In Dreams
Translated by Ryan Choi
About
Fifty-one pieces — flash fiction, vignettes, two short plays — from the writer who invented the modern Japanese short story. But these aren't the canonical tales. These are the deep cuts: observations about the Great Kantō Earthquake, friends described as food, folklore retellings compressed to a single page, dream journals that blur into fiction. This collection, appearing in English for the first time, reframes Akutagawa as something more playful and experimental than his reputation suggests. The man who wrote "Rashōmon" also wrote prose poems, absurdist sketches, and pieces so short they barely qualify as stories. In Dreams reveals an Akutagawa who was testing the limits of how small a story can be and still hold a human truth.
