Hello and welcome to the History of Japan podcast. This is Demetria Spinrad filling in for Isaac Meyer.

I do want to apologize in advance for my pronunciation in this podcast. I'm not actually trained in Japanese,

and I will probably butcher some of the names. This week, we're going to talk about a man

who was arguably one of the leading figures of modern Japanese literature.

Though his life was relatively short, he was until recently, easily the best-known Japanese author in the U.S.

Arguably, he's since been dethroned by the rising wave of interest in Murakami Haruki.

This week, we're going to talk about Akutagawa Ryunosuke.

Akutagawa was born in Tokyo on March 1, 1892, during the height of the Meiji period.

His parents were Nihara Toshizo, father, and Nihara Fuku, mother. His name, Ryunosuke, is a reference to the year of his birth,

which is the year of the dragon. Ryunosuke means something roughly like of the dragon. At a very young

age, he was forced to leave the home of his birth parents. His mother was committed to a mental institution

shortly after his birth. I have yet to find a decisive answer regarding exactly why, and his father

felt inadequate to the task of raising him alone. Instead, his maternal uncle adopted him and

raised him as his own son.

That uncle's name was Akutagawa Dosho, so the young Runeoske also took the family name of a Kudagawa for himself.

Ryunosuke was an exceptionally bright child.

He was able to gain admission to the Tokyo Daichi Kogiooki or Ichikyo, the top-ranked high school in the country,

and yes, the same one with the awesome baseball team.

He developed an interest in literature and began devouring everything he could get his hands on.

He was especially fond of Western literature,

as well as the two great Japanese literati of the Meiji period, Mori Ogai and Natsume Soseki.

Unusually for children of his generation, he also had an interest in classical Japanese and Chinese literature.

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