Analysis of In a Grove by Ryunosuke Akutagawa
In A Grove is a multi-narrative selection written by Japan’s renowned short-story writer, Ryunosuke Akutagawa. Ryunosuke Akutagawa was a prominent writer during the Taisho period, an era of liberal movement in Japan, wherein the country succeeded towards a greater representational government. Akutagawa favored historical settings and exacting detail, and these preferences can be depicted through his stories that seem to be groping on the aspects of human cruelty and disillusionment. In A Grove, one of the aforementioned historically-inspired stories, was published in 1922, during the rise of the Japanese Communist Party. The entirety of the story consists of seven varying narrations, either testimonies or confessions, professed by mere witnesses, as well as the ones implicated in the crime. The initial four testimonies were those of a woodcutter, a traveling Buddhist priest, a policeman, and an old woman. All indications are descriptions of the place of the crime, the persecuted couple, and the notorious brigand. The three confessions, however, were the ones that seem to perplex readers because of the disagreeing details in their accounts. Some ostensible details are the consistent in the three narrations. All stories have come to lead that Tajomaru was the suspect, that the samurai (husband) was killed, that the woman (wife) wishes that the samurai (husband) was dead (details vary, however), and that the woman survived (but she did not leave with Tajomaru).