Ryūnosuke Akutagawa

Akutagawa's mother was declared insane months after his birth and he was raised by an aunt and uncle who never let him forget he wasn't quite family. He studied English literature at Tokyo Imperial University and began mining old setsuwa folktale collections and classical anecdotes, retelling them with a modern psychologist's eye: Rashōmon and In a Grove, later fused into Kurosawa's film, and the bitter late satire Kappa, written the year he died.

Fame came fast through his twenties, dozens of stories serialized in major magazines, but so did insomnia, hallucinations, and dread of inherited madness. In 1927 he swallowed a fatal dose of Veronal, leaving behind a note citing 'a vague unease' about the future.

Kikuchi Kan founded the Akutagawa Prize in his memory in 1935; it remains Japan's highest honor for new fiction.