Cogwheels and Other Stories

About

In the final years of his life, Akutagawa Ryūnosuke — one of Japan's most revered literary figures — produced stories that stripped away the historical settings of his earlier work to confront the modern psyche directly. This collection gathers those late masterpieces alongside earlier gems, revealing an artist whose imagination ranged from feudal samurai to contemporary Tokyo with equal precision. What sets Akutagawa apart is his ability to compress entire worlds into a few pages. Each story operates like a trap: elegant, inevitable, and deeply unsettling in its revelations about human nature. His prose moves with the economy of haiku and the force of a parable. The title story, written months before his suicide at thirty-five, remains one of literature's most harrowing portraits of a mind consuming itself — and one of its most beautiful.