About the book: 2024 / If you want to understand the Japanese soul and mentality, you need to read the short prose of Akutagawa Ryunosuke. Read slowly and thoughtfully and re-read again and again, catching hints and subtexts and discovering hidden depths of meaning beneath the clean surface. This collection includes works from different years - short stories and very short, laconic stories and miniatures in Japanese, in which much more is implied (and, accordingly, read) than is written. Serious and ironic, but invariably elegant stylizations of medieval prose, in which Akutagawa still has no equal among Japanese writers, sad and ironic fairy tales and parables and texts in the more Europeanized genre of psychological realism, which was nevertheless invariably refracted by the author under a completely national angle…