Late autobiographical stories by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, among them "The Life of a Stupid Man", written shortly before his death in 1927. Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, art name Chōkōdō Shujin, was a Japanese writer active in the Taishō period in Japan. He is regarded as the "father of the Japanese short story", and Japan's premier literary award, the Akutagawa Prize, is named after him. He took his own life at the age of 35 through an overdose of barbital. (Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0)