Welcome to another piece in my short story reflection and analysis series!
In a Grove is a short story written by Japanese author Ryūnosuke Akutagawa. It is composed of 5 testimonies recounting the murder of a samurai in a bamboo grove. Each testimony is told by a different character and offers contradicting details about the death, painting a muddled picture with blurred lines between truth and falsities. A woodcutter, traveling buddhist priest, policeman, the murderer, and an old woman are amongst the characters who voice their own interpretation of how the death happened.
The initial accounts told in In a Grove felt like a straight-forward mystery short story. The factual re-telling of the scenery near the murder scene, the clothes worn by the samurai, and the miscellaneous items scattered near the corpse made it seem like In a Grove was simply going to be a regular murder mystery.
Initially, clues given by the different narrators slowly pieced together, with each account adding onto details provided by the previous account. However, as I reached the accounts told by the brigand, the samurai who was murdered, and the wife of the samurai, the details of the murder became inconsistent. Did the wife want to run away with the brigand? Was the samurai murdered by his wife or the brigand? Which character should the reader trust?
What intrigues me most about In A Grove is how it portrays the distorted world of human perception. As an avid reader of fantasy and action when I was younger, I’ve grow accustomed to a clear-cut line between characters I can trust and the villains. Examples would be the Baudelaire orphans against Count Olaf in A Series of Unfortunate Events, Harry Potter against Lord Voldemort, or Eragon and Saphira against Galbatorix in Eragon. There’s something almost comforting to me as a reader when I know which characters to root for and which characters to be wary of, but In a Grove highlights seven narrators that may all be telling some warped version of the truth. The slowly seeping unease I felt reading In a Grove likely stemmed from the fact that I didn’t think I could trust any of the characters.
With no decisive conclusion given by Akutagawa, maybe I’ll have to come to me own decisions on which character to believe, or maybe I’ll just be be satisfied with the feeling of unease caused by the contradictory narrators, for it made reading In a Grove seem like a blurry retelling of a dream.