‘The Case-Book of Ryūnosuke Akutagawa’ presents 12 scenes from the life of the writer known as the father of the Japanese short story
We expect biographies to portray events in the real lives of real people; we expect novels to portray imaginary events in the lives of imaginary people. David Peace is not a writer who obeys the usual conventions and assumptions: his work defies expectations.
Peace is best known for the Red Riding quartet, his ferocious series of novels set against the backdrop of the Yorkshire Ripper murders, and for his football novel The Damned Utd, the only truly great novel ever likely to be written about Brian Clough. He has lived for most of his adult life in Tokyo and several of his most recent works have been about post-second world war Japan. His new book engages with Japan in an entirely new and unexpected way. Patient X: The Case-Book of Ryūnosuke Akutagawa is a novel composed of 12 stories which retell incidents from the life and work of the writer who lived from 1892 to 1927 and is often referred to as the father of the Japanese short story; he is renowned in the west as the author of “In a Grove”, which was the basis for Akira Kurosawa’s film Rashōmon.
Patient X is told in Peace’s trademark fragmented, incantatory style, as distinctive in its way as, say, full-blown Henry James, using repetition, hyperbole and italicised interior monologue to create swirling hallucinatory effects. “In his study, sweating and bitten, Ryūnosuke felt like a flying fish, lucklessly fallen onto the dusty deck of a dry-docked ship, to die tormented by the screams of cicadas, tortured by the probosces of mosquitoes.” “You stare at your face, your skin and your skull. […] You are the magician, you are the sorcerer. In your tuxedo, in your top hat.”
Unlikely as it seems, Peace’s extraordinary, highly performative style is as well suited to depicting Akutagawa’s various struggles as a writer as it was to portraying the drama of being Brian Clough. “Down there was a man named Ryūnosuke, who was writing in Hell with all the other sinners. This man had once been an acclaimed author but he had led a most selfish life, hurting even the people who loved him.” This is essentially a novel about a man being confronted with “his selves, his legion of selves – son and father, husband and friend, lover and writer, Man of the East and Man of the West […] his selves and his characters too […] his many creations and, of course, his sins, his countless, countless sins: his pride, his greed, his lust, his anger, his gluttony, his envy and his sloth.”
Peace goes from the very beginning – imagining Akutagawa in his mother’s womb, his father with “his mouth to your mother’s vagina”, calling out, “Can you hear me in there? Do you want to be born … ?” – to the very end, portraying Akutagawa’s death by suicide aged just 35, as observed by others. “The woman sat back down in her seat […] then picked up the newspaper, now holding up its front page, its photograph and headline staring Yasukichi in the face – RYUNOSUKE AKUTAGAWA, RENOWNED AUTHOR, COMMITS SUICIDE AT TABATA HOME”. In between, there are accounts of Akutagawa’s life as a teacher, his friendships and relationships, and his psychic turmoil. An extensive bibliography at the end of the novel suggests that Peace has read everything there is to know about Akutagawa in English translation, and much of what’s to be read in Japanese.
As a portrait of a very particular kind of artist – the tormented genius, obsessed with the nature of the self and the impossibility of true self-knowledge and self-depiction – the book is accurate and profoundly revealing. Raised by his aunt and uncle after his mother’s mental breakdown, Akutagawa grows up timid and afraid – “Afraid of the doors, afraid of the floors” – and becomes a bookish teenager inhabiting a “secondhand world of words”, with a life that is “always, already secondhand, secondhand”. He seeks out friendships and relationships with other Japanese writers – Jun’ichirō Tanizaki, Natsume Sōseki – and becomes immersed in the literatures of both east and west, drawn towards doppelgangers and figures of uncanny, unexplained encounters. (In his introduction to Jay Rubin’s standard English translation of Akutagawa’s work, Rashōmon and Seventeen Other Stories, published in 2006, Haruki Murakami pays tribute to Akutagawa’s work, which has clearly influenced his own.)
One of the most complex and memorable stories in the book, the phantasmagoric “Jack the Ripper’s Bedroom”, is an imagining of Sōseki’s famously miserable time spent in London, as retold to Akutagawa. Dense with literary allusions, the story reads like something by Edgar Allan Poe set in Edwardian London with a Japanese protagonist, and concludes with a nod and a wink to Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. With Patient X, one begins to see that Peace’s achievement is not merely as an English prose stylist, or as someone who merges genres, or indeed even as a political writer challenging what appears to be the natural order, but as a transnational figure challenging all categories of containment.
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