Ryūnosuke Akutagawa (1892-1927) was born in Tokyo in a bourgeois family. As a child he developed a voracious appetite for traditional Japanese literature, which he alternated with teenage reading Western writers . A brilliant student , he joined the prestigious Tokyo Imperial University and successfully began publishing his first stories , " Rashōmon " ( 1915 ) and " The Nose " ( 1916). After graduating from college in 1916 he worked as a professor of English at the Yokosuka Naval School . In 1918 he married Fumi Tsukamoto and left his job to devote himself exclusively to literature through a contract with the Osaka Mainichi daily . It began a very fruitful time of production : ' Lust ', ' Autumn ' and ' In the forest '. After a trip to China as a correspondent in 1921 , his health , already delicate , considerably worsened insomnia , neurasthenia , hallucinations and in mortal fear of madness not prevent him from creating what many consider his masterpieces : " Gears " " Kappa " or " Life of an idiot ." The July 24, 1927 , at 35 years old, Akutagawa ended the " vague confused anguish" that consumed ingesting a lethal dose of Veronal .