Vanity and Unease

A machine that weighs the worth of a book. A comic mask that outlives its wearer. A bow that cannot be taken back. A beggar with a pistol in a deserted shop. A young wife’s dread of a Western-style dinner. A bowl of sweet bean soup.

Vanity and Unease collects eight pieces by Akutagawa Ryūnosuke (1892–1927), written between 1915 and the summer of his death, in a new English translation. They are comedies of self-regard and small humiliations, sharpened by the author’s irony and, here and there, by something darker underneath.

Inside: