Is “writing” quite the right word to describe what David Peace does these days? Arguably, the most enjoyable passage in Red Or Dead, his pulverisingly repetitive novel about how Bill Shankly made Liverpool the best team in Europe, was the 25-page transcript of Shankly’s radio interview with Harold Wilson – a rare moment of light relief from the other 700 pages, made up of endless restatement of, for instance, match statistics arranged in relentless rhythm barrelling across the page.

Of course Peace didn’t actually write it – which isn’t to downplay his skill in placing this found text at the right moment, or his invention in cutting up and repeating match statistics, such as attendance figures and team sheets, to build the texture of the book. His new title only confirms the impression that the novelist who began as Yorkshire’s answer to James Ellroy with the Red Riding quartet of detective novels, before becoming the narrative historian of the repressed national trauma in his cacophonous miners’ strike novel GB84, is now less novelist than a literary collagist. The trouble is that Patient X leaves us more unsure as to the benefits of the method.

The book combines Peace’s interest in biographical fiction with his long-standing interest in Japan, where he lives. The subject is the early 20th-century Japanese writer Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, best known for two stories that inspired Kurosawa’s Rashōmon. His stories operated in a variety of modes, often with a supernatural tint, but many of them are ugly, trading on reversals of the be-careful-what-you-wish-for type. Peace gives us 12 stories that show us Akutagawa’s intellectual formation, including his countercultural interest in Christianity (a flavour of his times), from his birth (“It makes me shudder to think of all the things I will inherit from you... the human condition is hell,” he’s shown thinking from the womb) to his suicide at the age of 35.

He’s gone about this by making a kind of broth of Akutagawa’s own writing and serving it up in a variety of styles, injecting energy with random em-dashes, sudden paragraph breaks and a hectoring second-person address (to create interiority) that served him so well in his novel about Brian Clough, The Damned Utd.

But as a whole, the exercise comes perilously close to redundancy. I could have picked other examples to show how it’s stitched together but here is Akutagawa’s 1926 autobiographical piece Death Register in Jay Rubin’s 2006 translation, in which Akutagawa reflects on his father, who sent him away to be raised by an uncle. “I don’t remember his funeral at all. What I do remember is that we transported his body from the hospital to his home, a great big spring moon was shining down on the hearse.”

And here’s Peace: “You don’t recall your father’s funeral at all. But you do remember that when you were accompanying his body from the hospital back to his house, a great, full spring moon was shining down on the road of the hearse as you crossed the city.”

Is Peace really adding value here? It’s questionable. Part of the problem is that even with a biography as torrid as Akutagawa’s, it’s notoriously difficult to dramatise a writer at work without seeming reductive or corny. Peace tries to take us behind the scenes of the writer’s mind, imagining Akutagawa imagining himself as the protagonist of that story – and then excerpting that story (in this case, Rashōmon).

Here he is on Akutagawa writing Rashōmon, in which the protagonist attacks an old woman he finds scavenging from a corpse. “Pen in your hand, at your desk, under the gate, you are under the gate, in the upstairs room, you are in that room, in that place and in that time. The stench of death, the sound of rain. A flash of lightning, a peal of thunder. You strip the old woman of her robes, you tear the hair from her hands…”

More conventional methods of biographical fiction, of embedding a life’s turning points in dialogue, or using material such as newspaper accounts – as with the death of the emperor in 1912, in which Peace frames excerpts from contemporary news stories with commentary in trademark style: “Ryūnosuke bought the newspapers, all of the newspapers... Day after day, Ryūnosuke kept buying the newspapers, all of the newspapers...” – don’t serve the novel much better.

He’s always worth reading but this is a curio.

• Patient X by David Peace is published by Faber (£14.99). To order a copy for £12.74 go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99