In A Grove

Content Warning: This section refers to sexual assault and suicide.

Many authors use unreliable narrators as a storytelling device. Edgar Allen Poe famously makes readers doubt the sanity of his protagonists, while films such as The Usual Suspects deliberately mislead the audience. “In a Grove” provides one of the strongest examples of unreliable narrators in literature. In fact, this story is probably best understood as a thought experiment about how to account for details we don’t know rather than how we make sense of things we do—i.e., a meditation on Truth and Reading the “Negative Space”.

Even before the three accounts of the crime itself, the story’s minor characters show bias and unreliability. The traveling Buddhist priest, who gives a detailed description of Masago’s clothing, describes her height precisely as four feet, five inches. However, he then claims that because he is a priest, he took little notice of her. This immediately raise a question that the reader cannot answer: whether he is lying about taking little notice of her, or about her description. Perhaps he is shamed by his sexual interest in the samurai’s wife and is trying to backpedal to avoid giving this impression. On the other hand, he could simply exemplify the limits of human memory and the tendency to fill in gaps with details that make sense. The brain does not record information it doesn’t immediately find important or relevant, and Akutagawa seems to understand this intuitively, even though modern understanding of memory post-dates him.

Characters also throw out biased accusations. The arresting policeman, after hearing that Tajomaru’s possessions were almost certainly stolen from the dead man, jumps to the conclusion that the bandit murdered the samurai. This seems logical until Masago’s and Takehiko’s accounts show that there are other ways the bandit could have wound up with these items. Masago’s mother, seeing her son-in-law dead and learning her daughter is still missing, jumps to a similar conclusion. Her emotions understandably cause her to lash out and demand justice, accusing Tajomaru of the murder without conclusive evidence.

In an unintentional meta-twist, reading the story in translation further adds to its ambiguity. Whether a translator chooses to describe the kimonos as pale-blue, bluish, or lilac can create a slightly different image in the readers’ minds. Choosing to translate an action as a sword stroke, cut, slash, or pierce can have this obscuring effect as well. In some translations, the nature of Takehiko’s mortal wound is up for debate, while in others, the translator chooses to maintain consistency.

Due to the nature of the unreliable narrators, “In a Grove” is best analyzed from the perspective of what we don’t—or can’t—know. This makes the reader into the story’s detective, rather than any of the characters—as we read, we can use the details that aren’t given to make our own inferences. Tajomaru’s confession is longer than those of the other main characters. Masago and Takehiko don’t recount their journey from the Yamashina road to the bamboo grove, nor do they describe the rape, although all accounts agree that this violent assault motivated all the actions that followed. We could interpret this absence in several different ways.

The simplest interpretation is functional. Akutagawa found the structure of a story to be more important than the plot. By giving readers the journey to the grove and the rape only once, he’s signaling that these events are not in question; what readers should focus on is everything that transpired afterward. This interpretation relies heavily on the mechanics of storytelling: Akutagawa uses this literary sleight-of-hand to assist the reader in knowing where to invest the most thought.

A more psychological explanation involves the importance of shame to the story’s characters. If the events leading up to the rape are not in dispute, Tajomaru’s account of the samurai’s greed is accurate. Feudal Japan was a culture heavily invested in Reputation and Legacy, as well as one’s Position in Society. The dead man and his wife are perhaps too ashamed to acknowledge that an honorable samurai fell prey to such a materialistic ruse. Shame (presumably mixed with trauma) would also explain why Masago doesn’t wish to tell the priest directly about the assault; humiliation is a common response to sexual assault even in societies that do not frame rape as a permanent stain on a woman’s honor.

A third interpretation blends the previous two. If the characters do not disagree about the events leading up to the assault on Takehiko and Masago, perhaps that act shifted each character’s psychology in a highly individualized way. Their divergent perspectives would therefore reflect this shift.

Knowing that, guilty or not, he will likely be executed, Tajomaru praises himself several times in his story. This gives a clear indication of his motives for potentially fabricating his account. First, there is one significant detail absent in Tajomaru’s confession that both Takehiko and Masago include in theirs: the bandit striking Masago. This omission from his account drives home one of the key points of this story: that perspective is mainly about a character’s self-image. Many cultures shun men who physically strike defenseless women, and it makes sense that if Tajomaru wants to be remembered as a legendary bandit, he might avoid admitting this weakness. He does admit to raping Masago, but he mitigates this attack by describing Masago’s fiery defense with a dagger. By making this attack into a two-sided fight, he avoids the shame of physically assaulting a powerless person. To further remove shame, Tajomaru claims to want to marry Masago—an intention that, according to the mores of his time and place, somewhat exculpates him. (Notably, Masago mentions nothing about this second marriage, indicating that she does not forgive the rape.) Another aspect of this self-praise is Tajomaru’s insistence on his fighting prowess. He builds up Takehiko in his story, referring to him as a trained warrior several times and describing a fierce battle of equals. This is an unrealistic element; a bandit with no training and only stolen weaponry could likely not overcome a warrior trained by masters since childhood.

By placing Tajomaru’s confession first of the three (in most translations), Akutagawa allows readers to draw inferences about the stories of the samurai and his wife, whose motivations are more difficult to understand. Perhaps most challenging is the fact that all three accounts are confessions, not accusations. Akutagawa could have set up a rock-paper-scissors round of finger pointing, with all three characters accusing another. However, Japanese culture views a good death as honorable. Feudal lords defeated in battle would often resort to seppuku (sometimes called harakiri), a ritualistic suicide meant to prevent them from being captured or killed by their enemies (though modern historians question the actual frequency of this act).

“In a Grove” was produced in a culture, where honor is paramount and public shame a fate worse than death. As a mystery, the story is unresolved, but when viewed as a profile of three characters, the story paints a psychologically coherent picture of the bandit, the samurai, and his wife. Each turns out to have had a clear and understandable goal in telling their story in the way they do: Tajomaru wants to be seen as a heart-of-gold thief who overcame a stronger oppressor, Masago claims to have done her best to dispel the shame the attack brought on her and her husband, and Takehiko reaches out from beyond the grave to show the living that he took the honorable course in the face of defeat.