Hell of Solitude by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa. Translated by Ryan Choi. Prototype Publishing. 2026.
Reviewed by Eric Bies
An airy miscellany of apparently minor poems, short stories, and essays by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, Hell of Solitude probably isn’t the best place to begin with this stupendously gifted author. But neither is it the worst place. When it comes to Akutagawa, arguably the greatest Japanese writer of the twentieth century, there simply isn’t a bad place to begin. In skipping over the canonical works – stories like “Rashomon,” “In a Grove,” and “Hell Screen” – translator Ryan Choi has baffled the very categories of major and minor, prompting an awkward question in the process: How did so much good stuff persist for so long in an untranslated state?
It’s not that we’ve lacked the time. Nearly a century has passed since Akutagawa’s death by suicide in 1927. Nor has the number of his admirers ever really experienced a downswing, and for good reason: even the stuff we’re only seeing now, a century hence – the secondary sketches, the tertiary verses – persists in a line of persuasion that borders on the axiomatic: that Akutagawa, about as genius as they come, was incapable of producing a poorly written page, of which he produced many: some three hundred and fifty works of prose alone.
But he wasn’t just ridiculously prolific or linguistically gifted. He was modern – modern in that the present he wrote for extended far beyond his own – a truth this book makes good on as early as its opening story. In “Seashells,” Akutagawa anticipates the contemporary craze for brute-force juxtaposition, unleashing a rapid-fire sequence of seemingly unrelated vignettes – fifteen of them, including “The Cat,” “Kajika Frogs,” “A Joyous Tragedy,” and “First Kiss” – in what turns out to be less an art-for-art’s-sake exercise in narrative experimentation than a tour of the author’s artistic sensibility. Each abrupt, disjunctive leap amounts to its own personal aesthetic statement, the samplings ranging from the darkly humorous (“If you’re going to haunt me, at least pay me the respect of looking dead.”) to the nihilistically absurd:
At the end of his life, having settled on a career in theatre with a specialty in political dramas, the man secured his first role in a play called The Antarctic Expedition, not in the lead role of Lieutenant Shirase as he had hoped, but in a bit role as a penguin. It was a summer production and the weather was extremely hot. During the man’s one and only scene – in which he waddled across an iceberg – he fainted and died of heatstroke on stage.
In Choi’s translations, the same eminently readable prose that Jorge Luis Borges correctly deemed “always crystal-clear” meets the reader’s mind with as little resistance and as much penetration as it probably ever has. Of course, anyone who’s read and enjoyed a book like Ulysses knows that clarity isn’t everything, but there are certain things clear prose can do that its unclear counterpart cannot. In this case, it opens up vistas of storytelling as old as our capacity to tell them. Specifically, it stabilizes that delicious, destabilizing tendency toward narrative sleight-of-hand that has always made this author seem like the natural consequence of a collision between Daniel Defoe and Meiji Japan. How many stories in this slim volume start out by stringing the reader’s credulity along the outline of some simple yet surprisingly compelling seventeenth-century conceit?
This is a story that I heard from my mother. She first heard it from my great-uncle. I don’t know if it’s fact or fiction, but knowing what I know about my mother’s uncle I believe there’s a good chance that it’s real.
So begins the book’s title story, one of several standout pieces that, taken together, threaten the very notion of a literary dud. This book contains none of them, refusing to prop up, as so much of our literature has become accustomed to doing, a sagging, skippable span of pages. Every one of these entries jostles to sing its quiet, clever, impeccably crafted song, as witness the artfully fragmented essay, “Glimpses of Poe,” in which – all lucidity and startling conjecture – a restless critic tries every vantage of his infamous subject. Projecting a few lines of accidental autobiography along the way, the tragic dimension of Poe’s life neatly conforming to Akutagawa’s own, the latter inevitably speaks for himself when he writes that “all greatness – so it seems – must wait for posterity.”
That greatness wasn’t long in coming for Akutagawa, whose early death spurred the inauguration of a literary prize on the order of the Pulitzer. For better or for worse, the romantic manner of his death (an overdose of Veronal, the same drug with which Stefan Zweig did himself in) formed a touchstone for the tortured Japanese artist in the twentieth century. It also furnished a starting point for many of his own stories, in which precocious young men – acolytes of pain and literature, readers of Bakunin, Baudelaire, and Jean-Christophe – live like characters in a Bolaño novel, which is to say treacherously yet tenderly.
Fruitful comparisons aside, these stories and essays couldn’t have been written by anyone else. Readers expecting fresh spins on the classic Akutagawan subjects – friendship, mental illness, desperation, ambition, artmaking – will not be disappointed. What’s decidedly less of a piece with the rest is the poetry, comparatively little of it having ever been translated into English (for which reason it may not be easy to tell whether the pieces Choi picked are or aren’t representative of their author’s poetic art). What can be said is that they tend toward single-stanza brevity, as many as ten lines on the long end, though it isn’t rare for fewer than five to get the job done. It isn’t haiku, exactly – the images and inflections favor a Yeatsian rather than a Bashoesque palette – but it also isn’t not haiku. As with virtually everything he wrote, Akutagawa never manages to sound more like himself than when he reminds us of another writer. A poem like “My Poetry,” for instance, looks and sounds like a shred of something Wallace Stevens dreamed up.
The sunless lake in the centre of my mind,
the waters that only move sometimes.
Days lengthen – I stare at the light figures in the sunless lake.
Then, by ambush, falling headfirst from the sky, the frogs
with bulging eyes!
My poetry is you.
My poetry is you.
It’s worth noting when a work of the imagination persists as a force in the world outside its maker’s mind. This pricking and prompting of other minds a century removed from its origin can only be described as a miracle. This book does just that, and in doing so provokes an imperative sentence, leveled at all accomplished translators of Japanese (but at Mr. Choi in particular): Keep it coming!
Eric Bies is the founding editor of Orange County Review of Books. His essays and reviews have appeared in World Literature Today, Asymptote, and American Book Review, among others.