R
Ryūnosuke Akutagawa
Japanese writer active in the Taishō period in Japan. He is regarded as the "father of the Japanese short story", and Japan's premier literary award, the Akutagawa Prize, is named after him.[
The Life of a Stupid Man
Synopsis
Written in the months before Ryūnosuke Akutagawa's suicide in July 1927, The Life of a Stupid Man unfolds as fifty-one brief, numbered vignettes rather than a linear narrative — an impressionistic mosaic of childhood memories, doomed love affairs, artistic ambition, and a mind pulled steadily toward despair. The "stupid man" of the title is a bitterly ironic self-portrait: a writer too intelligent and too self-aware to find peace in anything he understands.