Aoi Bungaku

Aoi Bungaku Series (青い文学シリーズ) is a twelve episodes anime 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: 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: 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!: 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: 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.