‘Hell of Solitude’ by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa (Review)

As some of you may have seen on social media recently, an enjoyable reread of Anri Yasuda’s excellent Beauty Matters: Modern Japanese Literature and the Question of Aesthetics – 1890-1930 had me caving in once again and reaching for my wallet. I ended up with four new books, one for each of the main chapters, and I’ll hopefully be getting to each of them in turn over the coming months. However, I was actually fortunate enough to get one of them as a review copy, courtesy of Prototype Publishing, a new book from a writer whose name looms large in Japanese literature – even if, according to the foreword, it doesn’t really loom large enough outside his native country… ***** Hell of Solitude (translated by Ryan Choi) is a collection of various texts by Japanese writer Ryūnosuke Akutagawa. A master of short fiction, he blazed a trail through the Japanese literary world before taking his own life in 1927 at the tender age of thirty five. He’s certainly well-known round these parts, but in…