“One autumn night”

Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, “The Christ of Nanjing.” 1920. In The Essential Akutagawa: Twenty-Two Short Stories by Japan's Master Storyteller, trans. Richard Medhurst (Rutland, VT: Tuttle, 2025).

This story’s opening paragraphs made me think right away of James Joyce’s “Eveline.” So I was excited to learn that in 1919 Akutagawa purchased copies of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and one other book by Joyce. Was it the slim poetry volume Chamber Music , the Ibsen-like play Exiles , or Dubliners ? My guess is that it was Dubliners . Akutagawa later translated excerpts from A Portrait of the Artist into Japanese.

I caught on to Akutagawa by reading The Life of a Stupid Man , no. 56 in the Penguin Little Black Classics series (2015).

Also from Akutagawa
Cut ear, long pipe