藪の中

Why it matters

In a Grove is a short story built entirely from testimony. There is no narrator to settle things: the reader sits with a police commissioner or magistrate as seven people speak in turn, and the only evidence is what they choose to say. It still feels current because everyone in it is, in their own way, protecting something. The story asks a question that courts, journalists and ordinary families keep running into: when honest-sounding accounts of one event conflict, what exactly are we being asked to believe? It is short enough to read twice in an evening, and the second reading is a different story.

Akutagawa published it in January 1922 in the magazine Shinchō, drawing possibly on the medieval tale collection Konjaku Monogatarishū. Its structure, a single event told from competing positions, travelled far. Akira Kurosawa’s 1950 film Rashōmon took the story as its main source and gave the English language the phrase ‘Rashomon effect’ for contradictory accounts of the same event. The Outrage (1964) and an opera by Alejandro Viñao followed. In Japan the title itself works as an idiom for a situation in which conflicting statements keep the truth hidden.

As you read, mark who is speaking, whom they are speaking to, and what each speaker wants the listener to think of them. Notice the register shift between the matter-of-fact witnesses and the confessions, and notice what the commissioner never says. Do not read to solve the case: the story is built so that neither the text nor Akutagawa hands you a verdict. Read the film afterwards if you like, but it is a different work with a different ending. There are English translations by Takashi Kojima (1952), James O’Brien (1988) and Jay Rubin (2007).

Introduction written for LitMundi with AI assistance and checked against the sources listed below.