The book combines Peace’s interest in biographical fiction with his long-standing interest in Japan, where he lives. The subject is the early 20th-century Japanese writer Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, best known for two stories that inspired Kurosawa’s Rashōmon. His stories operated in a variety of modes, often with a supernatural tint, but many of them are ugly, trading on reversals of the be-careful-what-you-wish-for type. Peace gives us 12 stories that show us Akutagawa’s intellectual formation, including his countercultural interest in Christianity, from his birth to his suicide at the age of 35.
Patient X is told in Peace’s trademark fragmented, incantatory style, as distinctive in its way as, say, full-blown Henry James, using repetition, hyperbole and italicised interior monologue to create swirling hallucinatory effects ... Peace goes from the very beginning – imagining Akutagawa in his mother’s womb, his father with 'his mouth to your mother’s vagina', calling out, 'Can you hear me in there? Do you want to be born … ?' – to the very end, portraying Akutagawa’s death by suicide aged just 35, as observed by others ... With Patient X, one begins to see that Peace’s achievement is not merely as an English prose stylist, or as someone who merges genres, or indeed even as a political writer challenging what appears to be the natural order, but as a transnational figure challenging all categories of containment.
Fragmented and adrift is a pretty good description of the structure of Patient X, which consists of 12 loosely connected tales based on Akutagawa’s writings and events from his life. For readers unfamiliar with Akutagawa — who is probably less well known to American readers than such near-contemporaries as Natsume Soseki and Junichiro Tanizaki, both of whom figure in the novel — Peace’s book provides a vivid, if challenging, introduction. Patient X is an uncanny act of ventriloquism, fusing Akutagawa’s jagged storytelling voice with Peace’s own pulsing narration ... Peace’s deft novel leaves us wondering whether Akutagawa was a saint or a madman, a great writer or a bad husband. Or, 'Rashomon'-like, some combination of this bewildering 'legion of selves.'”
Mr. Peace is a blunt, forceful stylist with a habit for obsessive repetitions and a taste for the weird, all of which makes him is a good match for Akutagawa. The most disorienting aspect of Patient X is the author’s decision to blend scenes from Akutagawa’s fiction with those from his life, as though the wall dividing the two had been irreparably breached. The effect is fittingly hallucinatory, but for those who know little about Akutagawa’s books it may seem merely opaque.
For all that he’s little-known in the west, the Japanese writer Ryunosuke Akutagawa is one of the most intriguing figures in early modernist fiction. Mercurially talented, hugely popular in his own country, he left behind a slim and arrestingly odd body of work...Perhaps it’s not surprising that David Peace, who rivals Akutagawa for genre-bending inventiveness, should have adopted him as a kind of father figure. Peace has long been fascinated by Akutagawa’s work, to the point of basing the second volume of his ongoing Tokyo trilogy on In a Bamboo Grove. The new work, Patient X, goes one step further, not only summoning the ghost of his Japanese antecedent but attempting to crawl inside his skin ... Peace being Peace, that thumbnail description doesn’t quite do the book justice. Described as 'inspired and informed by the stories, essays and letters of Ryunosuke Akutagawa himself, incidents from his own life, and the memories and writings of people around him', Patient X hovers somewhere between biographical novel, short story sequence, act of shamanistic ventriloquism and homage to Akutagawa’s singular oeuvre.
In another fictionalized memoir, Peace turns his attention from British football fields to the early twentieth-century literary world of the highly influential modern Japanese short-story writer, Ryunosuke Akutagawa. The jump in subject reflects Peace’s more than 20 years of living in Japan ... Peace’s writing in Akutagawa’s voice is, at times, disorienting, but this form of literary devotion is not without reward. By combining history, oral tradition, surrealism, and a Poe-like grittiness, the always innovative Peace reimagines the life of a gifted writer who died young by his own hand.
In the next life, if there is such a punishment, I wish to be reborn as sand.' So says Ryunosuke Akutagawa , the protagonist and reluctant center of Peace’s latest venture into fact-based fiction—and not as much a departure from his procedurals as one might imagine, either. Presented as a series of sketches, the book proceeds from one turning point to another while emphasizing constant themes, opening with a parable that speaks to Akutagawa’s idiosyncratic blending of Buddhism with Christianity; 'I am not surprised,' says a psychiatrist, archly, when Akutagawa travels to Nagasaki, the most Christian of all Japanese cities, though Akutagawa’s interests turn out to be more nuanced than all that ... Though the book is a touch too pensive, it has an elegant poetry to it, even in the horrific passages depicting the great earthquake of 1923 ... Quiet homage to the progenitor of the modern Japanese short story.
In this sly, intermittently arresting novel, Peace draws on the life and work of Ryu¯nosuke Akutagawa, a Japanese author 'dogged with accusations of unoriginality,' to create a sui generis portrait. Peace has written two fictional biographies of British soccer coaches and turns to a more bookish subject here: a tortured writer best known for the short story that was adapted into the Akira Kurosawa film Rashomon. The novel is composed of 12 tales from various periods in Akutagawa’s life, beginning inside his mother’s womb, where he is unsure he wants to be 'born into this world.' ... Some of the tales capture Akutagawa’s mesmerizing energy, while others are wan, if devoted, homages, making this book most recommendable to fans of Akutagawa.
