Patient X
Subtitle: the case-book of Ryūnosuke Akutagawa
By: David Peace
Edition: First American edition.
Published: 2018
Language: eng
Number of pages: 311
ISBN-13: 9780525521778
Subjects: Fiction
Description: Haunting and evocative, brutal and surreal, these twelve connected tales evoke the life of the Japanese writer Ryūnosuke Akutagawa (1892-1927), whose short story "In the Grove" served as an inspiration for Akira Kurosawa's famous film Rashōmon, and whose narrative use of multiple perspectives and different versions of a single event influenced generations of storytellers. Writing out of his own obsession with Akutagawa, David Peace delves into the known facts and events of the writer's life and inner world--birth to a mother who was mentally ill and a father who died shortly thereafter; his own battles with mental illness; his complicated reaction to the beginnings of modernization and Westernization of Japan; his short but prolific writing career; his suicide at the age of thirty-five--and creates a stunningly atmospheric and deeply moving fiction that tells its own story of a singularly brilliant mind.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (pages 303-308).
Table of contents: title: After the thread, before the thread; title: Hell screens; title: Repetition; title: Jack the Ripper's bedroom; title: A twice-told tale; title: The yellow Christ; title: After the war, before the war; title: The exorcists; title: After the disaster, before the disaster; title: "Saint Kappa"; title: The spectres of Christ; title: After the fact, before the fact; title: Bare bones.