Rashomon and Other Stories (Tuttle Classics)
"There are enough Swiftian touches in Akutagawa to show his hatred of stupidity, greed, hypocrisy, and the rising jingoism of the day. But Akutagawa's artistic integrity kept him from joining his contemporaries in the easy social criticism or naive introspectionàWhat he did was question the values of his society, dramatize the complexities of human psychology, and study, with a Zen taste for paradox, the balance of illusion and reality."—Howard Hibbett