is a twelve episodes anime

Anime

is the Japanese abbreviated pronunciation of "animation". The definition sometimes changes depending on the context. In English-speaking countries, the term most commonly refers to Japanese animated cartoons....

 series featuring adaptations inspired by six short stories from Japanese literature. The six stories are adapted from classic Japanese tales.

Stories Adapted

• No Longer Human
  No Longer Human
  is a Japanese novel by Osamu Dazai. Published after Run Melos and The Setting Sun, No Longer Human is considered Dazai's masterpiece and ranks as the second-best selling novel in Japan, behind Kokoro....
  
  : The path of a man with intense feelings of alienation towards society and the feeling of "humanity".
• Sakura no mori no mankai no shita: A forest bandit finds a beautiful maiden in the forest and takes her to be his wife, but she is more than she seems to be.
• Kokoro
  Kokoro
  is a novel by the Japanese author Natsume Sōseki. It was first published in 1914 in serial form in the Japanese newspaper Asahi Shinbun. While the title literally means "heart", the word contains shades of meaning, and can be translated as "the heart of things" or "feeling"...
  
  : A young man lives in Tokyo as a renter with a widow and her daughter. He invites his childhood friend, a monk, to come live with him, hoping to help him. When the monk falls in love with the widow's daughter, it drives a rift between them. The story is narrated from two points of view, the man's and the monk's.
• Run, Melos!
  Run, Melos!
  is a Japanese short story by Osamu Dazai. Published in 1940, "Run, Melos!" is a widely read classic in Japanese schools.The story is a reworking of Friedrich Schiller's ballad Die Bürgschaft, which tells the story of Moerus and Selinuntius , originally Damon and Pythias...
  
  : A playwright writes a play based on the story "Run, Melos", and deals with his own feelings of betrayal towards his childhood friend.
• The Spider's Thread: Kandata, a cruel and evil bandit is executed and lands in hell. The one good thing he had done in his life was to not kill a spider he met in the city. The spider drops him a thread to climb up into heaven. His elation is short-lived, however, as he realizes that others have started climbing the thread behind him.
• Hell Screen
  Hell Screen
  is a short story written by Japanese writer Ryūnosuke Akutagawa. It was originally published in 1918 as a serialization in two newspapers. It was later published in a collection of Akutagawa short stories, Akutagawa Ryūnosuke zenshū.- Translation :...
  
  : Yoshihide, the greatest painter in the country, is commissioned to draw his greatest work, an image of the king's country inside his mausoleum. In the despotic king's realm, Yoshihide can see nothing but the suffering of the commoners. He decides to make his last work a tribute to the country as it really is.

Feature Film

A feature film, a re-edit of the four episodes based on Osamu Dazai's No Longer Human, premiered in Japan on December 12, 2009.

Reception

Emmanuel Bahu-Leyser from the French Animeland found exceptional to have such realistic, with depths and mature stories to be adapted into anime. He went further by describing the series as a gold nugget both culturally and technically. On the negative side, he noted that the adaptation quality is uneven between the teams.

External links

• Official anime website