By C.D. Rose.
Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, Hell of Solitude, trans. Ryan Choi (Prototype, 2026).
Ryūnosuke Akutagawa had literary beef with Junichirō Tanizaki. In 1927, via essays in small literary magazines (a better forum than any social media platform, surely) the two eminent Japanese writers politely swiped back and forth at each other about truth, imagination, the poetic spirit and, chiefly, the necessity – or otherwise – of having a good plot. Tanizaki insisted a strong plot was everything, the essential architecture of fiction upon which everything else depended and flourished; Akutagawa claimed plots covered up the profound truths that fiction could reveal were it not so bothered with who did what to whom and when and why and how.
As they delved more deeply into the role of a narrating ‘I’, the possibility of representing another person’s mental state or processes, if raw experience can even be shown when transmuted by language, and the possibility of a ‘plotless novel’ or a ‘story without a story’, however, they each realised their own arguments were unravelling before them: Akutagawa and Tanizaki were not actually contradicting each other, but themselves.
Given that, it is perhaps not surprising that Tanizaki’s most famous work in the West is perhaps his elegant long essay In Praise of Shadows and Akutagawa is probably most known for his story ‘In a Bamboo Grove’ (which was adapted to become Akira Kurosawa’s film Rashōmon.) The former is richly digressive and utterly compelling despite having no plot whatsoever; the latter is as close to pure plot (and its complications) as could be imagined.
A new collection of Akutagawa’s work, Hell of Solitude (Protoype, trans. Ryan Choi), both encapsulates and expands upon these arguments. Presenting a range of shorter pieces – stories, poems, essays, and mixtures of all the three – the book offers a map of its writer’s obsessions, questions, processes and approaches.
In an introduction that is worth the cover price alone, Polly Barton notes the ‘offhand, dispassionate boldness’ of Akutagawa’s storytelling, how he dispenses with the traditional tropes of Japanese fiction while acknowledging that he’s throwing them off as he’s doing it. This is a man who has learned the ropes and has decided to rid himself of them to find that what is left behind is more interesting, if occasionally more oblique.
‘Seashells,’ for example, consists of fifteen numbered sections, each one a tiny story (some realist; others surreal; some narrative; other imagistic), none of which have anything to do with seashells; ‘The Zoo’ is an Edward Lear-ish bestiary, forty animals summed up in a way that is puckish, rebarbative, and charming; ‘The Battle of the Crab and the Monkey’ is a continuation of a Japanese folk-tale, dragging it into the reality of the modern world.
As well as these pieces, there are a number of what appear to be more traditional narratives where that narrating ‘I’ tells of friendships, or memories, or recounts stories once told to them. Many of these resemble the work of Akutagawa’s near contemporary, Yasunari Kawabata, and his Palm-of- the-Hand Stories: in both cases, brevity magnifies intensity, with seemingly offhand accounts registering in the consciousness like dimly remembered dreams.
The prose pieces are interspersed with eighteen short poems which function as pauses, breaths or reflections, which lend greater heft to the prose pieces, though a different reading might see the poems as being the elliptical results of their explanatory prose counterparts: like the entire book, in fact, it depends on which way you choose to look at it.
In his introduction to Jay Rubin’s translations of the stories (Rashōmon, Penguin Classics), Haruki Murakami claims Akutagawa lay at various intersections: between the Meiji and Taishō eras, the old order giving painful way to a new one; between the traditional and the Western; between the lower middle class world into which he was born and an emerging literary class, and suggests that this shaped his attitude to form. This may all be valid, and yet – with the help of Ryan Choi’s fluid and confident translations – what a modern Western reader may derive from this collection is something other. What emerges is a figure that is certainly mercurial, in a way that is constantly interesting if difficult to pin down.
In the epigrammatic essay ‘Art and Other Matters’, Akutagawa mentions Cézanne, but it’s Satie I think of. Hell of Solitude – the grim title is misleading – is Satie-esque: surface simplicity meets technical complexity, playfulness and utter seriousness walk hand-in-hand, brevity is a delight, evanescence a risk of life, and form to be used capriciously. Both artists refused to engage the world on anything other than their own artistic terms, and posterity is now able to recognise their value.
ABOUT THE REVIEWER
C.D. Rose is the author of five books, most recently We Live Here Now, which was awarded the Goldsmiths Prize in 2025 and is out in paperback in May 2026.
