Ryunosuke Akutagawa
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40 free Ryunosuke Akutagawa trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Ryunosuke Akutagawa wrote for little more than a decade, and almost everything he wrote was short. That was enough to make him one of the most read authors in Japan, where his tales are set texts in schools and his name is attached to the country's most watched literary award. Outside Japan he is known best at one remove, through a film that borrowed two of his stories and gave the world a new word for a truth nobody can agree on. This quiz covers the stories people look for first: Rashomon, In a Grove, Hell Screen, The Nose, The Spider's Thread and Kappa. It asks what happens in them, who the characters are and where Akutagawa found his material. It also covers his life, from his unusual upbringing to his friendships and rivalries with other writers, and the long afterlife of his work on screen, on stage and in manga and anime. It suits students reading Akutagawa for a class, book clubs working through a collection of his stories, and fans who met his name in a film or an anime and want to know the author behind it. Every answer comes with a short explanation.
30 of 40 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which director's 1950 film Rashomon retold Akutagawa's In a Grove under the title of another of his stories?
Akira Kurosawa
Akira Kurosawa borrowed only the title and the ruined-gate framing scenes from Akutagawa's Rashōmon. The murder told several contradictory ways comes from the other story.
Q 02The 1950 film Rashomon, built from two Akutagawa stories, won the Golden Lion at which city's film festival?
Venice
Venice gave the film its top prize, and the win made it the first Japanese film to find a wide international audience.
Q 03Akutagawa's given name, Ryūnosuke, commemorates his birth in the year of which animal of the East Asian zodiac?
Dragon
Dragon is what the first character of Ryūnosuke means, and the name was chosen because 1892, the year he arrived, belonged to that zodiac sign.
Q 04Which manga and anime series features a Port Mafia fighter named after Akutagawa, with powers drawn from Rashōmon?
Bungo Stray Dogs
Bungo Stray Dogs names its main characters after real authors and bases each power on that writer's books, which is why its Akutagawa is tied to Rashōmon.
Q 05The Rashomon effect, a term born from the film of Akutagawa's stories, names the unreliability of which group?
Eyewitnesses
Eyewitnesses to one event can honestly describe it in ways that cannot all be true, the trap at the heart of the film. The term is now used in law and psychology as well as cinema.
Q 06The river creatures of Japanese folklore that give Akutagawa's novella Kappa its title are said to love which vegetable?
Cucumber
Cucumber is the kappa's favourite food in folk belief, and townspeople once sent the vegetables down the river to keep the creatures from drowning anyone.
Q 07The crumbling Rashōmon of Akutagawa's story was once the grand southern gate of which ancient Japanese capital?
Kyoto
Kyoto lies in ruins when the tale is set, and its great gate has become a place where unclaimed corpses are dumped.
Q 08Who lowers a silver thread into Hell to rescue one sinner in Akutagawa's The Spider's Thread?
The Buddha
The Buddha spots the robber Kandata from a lotus pond in Paradise and recalls his one kind act: he once chose not to crush a spider.
Q 09Akutagawa spent four months as a newspaper correspondent in which country, a trip from which his health never recovered?
China
China had fascinated him since boyhood through its classic novels, but the 1921 assignment for the Osaka Mainichi left him with illnesses he never shook off.
Q 10Which bestselling novelist introduced the Penguin Classics edition of Akutagawa's Rashōmon and Seventeen Other Stories?
Haruki Murakami
Haruki Murakami wrote the introduction, and the translator was Jay Rubin, the scholar who also translated several of the novelist's own books, including Norwegian Wood.
Q 11Which novelist, the author of I Am a Cat, launched Akutagawa's fame by praising The Nose in a letter?
Natsume Sōseki
Natsume Sōseki was Akutagawa's idol and hosted a weekly literary circle, the Thursday Salon, which the young student had only just found the nerve to attend.
Q 12In Akutagawa's Rashōmon, what is the old woman taking from the corpses left in the ruined gate?
Hair
Hair is her harvest: she pulls it out strand by strand to make wigs she can sell, and argues that robbing the dead is no crime when the alternative is starving.
Q 13Which actor, later the star of Seven Samurai, played the bandit in the 1950 film of Akutagawa's Rashomon stories?
Toshiro Mifune
Q 21Which publisher and lifelong friend of Akutagawa founded the Akutagawa Prize in the dead author's memory?
Kan Kikuchi
Kan Kikuchi met Akutagawa at school, built the publishing house Bungeishunjū, and also headed Daiei, the film studio that went on to make Rashomon.
Q 22Which author of No Longer Human idolised Akutagawa and was shaken as a teenager by his death?
Osamu Dazai
Osamu Dazai was a schoolboy enjoying early success with his writing when the news came in 1927, and losing his idol brought that progress to a halt.
Q 23Akutagawa publicly argued over whether plot matters in fiction with which novelist, the author of The Makioka Sisters?
Jun'ichirō Tanizaki
Toshiro Mifune was a regular collaborator the director wanted from the start, though one Japanese critic complained that his bandit had far too much to say.
Q 14Akutagawa studied which language's literature at university, then briefly taught the language at a naval school?
English
English was his field, and as a student he was already publishing translations of the Irish poet W. B. Yeats in a magazine he ran with friends.
Q 15At the end of Akutagawa's Rashōmon, what does the dismissed servant steal from the old woman before fleeing?
Her robe
Her robe is torn from her back as he turns her own excuse against her: if stealing to survive is no sin, she cannot blame him for doing the same.
Q 16Akutagawa's satirical novella Kappa is narrated by a man known only as Number 23, who is what?
A psychiatric patient
A psychiatric patient tells the whole tale, claiming he lost his way in the mountains and lived among the creatures, and he ends up thinking them better than humans.
Q 17Born Ryūnosuke Niihara, the future author took the surname Akutagawa from which relative who adopted and raised him?
His maternal uncle
His maternal uncle took him in after his mother fell mentally ill soon after he arrived, and in his last years the writer feared he had inherited her illness.
Q 18Who finds the samurai's body and gives the first testimony in Akutagawa's In a Grove?
A woodcutter
A woodcutter reports the corpse, and all he noticed beside it was a comb and a piece of rope: no sword and no horse.
Q 19What makes the last three accounts so puzzling in Akutagawa's In a Grove?
Each claims to be the killer
Each claims to be the killer: the bandit describes a duel, the wife a stabbing, and the dead man, speaking from beyond the grave, says he took his own life.
Q 20In Akutagawa's satire The Nose, what is the occupation of Zenchi Naigu, whose nose dangles past his chin?
Priest
Priest Naigu ought to be absorbed in the sutras, yet he frets about his looks instead, and Akutagawa took the plot from a centuries-old collection of tales.
Jun'ichirō Tanizaki defended the well-built plot, while Akutagawa argued that the way a story is told matters more than what happens in it.
Q 24Which novelist, the author of The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, adapted Akutagawa's Hell Screen as a kabuki play?
Yukio Mishima
Yukio Mishima dramatised the tale for the kabuki stage in 1953, and it has since been filmed, televised and turned into a ballet.
Q 25In Akutagawa's Hell Screen, what does the painter Yoshihide ask his lord to set on fire so he can paint it?
A carriage
A carriage with a noblewoman inside is what he asks for, and the lord obliges with a cruel twist: the woman placed in the flames is the painter's own daughter.
Q 26In Akutagawa's Hell Screen, which pet animal rushes into the fire to die beside the painter's daughter?
A monkey
A monkey is her devoted companion, and earlier in the tale it drags the narrator to the room where she has just fought off an attacker.
Q 27In the upside-down society of Akutagawa's Kappa, who is asked for consent before a birth goes ahead?
The unborn baby
The unborn baby is asked by its father whether it wants to enter the world, and one in the novella refuses, saying it dreads what it would inherit.
Q 28Akutagawa's The Spider's Thread is often traced to a fable about an onion in which Dostoevsky novel?
The Brothers Karamazov
The Brothers Karamazov tells of a wicked woman hauled out of the fire by the one onion she ever gave away, until she kicks at the others clinging on.
Q 29Akutagawa's youngest son Yasushi, a toddler when his father died, grew up to be famous in which profession?
Composer
Composer Yasushi Akutagawa wrote film scores and orchestral works, and in 1954 he slipped into the Soviet Union without permission and befriended Shostakovich.
Q 30Almost all of Akutagawa's career fell within which Japanese era, which ended months before his death?
Taishō
Taishō lasted only from 1912 to 1926, a short reign remembered for a liberal movement in politics, and Akutagawa is counted among its defining authors.