Product Overview
Prefiguring the vital modernist voices of the Western literary canon, Akutagawa writes with a trenchant psychological precision that exposes the shifting traditions and ironies of early twentieth-century Japan and reveals his own strained connection to it. These stories are moving glimpses into a cast of characters at odds with the society around them, singular portraits that soar effortlessly toward the universal. What good is intelligence if you cannot discover a useful melancholy? Akutagawa once mused. Both piercing intelligence and useful melancholy buoy this remarkable collection. Mandarins contains three stories published in English for the first time: An Evening Conversation, An Enlightened Husband, and Winter.
