Akutagawa's interest in collections such as the
Konjaku Monogatari (circa 1120; translated in part as
Tales of Times Now Past by Marian Ury, 1979) and
Uji Shui Monogatari (1210-1220; translated as
A Collection of Tales from Uji by D. E. Mills, 1970) contributed to a twentieth-century revival of interest in such collections. Well schooled in both Chinese and English, Akutagawa possessed a level of cosmopolitan erudition near that of Natsume Sseki, an older writer and intellectual who predicted a great future for him.
Akutagawa Ryunosuke was born in Tokyo, where he remained a lifelong resident. His family name was Niihara (which some scholars also read as Niibara), and Ryunosuke kept this family name until he was twelve years old, when his mother's family formally adopted him and he became an Akutagawa. At the time of Ryunosuke's birth, his father was forty-two years old and his mother was thirty-three years old--a combination which, according to a peculiar folk belief that holds these ages to be inauspicious, marked the infant as vulnerable to misfortune. As a protective measure Ryunosuke immediately had to undergo the ritual of "abandonment and recovery"--that is, to be adopted briefly by another family before being returned to his parents' home.
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