Akutagawa Ryunosuke and the Modernist Movement

Paper Summary:

The paper explores the life and literary pieces of Japanese writer and poet, Akutogawa Ryunosuke who was one of the first writers of the Japanese modernist movement to be translated widely into English. The paper shows that Akutagawa is probably best known for his single short story "Rashomon", which inspired director Akira Kurosawa's film of that name in 1950. In order to understand the times in which Akutogawa lived and worked, the paper defines modernism and explains the difference between Japanese and Western modernism.

From the Paper:

"The stories that Akutagawa wrote and that Kurosawa adapted were in fact based on stories that had probably been compiled in the 10th century. Akutagawa would over the course of his short professional life adopt many ancient Japanese stories, seeming to prefer tales that were both Gothic and based on pre-modern elements. His settings, as grotesque and bizarre as any that Edgar Allan Poe could ever have dreamed up, would have struck his readers as standing in obvious contrast the to "civilized" state of Western-influenced 20th-century Japan."

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