Body and soul

In his new novel, David Peace takes on — and takes over — a Japanese literary titan

Patient X: the Case-Book of Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, the new novel by David Peace, is a subtle, slippery thing. Although it sounds like a superior crime novel, it’s actually more a conceptual, poetic rumination — albeit one in which bodysnatching is involved.

Akutagawa was the Japanese writer who wrote Rashōmon, and who went mad and killed himself in 1927, aged 35. In Patient X, Peace explores Akutagawa’s life but also inhabits it: sometimes pushing him around as a second-person puppet, sometimes weaving Akutagawa’s stark, increasingly delusional writings through his own. Beautiful, gothic, and powerfully mysterious.

— Patient X: the Case-Book of Ryūnosuke Akutagawa is published on 5 April