Widely acknowledged as "the father of the Japanese short story," Ryunosuke Akutagawa remains one of the most influential Japanese writers of all time. Rashomon and Other Stories, a collection of his most celebrated work, resonates as strongly today as when it first published a century ago.

The editor requested a cover design with a cinematic flair, based on Akira Kurosawa's international breakthrough film Rashomon (1950), which is, in fact, based primarily on another of Akutagawa's short stories featured in the collection, In a Grove. After revisiting Kurosawa’s film and extracting visual scenes, our cover cooks sourced multiple photographs showing historical accuracy of samurai, women's clothing and hairstyles, and the forest textures to blend them into a single atmospheric image. Centaur, a typeface based on 15th-century letters, proved the most elegant choice for a classic of this calibre and completed the cover design.