Ryūnosuke Akutagawa takes us back to medieval Japan, Robert Macfarlane journeys deep underground … author Tade Thompson shares his favourites
It may not be the apocalypse we anticipated, but even in a dystopia of handwashing, social distancing and coughing into the elbow, there are always books. After we return from scavenging in the wasteland of civilisation, we can still range far and wide in the world of imagination.
Ryūnosuke Akutagawa takes us back to medieval Japan in Rashōmon and Seventeen Other Stories. Published in a brief flowering after the outbreak of the first world war in 1914, these short stories remain as arresting and disturbing as ever. Two of the tales, “Rashōmon” and “In a Bamboo Grove”, spawned a film by Akira Kurosawa with a series of contradictory narrators that brought a fresh approach to cinema. Stories such as “Loyalty”tackle the ideas of honour and duty in the samurai code head on, but many of them have moral subtexts. “The Nose” and “Dragon” can both be read as a critique of religious leaders eschewing the spiritual for the physical. While the earlier stories are more conventionally striking in terms of voice and structure, the later, autobiographical tales reflect the writer’s steady disintegration into mental illness.
Tade Thompson’s Making Wolf is published by Little, Brown.
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