Includes bibliographical references (pages 291-296)

Ryunosuke Akutagawa was one of Japan's great writers - author of the stories 'Rashomon' and 'In a Bamboo Grove', most famously - who lived through Japan's turbulent Taisho period of 1912 to 1926, including the devastating 1923 Earthquake, only to take his own life at the age of just thirty-five in 1927. -- Inspired and informed by Akutagawa's stories, essays and letters, David Peace has fashioned a most extraordinary novel of tales. An intense, passionate, haunting paean to one writer, it also thrillingly explores the act and obsession of writing itself, and the role of the artist, both in public and private life, in times which darkly mirror our own.