Length: 311 pages
Genre: Historical fiction
Ryunosuke Akutagawa was a highly acclaimed Japanese writer, known as "the Father of the Japanese short story". He lived in the turbulent Taisho period and survived the devastating 1923 Tokyo earthquake, before taking his own life in 1927 at the age of 35.
Patient X documents the strange, short life of Akutagawa in a kind of fictionalised biography. David Peace is an English novelist who now lives in Tokyo. He first came to prominence with the "Red Riding Quartet" a series of crime novels set against the backdrop of the Yorkshire Ripper case, and then GB84, a fictional account of the 1984 Miner's Strike in England, two sports novels: The Damned Utd and Red or Dead, and the "Tokyo Trilogy": Tokyo Year Zero (2007), Occupied City (2009) with the third volume set to be published in 2020. Peace's style is to take real people and incidents and embroider a fictional narrative. In his prose he mixes narrative voices, repeated phrases and different styles to create a surreal, hallucinatory style.
Patient X consists of connected short stories from the life of Akutagawa adapted from Akutagawa's own essays, letters and fiction. Ryunosuke Akutagawa is probably best known for the short stories "Rashomon" and "In the Grove", which were adapted by Akira Kurosawa for the 1950 film Rashomon. In fact, Kurosawa himself is briefly referenced in the book. It's not necessary to iknow about Akutagawa to appreciate the book, although it helps. The narrative takes us inside Akutagawa's troubled mind creating a strange, nightmarish world, where the real world exists, cheek by jowl, with ghosts, monsters, angels and demons.
It's often disturbing, sometimes beautiful and often just plain weird. The book is also a book about writing, and the healing power of art and creativity in dark times.
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