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David Peace, Natasha Pulley, Yuna Tasaka and Jasper Sharp join Rana Mitter.

Ry\u016bnosuke Akutagawa's short story 'In a Grove', published in 1922, became the basis for the 1950 film from Akira Kurosawa 'Rash\u014dmon', one of the first Japanese films to gain worldwide critical acclaim. 'The Rash\u014dmon Effect' has become a byword for the literary technique where the same event is presented via the different and incompatible testimonies from the characters involved. David Peace's new book 'Patient X' is a novelised response to Ry\u016bnosuke Akutagawa's last years and his death by suicide at the age of 35. Natasha Pulley is a novelist and Japanophile with a particular interest in Japanese literature of the 1920s, and in the unreliable narrator implied by use of the Rash\u014dmon Effect. And Jasper Sharp is a writer and curator, author of the Historical Dictionary of Japanese Cinema.

Producer: Luke Mulhall