Patient X: The Case-Book of Ryunosuke Akutagawa
Japanese fiction is replete with a searing obsession with darkness and beauty, which is exemplified in David Peace’s latest novel. It is a chronological series of personal, literary and historical anecdotes about the haunted mind of the central character, writer Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, as much formed by the influence of profound familial mental illness as the devastating effects of war and the beginning of Westernization in Japan.
The first vignette is a Dante-like story of the Gautama Buddha, Jesus, and Ryūnosuke communicating between heaven and hell; the tale is so haunting to the characters within and the reader to make one hold one’s breath with anxiety. This is Ryūnosuke’s obsessive world, shown through the story of the Rashōmon Gate (which strongly influenced movie director Akira Kurosawa’s later film Rashomon in 1950), leaving the viewer mired in absolute darkness. The same effect follows Ryūnosuke’s obsessive reflections on the death of the last Meiji emperor and the suicide of General Nogi and his wife during the emperor’s funeral.
Wonderful chapters follow, depicting great writers such as Edgar Allan Poe, Junichiro Tanizaki, and others who wrote about the intense persecution (kuzure) of Japanese Christians. Other tales concern the writer known as Tock, whose dreams and tales are about creatures writing about other creatures writing about other creatures, etc., in his “demon cave.” These parts of the novel are purely surrealistic but definitively convey the tone of unreality, darkness and despair that eventually culminate in the horrific demise of our main character. In a sense, this is a creative portrait of late 19th-century Japan unready but forced to enter a new, modern age. Excellent historical fiction!
