About this item
The acclaimed author of Occupied City, Tokyo Year Zero, and The Red Riding Quartet now gives us a stunning work of fiction in twelve connected tales that take up the strange, brief life of the brilliant twentieth-century Japanese writer Rynosuke Akutagawa.Haunting and evocative, brutal and surreal, these twelve connected tales evoke the life of the Japanese writer Rynosuke Akutagawa (1892-1927) , whose short story "In the Grove" served as an inspiration for Akira Kurosawa's famous film Rashmon, and whose narrative use of multiple perspectives and different versions of a single event influenced generations of storytellers. Writing out of his own obsession with Akutagawa, David Peace delves into the known facts and events of the writer's life and inner world--birth to a mother who was mentally ill and a father who died shortly thereafter; his own battles with mental illness; his complicated reaction to the beginnings of modernization and Westernization of Japan; his short but prolific writing career; his suicide at the age of thirty-five--and creates a stunningly atmospheric and deeply moving fiction that tells its own story of a singularly brilliant mind.
About the Author
David Peace is the author of the Red Riding Quartet, GB84, The Damned Utd, Tokyo Year Zero, and Occupied City. He was chosen as one of Granta's Best Young British Novelists of 2003, and has received the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, the German Crime Fiction Award, and France's Grand Prix du Roman Noir for Best Foreign Novel. In 2007, he was named as GQ (UK) Writer of the Year. He lived in Tokyo for fifteen years before returning to his native Yorkshire.
