This paper demonstrates how a short story by William Butler Yeats, The Heart of the Spring, came to function as world literature in Japan during the Taisho period (1912–1926) through analyzing its translation by a prominent Japanese author Akutagawa Ryunosuke, along with its literary context. By comparing his translation with Yeats’ original and with another translator’s version of the same source text, the present paper shows how Akutagawa successfully reconstructed the poetic prose of Yeats in Japanese. This study argues that his effective rendering, along with the specific context of the period, allowed the work to gain new significance in Japan, thus making Akutagawa’s translation a prime example of the importance of translation and translators in the formation of world literature.