Patient X: The Case-Book of Ryunosuke Akutagawa

by David Peace Narrated by Ric Jerrom

Overview

The acclaimed author of Occupied City, Tokyo Year Zero, and The Red Riding Quartet now gives us a stunning work of fiction in twelve connected tales that take up the strange, brief life of the brilliant twentieth-century Japanese writer Ry¿nosuke Akutagawa.

Haunting and evocative, brutal and surreal, these twelve connected tales evoke the life of the Japanese writer Ry¿nosuke Akutagawa (1892-1927), whose short story "In the Grove" served as an inspiration for Akira Kurosawa's famous film Rash¿mon, and whose narrative use of multiple perspectives and different versions of a single event influenced generations of storytellers. Writing out of his own obsession with Akutagawa, David Peace delves into the known facts and events of the writer's life and inner world--birth to a mother who was mentally ill and a father who died shortly thereafter; his own battles with mental illness; his complicated reaction to the beginnings of modernization and Westernization of Japan; his short but prolific writing career; his suicide at the age of thirty-five--and creates a stunningly atmospheric and deeply moving fiction that tells its own story of a singularly brilliant mind.

Editorial Reviews

The New York Times Book Review - Christopher Benfey

…dazzling, dizzying…For readers unfamiliar with Akutagawa…Peace's book provides a vivid, if challenging, introduction. Patient X is an uncanny act of ventriloquism, fusing Akutagawa's jagged storytelling voice with Peace's own pulsing narration…Peace's deft novel leaves us wondering whether Akutagawa was a saint or a madman, a great writer or a bad husband. Or, Rashomon-like, some combination of this bewildering "legion of selves."

Publishers Weekly

07/09/2018
In this sly, intermittently arresting novel, Peace (Occupied City) draws on the life and work of Ryu¯nosuke Akutagawa, a Japanese author “dogged with accusations of unoriginality,” to create a sui generis portrait. Peace has written two fictional biographies of British soccer coaches and turns to a more bookish subject here: a tortured writer best known for the short story that was adapted into the Akira Kurosawa film Rashomon. The novel is composed of 12 tales from various periods in Akutagawa’s life, beginning inside his mother’s womb, where he is unsure he wants to be “born into this world.” His noisy birth presages existential agonies: “you scream, alone, alone, you scream and you scream.” In similarly portentous style, Peace narrates the prolific writer’s artistic apprenticeship, spiritual struggle, growing fascination with Christianity, and suicide in middle age. Peace captures his subject’s febrile sensibility, the way literature forms and deforms him. Reading Poe, a major influence, makes Akutagawa feel “the fragility of his mind, so easily, easily fragmented and torn, shattered and ripped into so many, many pieces.” Akutagawa’s own writing is marked by “a frantic intensity, filling the decaying world of this supernatural story with horrific beasts.” Some of the tales capture Akutagawa’s mesmerizing energy, while others are wan, if devoted, homages, making this book most recommendable to fans of Akutagawa. (Sept.)

From the Publisher

Dazzling. . . . An uncanny act of ventriloquism, fusing Akutagawa’s jagged storytelling voice with Peace’s own pulsing narration.” —The New York Times Book Review

“A lyrical masterpiece that takes up Japan and the circumstances of life in the past, present and beyond. . . . Astounding.” —The Japan Times
 
“His best to date, to my mind.”  —David Mitchell, The Guardian
 
“Superlative: exacting, precise and filled with the suffocating sense of foreboding generated by the master’s own best stories. . . . Peace is not simply a masterfully controlled stylist but a magnificently atmospheric one, composing hypnotic collages.” —Financial Times

“One might say that what Peace does with words is impossible to adequately describe with words. . . . [He] has written a biography in fiction. He has assumed Ryūnosuke Akutagawa’s writing soul. . . . Yet, the possibility that Peace’s fiction is not all his own never enters the reader’s mind. To not only attempt such a feat, but to carry it out in a work that is not autobiographical in any shape or form is further proof of Peace’s mastery of the art of fiction.” —Counterpunch
 
“David Peace is not a writer who obeys the usual conventions and assumptions: his work defies expectations. . . . With Patient X, one begins to see that Peace’s achievement is not merely as an English prose stylist, or as someone who merges genres, or indeed even as a political writer challenging what appears to be the natural order, but as a transnational figure challenging all categories of containment.” —Ian Sansom, The Guardian
 
“[A] forceful stylist with . . .  a taste for the weird, all of which makes [Peace] a good match for Akutagawa.” —The Wall Street Journal
 
“Beautiful, gothic and powerfully mysterious.” —Esquire (UK)
 
“An imaginative glimpse behind the curtain of a sheltered, definitively troubled writer of a century past. . . . [Patient X] has an elegant poetry to it.” —Kirkus Reviews
 
“By combining history, oral tradition, surrealism, and a Poe-like grittiness, the always innovative Peace reimagines the life of a gifted writer who died young by his own hand.” —Booklist
 
“A surreal world in which madmen, doppelgangers and demons rub shoulders with Christ, Buddha and Jack the Ripper. . . . One of the most original and intriguing books you’ll read this year.”  —The Mail on Sunday
 
“Brilliant. . . . Peace is one of the best and most peculiar writers in English today. . . . The kaleidoscopic effect of Patient X gives English-language audiences their best chance of insight into the strange mental amalgamation that allowed Akutagawa to construct his fiction.” —The Washington Free Beacon
 
“Further proof, if proof were needed, that David Peace is one of Britain’s (and the world’s) most gifted and original novelists.” —Sydney Morning Herald
 
“A riskily complex novel. . . . Think Dostoevsky, but also Edgar Allan Poe and Paul Auster . . . Intricate. . . . Lyrical.”  —Clive Lowdon, The Sunday Times (London)
 
“The most illuminating commentary possible that Anglophone readers could find on this compelling figure.” —The Daily Telegraph

Kirkus Reviews

2018-06-18
An imaginative glimpse behind the curtain of a sheltered, definitively troubled writer of a century past."In the next life, if there is such a punishment, I wish to be reborn as sand." So says Ry?nosuke Akutagawa (1892-1927), the protagonist and reluctant center of Peace's (Red or Dead, 2014, etc.) latest venture into fact-based fiction—and not as much a departure from his procedurals as one might imagine, either. Presented as a series of sketches, the book proceeds from one turning point to another while emphasizing constant themes, opening with a parable that speaks to Akutagawa's idiosyncratic blending of Buddhism with Christianity; "I am not surprised," says a psychiatrist, archly, when Akutagawa travels to Nagasaki, the most Christian of all Japanese cities, though Akutagawa's interests turn out to be more nuanced than all that. Another constant is Akutagawa's obsession with death, beginning with that opening parable and continuing right up until his own suicide at age 35, having left behind a note complaining about his "vague sense of anxiety." A section of the book finds Akutagawa fascinated by the ritual death of a general and his wife after the death of the emperor, following an ancient though outlawed custom by which a retainer must accompany a master into the afterlife: "the newspapers were all agreed that General Nogi had committed junshi, following his lord into death, and then Shizuko had taken her own life, a true samurai wife following her husband into death." Akutagawa, Peace suggests, may just have been taking a place in that chain of suicides, all in obedience to an emperor whose death signaled the arrival of a "new age, a new era!" in which the writer would not comfortably fit. Though the book is a touch too pensive, it has an elegant poetry to it, even in the horrific passages depicting the great earthquake of 1923.Quiet homage to the progenitor of the modern Japanese short story.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940172082054
Publisher:	Penguin Random House
Publication date:	09/04/2018
Edition description:	Unabridged

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Excerpted from "Patient X"
by .
Copyright © 2018 David Peace.
Excerpted by permission of Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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