There is comfort in familiarity, and there is no doubt that after reading Ryunosuke Akutagawa’s stories one might find them appealing due to his extensive use of Western literary references. While he was a Japanese writer, his stories still embodied the characteristics of modernist ideals of the time, a break with the traditional styles, not to mention his extensive knowledge of Western literature. In “The Handkerchief” we come across Akutagawa’s use of the unreliability of the narrator who seems to be fascinated with the character in the story, Hasegawa Kinzo, an intellectual, who, in the story, reads Strindberg’s Dramaturgy. Through this portrayal and a visit the character receives, Akutagawa is laughing at Hasegawa, no doubt, by using the narrator to tell the reader what really goes on in the mind of an intellectual. In the beginning we’re told Hasegawa is a Law professor who specializes in colonial policy and he is reading Strindberg’s Dramaturgy, not because it is useful to him, but because he’s concerned with the students’ thinking and feelings. Akutagawa placed Strindberg’s Dramaturgy, a book on theatricality, in the hands of Hasegawa deliberately to add humor to the story because the depiction of the main character himself is staged from the beginning to the end. At one point in the story we are told Hasegawa “was by nature indifferent to the arts, especially drama” and therefore “had utterly no opinion concerning the pithy criticisms that Strindberg had contributed to the discussion of dramaturgy” yet his behavior throughout the story resembles that of a play. For example, after noticing the way in which his visitor, the mother of the student, is holding her handkerchief, Hasegawa’s expression was “Somewhat theatrically overplayed, it reflected pious circumspection at a sight he ought not to have witnessed, mixed with satisfaction at his own awareness of the same.” Akutagawa uses the narrator