Mandarins: Stories by Ryunosuke Akutagawa

Prefiguring the vital modernist voices of the Western literary canon, Akutagawa writes with a trenchant psychological precision that exposes the shifting traditions & ironies of early twentieth-century Japan & reveals his own strained connection to it. These stories are moving glimpses into a cast of characters at odds with the society around them, singular portraits that soar effortlessly toward the universal. “What good is intelligence if you cannot discover a useful melancholy?” 

Akutagawa once mused. Both piercing intelligence & “useful melancholy” buoy this remarkable collection. Mandarins contains three stories published in English for the first time: "An Evening Conversation," "An Enlightened Husband," & "Winter."

°°° 

During a writing career that spanned little more than twenty years, Ryūnosuke Akutagawa (1892-1927) produced hundreds of short stories. Most of the stories in this collection have early modern settings: the world of trains, newspapers, & Western intellectual fashions. Sometimes we glimpse elements of the macabre for which Akutagawa is renowned, but on the whole the emphasis is on the day-to-day life of which the writer had direct personal experience in the early years of the 20th century. We also glimpse the changing & still uncertain role of women in Japan’s new society. The most important literary prize in Japan is the Akutagawa prize, & Borges was a great devotee of his work. 

°°° 

“Each story, a carefully constructed world of sadness & a kind of hopeless beauty, is precisely described in spare & graceful sentences. As a group, they linger & tease & disturb. . . . They plunge fearlessly into the place that lies between sanity & madness, between tradition & modernity, between the past & the future. Creations of the beginning of the last century, they could easily have been written yesterday, & will last far beyond tomorrow.” — Rain Taxi