Literary, All Too Literary

What gives a work of fiction its life: an ingenious plot, a poetic spirit, or something harder to name? Akutagawa Ryūnosuke pursues the question through forty essays that move between literary argument, personal recollection, painting, poetry, and the artist’s place in society.

Beginning with an exchange with Tanizaki Jun’ichirō, Literary, All Too Literary turns to Shiga Naoya, Mori Ōgai, Natsume Sōseki, and other Japanese writers, alongside Renard, Heine, Dante, and the painters Gauguin and Renoir. Akutagawa weighs the claims of realism, proletarian literature, and new sensations, while asking how originality arises and what artistic perfection does to the desire for action.

Published in 1927, the year of Akutagawa’s death, these essays reveal a searching and often self-questioning critic. This complete English translation preserves all forty sections, their quotations and verse, and the uncertainties and sharp judgments of the original. Brief notes clarify names, period terms, and textual problems.