On Akutagawa's Artistic Pursuit

Ryunosuke Akutagawa is one of the excellent short story writers in Japanese modern literary history. With a compact plot and unique conception, his works shows a distinctive style in its themes and content. He was disgusted with mediocre, superficial, Japanese implicit and naturalistic, realistic technique of expression. The year 1920 separated his writing career into two periods, the former and the latter. In the former period the themes of his novels were concentrated on history. And he mainly described the reality and analyzed his own novels in the latter period. So in comparison with the style of his masterpiece in the former and latter period respectively, this dissertation tries to find out the changes in his style and its reason and analyzes why Ryunosuke Akutagawa committed suicide and his works was called败北文学, so that we can have a thoroughly understanding about his special outlook on life and thoughts contained in his works.