The Story Archive

Cogwheels

Ryūnosuke Akutagawa · 1927 CE · Short Story · Japanese · Modernist

On the way to a wedding banquet a writer is told about a ghost in a raincoat, and raincoats start appearing everywhere: on the platform, in the hotel corridor, at the edge of the manuscript he cannot finish. Half-transparent cogwheels begin turning in the corner of his vision, which he knows is the warning sign of a migraine and cannot stop reading as a message. Published after his death, and the most exact record anyone has left of a mind watching itself.

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