Rashomon And Seventeen Other Stories

P EN G U I N @ C LA SSICS RASHOMON AND SEVENTEEN OTHER STORIES RYDNosUKEAKUTAGAWA (or, in the Japanese order, Akutagawa Ryiinosuke) continues to be read and admired today by virtually all Japanese as one of the country's foremost stylists, a master of the modem idiom enriched by a deep knowledge of both the classics and the contemporary literature of Japan, China, and the West. Born in Tokyo in 1892, he was raised in a family steeped in traditional Japanese culture, learned English at an early age, and proved himself a brilliant student in Japan's foremost educational institutions. He began setting up and writing for student publications at the age of ten, and even before he graduated from Tokyo Imperial University (now University of Tokyo) in 1916 with a degree in English literature, his contnbutions to university magazines were recognized for their accomplished style. He supported himself as a teacher of English for a little over two years, but the great demand for his stories and essays enabled him to resign his post in 1919 and concentrate on his writing. Soon he began to have doubts about his reliance on Japanese and Chinese classical materials in his fiction, and he responded to requests for more autobiographical work by revealing his own anguish as the child of a madwoman, a frail youth tom between his adoptive and biological fathers , a compulsive reader frightened by real life, a conscientious family head oppressed by his responsibilities, a devoted husband and father wracked by guilt for his extramarital affairs, a relentless intellect unable to find peace in religion, and a paranoid personality afraid of being overwhehned by the insanity he was sure he had inherited from his mother. When he ended his own life in 1927 at the age of thirty-five, he left behind a unique body of stories marked by imagistic brilliance, cynicism, horror, beauty, wild humor, and icy clarity. JAY RUBIN has translated Soseki Natsume's novels Sanshiro and The Miner and Haruki Murakami's Norwegian Wood, The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, and after the quake. He is the author of Injurious to Public Morals: Writers and the Meiji State and Haruki Murakami and the Music oj Words, and the editor of Modern Japanese Writers. He began his study of Japanese at the University of Chicago, where he received his Ph.D. in 1970, and has been a professor of Japanese literature at the University of Washington and at Harvard University. HARUKI MURAKAMI (in Western order) has written eleven novels, ten volumes of short stories, and more than thirty books of nonfiction while also translating well over thirty volumes of American fiction, poetry, and nonfiction since his prizewinning debut in 1979 at the age of thirty. Known in the English-speaking world primarily for his novels A Wild Sheep Chase, Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, Norwegian Wood, Dance Dance Dance, The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, and Kafka on the Shore, Murakami has also published commentary on the 1995 Tokyo subway sarin-gas attack in Underground, and edited a book of American, British, and Irish fiction, Birthday Stories. His works have been translated into thirty-four languages. RYŪNOSUKE AKUTAGAWA Rashōmon and Seventeen Other Stories Selected and Translated with Notes by JAY RUBIN With an Introduction by HARUKI MURAKAMI PENGUIN BOOKS PENGUIN CLASSICS Published by the Penguin Group Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014,USA Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division o