Patient X

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, Ryunosuke Akutagawa.

Haunting and evocative, brutal and surreal, these twelve connected tales evoke the life of the Japanese writer Ryūnosuke Akutagawa (1892-1927) whose short story, "In the Grove" served as an inspiration for Kurosawa''s famous film Rashōmon; 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 35--and creates a stunningly atmospheric and deeply moving fiction that tells its own story of a singularly brilliant mind.