I'm kind of torn with this one. I've read a bit of Akutagawa, so was probably better placed than some to approach this novel-cum-(auto)biography of the great Japanese writer. Peace is an excellent writer, and some of his sentences and imagery were just sublime. The fragmentary experience of the book was indeed suitable for what he was trying to achieve: a sideways look, almost as if it was in the shadows, at the life of the great man. It will have you reaching for your normal reference source on the internet to try and find out if a particular character is real or imagined, which is fine. This is the kind of book where the overall impression is the thing, not any specific 'did this happen or not?' It's a re-imagining, not a biography.

However, it just lacked something for me. As ever, with books like this, my reference point is Alex Pheby's astonishing 'Lucia', a fictional/biographical 'excavation' of James Joyce's daughter, which was published, funnily enough, pretty much at the same time as 'Patient X' in 2018. For me, that does things that 'Patient X' does not, and so as much as I enjoyed David Peace's book, and as much as it gives a reader a wider perspective of the man behind the work, it just doesn't quite reach the heights to which it aspires. 3.5 stars. ( )