Patient X
The Case-Book of Ryunosuke Akutagawa
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
In these twelve interconnected tales, David Peace—acclaimed author of the Red Riding Quartet, Occupied City, and Tokyo Year Zero—weaves fact and fiction as he takes up the brief but fiercely lived life of the early-twentieth-century Japanese writer Ryūnosuke Akutagawa. Unique and offbeat, Patient X delves into Akutagawa’s rich and complicated private life: his fears and battles with mental illness; his complex reaction to the Westernization of Japan; his exacting creative process; and his suicide, weaving these facets into a hauntingly evocative portrait. But Patient X is more than a paean to one remarkable writer: it is also an incandescent exploration of the act and obsession of writing itself, and of the role of the artist in times that darkly mirror our own.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this sly, intermittently arresting novel, Peace (Occupied City) draws on the life and work of Ryu nosuke Akutagawa, a Japanese author "dogged with accusations of unoriginality," to create a sui generis portrait. Peace has written two fictional biographies of British soccer coaches and turns to a more bookish subject here: a tortured writer best known for the short story that was adapted into the Akira Kurosawa film Rashomon. The novel is composed of 12 tales from various periods in Akutagawa's life, beginning inside his mother's womb, where he is unsure he wants to be "born into this world." His noisy birth presages existential agonies: "you scream, alone, alone, you scream and you scream." In similarly portentous style, Peace narrates the prolific writer's artistic apprenticeship, spiritual struggle, growing fascination with Christianity, and suicide in middle age. Peace captures his subject's febrile sensibility, the way literature forms and deforms him. Reading Poe, a major influence, makes Akutagawa feel "the fragility of his mind, so easily, easily fragmented and torn, shattered and ripped into so many, many pieces." Akutagawa's own writing is marked by "a frantic intensity, filling the decaying world of this supernatural story with horrific beasts." Some of the tales capture Akutagawa's mesmerizing energy, while others are wan, if devoted, homages, making this book most recommendable to fans of Akutagawa.
Customer Reviews
Hmm
It spooked and scared me, like no other. Well written,