Ryunosuke Akutagawa: Short Stories, Style and What to Learn
1892 to 1927
Quick answer: Ryunosuke Akutagawa craft file: the old tale recut with a modern mind, contradictory testimony, "Rashomon", "In a Grove", "Hell Screen", and what to steal.
Quick facts
- Born: 1892, Tokyo
- Died: 1927, Tokyo, aged 35
- Wrote in: Japanese
- Known for: "Rashomon", "In a Grove", "Hell Screen"
- Signature move: The same event told by witnesses who cannot all be right
- Start with: "Rashomon" (1915), then "In a Grove" (1922)
Akutagawa wrote about 150 stories in twelve years and killed himself at thirty-five, and for a long stretch of that time he was the most admired writer in Japan. Many of his best pieces are old tales from medieval collections like the Konjaku Monogatari, rewritten with psychology the originals never had. A servant at a ruined gate decides whether to become a thief; a painter watches his daughter burn for the sake of a picture.
What he actually does on the page
He takes a plot from an old anecdote and fills in the mind. "Rashomon" (1915) comes from a few lines in a twelfth-century collection: a thief at the great gate of Kyoto. Akutagawa makes him a servant just dismissed, sheltering from rain among the dead bodies people leave upstairs, and lets us watch the reasoning by which he moves from disgust at an old woman pulling hair from corpses to stealing her clothes. The old woman's defence, that the dead woman she is robbing was herself a cheat, becomes his permission.
He makes the frame do the moral work. "The Spider's Thread" (1918) has the Buddha, walking by a lotus pond in paradise, look down into hell and lower a single thread to a robber who once spared a spider. The robber climbs; sees the other sinners climbing after him; shouts at them to get off; and the thread snaps above him. The Buddha walks on. The tale is three pages and is told from above, with the pond's flowers described at the start and the end, so that the man's failure is small in the frame and enormous inside it.
He lets a story be an argument about art. "Hell Screen" (1918) is told by a retainer of a great lord about the painter Yoshihide, who cannot paint what he has not seen and asks the lord to burn a carriage with a woman in it so he can paint hell. The lord puts Yoshihide's own daughter in the carriage. The painter finishes the screen and hangs himself. The narrator's admiration for the painting and horror at its price are never reconciled.
The signature move
Contradictory testimony is dissected best in "In a Grove" (1922). A samurai is found dead in a bamboo grove. A woodcutter, a travelling priest, a policeman and an old woman give statements to a magistrate; then the bandit Tajomaru confesses to killing the man in a duel after raping his wife; then the wife, at a temple, says she killed her husband herself because of the contempt in his eyes; then the dead man, through a medium, says he killed himself after his wife urged the bandit to murder him. Akutagawa provides no magistrate's verdict and no narrator. Each account is consistent and flatters its speaker; the reader is left holding three murders and one corpse. The lesson is that a story can be built entirely from unreliable voices if each voice has a reason to lie.
Stories to read first
Seven stories, from 1915 to 1927.
What to steal for your own stories
Exercises drawn from the stories.
What not to copy
The despair. The late stories are the record of a mind coming apart, and their brilliance is not a method anyone should try to reproduce. Some early tales are exercises in elegance more than stories. Take the recut, the frame and the depositions; leave the darkness to him.
Life at a glance
- 1892: Born in Tokyo; raised by his mother's family after her mental illness
- 1915: "Rashomon" published while he is a student of English literature at Tokyo Imperial University
- 1916: "The Nose" is praised by Natsume Soseki, and his career begins
- 1918: "Hell Screen" and "The Spider's Thread"
- 1922: "In a Grove"
- 1927: Dies by his own hand in July; "Spinning Gears" and "A Fool's Life" appear after his death
- 1935: The Akutagawa Prize is founded in his memory
- 1950: Kurosawa's film Rashomon, built from "In a Grove" and "Rashomon", carries his name around the world
What writers can take from this
- Borrow the plot; invent the motive.
- Let each witness be consistent and self-flattering, and supply no judge.
- Frame a small human failure inside a large calm picture.
- Give your narrator two incompatible feelings and keep both.
- Choose the ten minutes before a decision rather than the decision.
Try it yourself
A small incident at a family gathering ends with something broken and someone in tears. Write it in under 1,000 words as five statements given afterwards to a neutral relative, each speaker consistent, each protecting themselves. Do not include the relative's conclusion. The last statement should be the one person nobody asked.
Questions
What is Ryunosuke Akutagawa's best short story?
"In a Grove" (1922) is the most influential, through Kurosawa's Rashomon. "Hell Screen" (1918) is the one most Japanese critics rank first, and "Rashomon" (1915) is the most read.
How did Akutagawa influence the short story?
He showed that old material could be rewritten with modern psychology, and "In a Grove" gave world fiction and film the structure of contradictory testimony. The Akutagawa Prize, founded in 1935, remains Japan's most important award for new writers.
Is Akutagawa hard to read?
No. The stories are short, clearly plotted and available in good modern translations (Jay Rubin's Penguin selection is the standard). The medieval settings need no background; the stories supply it.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working writers. Updated September 2026.
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