Patient X: The Case-Book of Ryunosuke Akutagawa

Description

Ryuosuke Akutagawa was one of Japan's great writers. He lived through Japan's turbulent Taisho period, including the devastating 1923 earthquake, only to take his own life at the age of just thirty-five in 1927. Inpsired by Akutagawa's stories, essays and letters, David Peace has fashioned an extraordinary novel of tales. An intense, passionate, haunting paean to one writer, it also thrillingly explores the act of writing itself, and the role of the artist, both in public and private life, in times which darkly mirror our own.

David Peace - named in 2003 as one of Granta's Best of Young British Novelists - was born and brought up in Yorkshire. He is the author of the Red Riding Quartet (Nineteen Seventy Four, Nineteen Seventy Seven, Nineteen Eighty, and Nineteen Eighty Three), GB84, which was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, The Damned Utd, and Red or Dead, which was shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize. The final part of his Tokyo Trilogy - to follow Tokyo Year Zero and Occupied City - is Patient X, his tenth novel. He lives in Tokyo.