SOURCE: “Akutagawa and the ‘Western’ Short Story,” in Revue de Litterature Comparee, Vol. 65, No. 2, April, 1991, pp. 175–83.

In the following essay, Goyet contends that Akutagawa's short stories are stylistically and thematically situated in-between the standards of Western and Eastern short fiction.

The Japanese did not have a special word for “short story” before the last years of the XIXth century. Up to that time, the same word monogatari was used indifferently: e.g., for the Genji monogatari and its thousands of pages, and for the Ugetsu monogatari of Ueda Akinari, tales of a few pages each. Length had never been a criterion for judging a prose work. Even at the end of the XIXth century, when the opening of the country to the Western world brought about new trends in Japanese literature, the emerging modern literature was slow to pay attention to the criterion of length. The word chosen...