akutagawa (1922–1945) was killed as a student draftee in Burma, and Yasushi Akutagawa (1925–1989) was a composer.

Following graduation, Akutagawa taught briefly at the Naval Engineering School in Yokosuka, Kanagawa as an English language instructor, before deciding to devote his efforts to writing fulltime.

In 1921, Akutagawa interrupted his writing career to spend four months in China, as a reporter for the Osaka Mainichi Shinbun.

The trip was stressful and he suffered from various illnesses, from which his health would never recover.

Shortly after his return he published Yabu no naka ("In a Grove", 1922).

During the trip, Akutagawa visited numerous cities of southeastern China including Nanjing, Shanghai, Hangzhou and Suzhou.

Before his travel, he wrote a short story "The Christ of Nanjing(short story)"; concerning the Chinese Christian community; according to his own imaginative vision of Nanjing, as influenced by classical Chinese literature.

Akutagawa's stories were influenced by his belief that the practice of literature should be universal and could bring together Western and Japanese cultures.

The idea can be seen in the way that Akutagawa used existing works from a variety of cultures and time periods and either rewrites the story with modern sensibilities or creates new stories using ideas from multiple sources.

Culture and the formation of a cultural identity is also a major theme in several of his works.

In these stories, he explores the formation of cultural identity during periods in history where Japan was most open to outside influences.