At the Paris Review, Dan Piepenbring revisits a century-old Japanese short story called “The Nose” (not to be confused with the Gogol story). Connecting it to contemporary narcissism and self-documentation on social media, Piepenbring makes the case that Akutagawa Ryūnosuke’s creepy tale is more relevant than ever:
There’s a book to be written about the evolution of the nose in pop culture (retroussé, button-cute, Roman, Nixonian) though maybe only the nasally well-endowed (read: me) would take an interest in it. “The Nose,” with its distended psychology, would rate an entire chapter—read it before bed and it will, despite its seeming simplicity, wend its way into your dreams.
