The seventeen stories and prose texts in this volume were created during the last years of Akutagawa Ryunosuke's life, whose later work remains largely unknown in the West. Alongside the linguistic elegance and subtle psychology of his early works, there is an experimental stylistic diversity that reflects the author's effort to pave new paths for Japanese literature of his time. Thus, his later work includes not only stories, such as those in dialogue form, but also film scripts, collections of aphorisms, masterful literary sketches in the most concise form, as well as a variety of essays, poems, and diary-like prose.