Patient X: The Case-Book of Ryūnosuke Akutagawa was published by Faber and Faber in 2018. Ryūnosuke Akutagawa (1892-1927) was one of the greatest Japanese short story writers — author of “Rashōmon” and “In a Grove” (the sources for Kurosawa’s film), master of the psychological tale, and a figure who descended into madness and suicide at thirty-five. Peace reimagines his life through twelve stories that blend historical fact, literary allusion, and invented narrative.
The stories are not biography — they do not follow Akutagawa’s life chronologically or attempt conventional portrait. Instead, they circle around the themes that obsessed both Akutagawa and Peace: the relationship between art and madness, the way literature feeds on and is fed by suffering, the impossibility of distinguishing between fiction and reality when the writer’s consciousness has dissolved the boundary.
Peace’s style — the repetition, the incantatory rhythm, the dissolution of linear time — finds its perfect subject in Akutagawa, whose own late stories (the hallucinatory “Cogwheels,” the fragmentary “A Fool’s Life”) employed similar techniques. The book is simultaneously an homage, a literary critical study, and a self-portrait: Peace writing about the writer he most resembles, recognizing in Akutagawa’s obsessiveness and formal radicalism a mirror of his own practice.
Collecting Patient X
First edition (Faber and Faber, London, 2018): Cloth with dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $20–$45
- Very good: $10–$20