Rashomon and seventeen other stories

the long version

Among the difficulties of getting much of a feel for the works of Akutagawa Ryūnosuke is that while there has been a steady flow of translations of his work into English for almost a century now, these have come piece-meal and jumbled together (just see the other volumes we have under review), with the best-known stories now available in numerous translations at the same time as much of his work remains untranslated. Add to that the absence of any accessible biography -- and the shadow cast by K