SOURCE: Introduction to Tales Grotesque and Curious by Akutagawa Ryunosuke, translated by Glenn W. Shaw, The Hokuseido Press, 1930, pp. i-vii.

In the following essay, Shaw gives an account of Akutagawa's influences and development as a short story writer.

[Akutagawa's] graduation thesis was entitled, Wiriamu Morisu Kenkyū (A Study of William Morris).

He was like Morris in his surrender to the fascination of the Middle Ages, but he had none of the practical reforming tendencies of that artist socialist. He has been more aptly compared to Flaubert for the seriousness with which he took his art and the preciousness of his style. And the post-bellum point of view has been expressed by a Japanese social worker who, at his death, compared him, as a man with a keen sense of humor and knowledge of human nature and “an arbiter of elegance in the vicious society in which he lived...