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Book synopsis

A writer haunted by raincoats, fires, doubles, and translucent cogwheels moves through hotel rooms, trains, bookshops, family houses, and the edge of madness. In Cogwheels, Ryunosuke Akutagawa turns ordinary modern life into a field of omens, where every object seems to point toward collapse.

Cogwheels and Other Stories brings together six late and psychologically intense works: Cogwheels, A Fool's Life, Genkaku's Villa, Death Register, Mirage, and A Note to a Certain Old Friend. The volume ranges from hallucinatory confession and autobiographical fragments to family decay, graveside memory, optical illusion, and the lucid terror of self-examination.

Akutagawa stands among the defining masters of modern Japanese short fiction. His work transformed classical learning, urban unease, irony, and psychological precision into narratives whose clarity often makes their darkness more unsettling.

This collection offers a concentrated encounter with Akutagawa at his most inward and severe: visionary, controlled, unsparing, and still one of Japan's most influential literary voices.

Book details

• Full title: Cogwheels
• Subtitle: and Other Stories
• Author: Ryunosuke Akutagawa, Yuko Yamashita
• Language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 104
• EAN: 9798181373693
• ID: 52857763
• Publisher: Independently published
• Weight: 112 g
• Dimensions: 203 × 127 × 5 mm
• Date of publishing: 13. June 2026

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