A review by briancrandall
Murder in the Age of Enlightenment: Essential Stories by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa

4.0

It should therefore go without saying that there was no limit to Yoshihide's esteem for his own artistry. True, his colours and brushwork were utterly unlike those of other painters of the day, and so among his detractors (that is, those fellow painters) he had the reputation of a charlatan. They waxed lyrical over the work of old masters like Kawanari and Kanaka—saying that on moonlit nights you could actually smell the plum blossoms on a painted door, or that you could really hear the courtier playing his flute on a painted screen—but when their talk turned to Yoshihide's paintings, all they invariably had to say was that they were odd and uncanny. Take, for instance, his depiction of the Five Stages of Rebirth on the Ryugaiji Temple gate. One person claimed that as you passed through the gate late at night, you could hear the sighs and sobbing of the celestial beings. Another even claimed that he could smell the flesh of the dead rotting. And of the portraits of the ladies-in-waiting commissioned by His Lordship? It was said that every one of them had fallen ill and died within three years, as though, in capturing their like-ness, Yoshihide had also taken their soul. [45]