Akutagawa Ryūnosuke

Akutagawa Ryūnosuke was born in Tokyo in 1892. Soon after his birth his mother went mad, and he was raised by his uncle's family. While a student of English at Tokyo Imperial University he published the story 'The Nose', which won the warm praise of Natsume Sōseki and launched his career. Widely read in the literatures of East and West, he often drew his material from old Japanese collections such as the Konjaku Monogatari, shaping it into finely built stories of cool psychological insight; he wrote more than a hundred and fifty in all. In 1927, in what he called 'a vague unease about the future', he took his own life at the age of thirty-five. In 1935 his friend Kikuchi Kan founded the Akutagawa Prize in his memory, still the most important award for literary fiction in Japan.