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The Quest for Ultimate Truth in Ryūnosuke Akutagawa’s “In a Grove”
Eugenia Prasol
Nagasaki University, Japan91

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Abstract
The paper focuses on Akutagawa’s story “In a Grove” and examines it through the frameworkof literary modernism and the concepts of traditional Japanese aesthetics such as traditional
images of ghosts and women in tales and fables of old Japan. The paper studies the motif of
ultimate truth and the search for it as well as the impossibility to find it as distinctive featuresof modernism. It analyzes compositional features of the story, examines the origins of the plot
and the possible literary influences. The paper deals with the change in the situational andpsychological roles of the main characters and addresses the use of the fantastic as a writing
technique, proving that said elements underscore the sense of uncertainty in the unknowableworld. A unique narrative is created, and it surpasses the modernist strategies, marked byepistemological uncertainty, which is simultaneously the characteristic feature of Japanese
literature of the twentieth century, with its ambiguous attitude to truth, reality and fantasy.
Keywords: Akutagawa, final (ultimate) truth, modernism, unreliable narrator

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The nature of truth, as well as our access to it, has been at the core of philosophical controversy
for ages. Until late modernism,1 though, the very possibility of truth has never been doubted.
According to Jeff Malpas, “in this sense, the post-modern era is also post-truth” (Malpas 288).
Japanese writer Ryūnosuke Akutagawa (1892-1927) way ahead of his time, ponders the natureof truth and questions its very possibility in his short story “In a Grove” (1922) which is in thecenter of this paper.
Akutagawa is known as one of the most prominent writers of the twentieth century. He is
considered to be an innovator in literature, a master of the short story. Lippit underlines
Akutagawa’s role in the modernist movement in Japan and outside of it that famously doubts
the realist notion of a secure world constructed around a consolidated narrator (Lippit, 2014, p.
68). Even in his early works, Akutagawa presents outstanding features of his innovative manner– estranged and ironic position of the narrator, epenthetic humorous plots. These features arealso revealed in his masterpiece “In a Grove”. Struhatsky in his research points out that
Akutagawa’s stories are interesting not only because of their stylistic and language specificity
but for creating bright, complex images with just a few words (Struhatsky, 1985, pp. 3–24).
Akutagawa is well-known to as a critic of naturalism, though in the end of his life he used thisparticular narrative technique in his works.
Scholars like Hibbet (1970), Ueda (1976) and Keene (1998) have stressed out that Akutagawa’s
writing deals with the depths of human personal existence. Thus, Hibbett claims that
Akutagawa’s writings possess “an elaborately varied poetic vision of human frailty andsuffering” (Hibbet, 1970, p. 427). In his short stories, existential problems and issues of humancondition are represented as moral choice a person always faces. With the help of the quest
motifs, Akutagawa addresses meaningful questions of life, and some of his characters (likethose of “In a Grove”, “Cogwheels”, “Rashōmon” and so on) make their moral choices that
require considerable courage and steadfastness. The fate of Akutagawa’s characters isconnected to the quest of the earthly life mortality. The writer works with these categories inaccordance with the centuries-old Zen traditions: unobtrusively, pathos without false, easily
and subtly.
In his short stories, particularly in “In a Grove” and “Cogwheels”, Akutagawa captures the
tragic and fractured nature of human being of the twentieth century. As Yoshida summarizes,“the process of modernization was in fact one of the key themes of Akutagawa’s fiction,although this was not always apparent on the surface. His early works were often set inpremodern Japan, yet his concerns were ultimately contemporary” (Yoshida, 1958, p. 174).
The author links such modernistic views (existential problems, human condition, fragmentedsense of self, search for identity, problematic notion of truth) to historical and culturalcounterparts from other geographical, historical and cultural layers, thus fitting it into a global
cultural perspective of modernism.2
1

A concept that originated in Western culture but was spread all over the globe, including Japan.
For more detailed study of literary modernism, its origins, main concepts and significance see Mellors (2005),
Gillies and Mahood (2007), Childs (2008), Hindrichs (2011).

2

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While Akutagawa is generally accepted as a forerunner of Japanese literary modernism andclearly influenced by western literary tradition (H. G. Wells, E. A. Poe, J. Swift and so on), his
stories are often based on distinctly Japanese material. Indeed, Akutagawa, in Keene’s words,“was likened, even by admiring critics, to a mosaicist, piecing together fresh masterpieces outof the materials gleaned from many books” (Keene, 1998, p. 565). The Japanese material
includes revised Japanese legends and ancient tales. With their help, Akutagawa creates
fantastic, dark, funny and frightening stories. As it was pointed out, “while the Japanesefascination with tales of the grotesque is nothing new, Akutagawa was among the first to takeancient folklore and imbue it with a menace and uncertainty that resonated with a turn-of-thecentury Japanese audience” (Henninger, 2009, par.1). At the same time, Akutagawa “is known
in both Japan and the West for his imaginative and often surprising fantasies which incorporate
both “impossible” situations with an attitude toward the real that is fascinatingly ambivalent”(Napier, 1996, p. 1–15), which is especially true for the story “In a Grove”.
The story “In a Grove” written in 1922, is viewed by critics (Napier, 1996; Morrisson, 2012and so on) as a striking literary work that is unique in the history of literature, for it raises frankillogic to the highest artistic level. It is also known for exemplifying the concept of an unreliablenarrator3, another distinct device of modernist literature.4 In Akutagawa’s story, several people
talk about the events of the murder, and every character has its own version of what happened,
and it is hard to establish what really occurred in the forest, and, perhaps, that is exactly
Akutagawa’s goal here. Besides, the title of the story may also present itself a metaphor of theunknowability of human relationships and truths so deep and dark it resembles the dark woods
hard to navigate.
Critics have always regarded the story very highly and much has been written on it.5 Being an
example of virtuoso and innovating plot building, it made its way into various anthologies andwas even turned into a movie by famous Kurosawa. 6 Here I will focus on the author’s
problematic vision of truth and consider the peculiarity of the plot in regards to this issue.
Morrison gives the opinion that “criticism focuses on the purported ‘philosophical’ message of
the work, namely the idea that there is no ultimate reality or truth but only an irreducible
multiplicity of subjective perspectives” (Morrison, 2012, par. 3). In this paper, I will take a

3

The term was used by Wayne C. Booth in his The Rhetoric of Fiction in 1961.
In his lecture in Oregon State University, Professor Neil Davison gives an exhaustive summary, history andexamples of what an “unreliable narrator” is. Among other things, the researcher specifies the role of the device
in Modernist literature:
This first-person unreliable narrator became popular in Western literature during the Modernist period fromthe end of the 19th (1890’s) through the 20th century. An influential Modernist writer from Ireland, James
Joyce, employed the technique in some of his earliest short stories. Later in his career, and along with other
American Modernist writers such as Gertrude Stein, William Faulkner, and Ralph Ellison, he pushed thetechnique further into a different kind of first-person narration called Stream-of-Consciousness (Davison
par. 7).
5
Among those, who thoroughly studied Akutagawa’s work in general and“In a Grove” in particular, are Keene(1998), Makoto (1976), Lippit (2014), Hibbett (1970).
6
Kurosawa’s award-winning work Rashōmon (1950) actually combined two of Akutagawa’s stories,“In a
Grove” and “Rashōmon”.
4

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closer look into modernist understanding of truth and Akutagawa’s take on it in particular andanalyze the story in accordance to this task.
Thus, this paper attempts the analysis of the main categories of modernism and traditional
Japanese poetics embodied in Akutagawa’s story “In a Grove”. It highlights the way in which
Akutagawa develops an experimental textual strategy in the story “In a Grove” in order tograpple more fully with the complexities of representing the quest for truth. In this paper, there
are shown specific features of psychologism and quest for ultimate truth as well as
impossibility to find it as distinctive items of literary modernism and the ways it wasincorporated into the story.
This paper while arguing the irrepresentability of truth addressed by Akutagawa in his work,
presents compositional features of the story, studies the origins of the plot and the possible
literary influences to help understand the story and the author’s message. The paper also
examines the change in situational and psychological roles of the main characters, which canback up the idea of irrepresentability of truth. I also focus here on the use of the fantastic
elements as writing technique, and prove that these elements underscore the attitude of
uncertainty in the unknowable world, which expand the understanding (or rather its
impossibility) of truth and how it is seen by Akutagawa. Furthermore, the work represents theinfluence of Zen philosophy, with its emphasis on the relativity of any truth. Combined, allthese ideas and concepts, coming from different literary and cultural tradition, help us see how
exactly Akutagawa addresses the concept of truth in all its cultural and epistemologicalcomplexity. In this paper, I attempt to interpret the concept of truth depicted in Akutagawa’s
story as an ambiguous reality, as a conflicting essence of a human being, as woman’s nature,
as a representation of guilt, as an ironic interpretation of the I-narrative technique in Japanese
literature. Studying how the author depicts truth from all these perspectives allows us to see
better how he finally denies its representability.
Origins of the Plot and Compositional Structure of Akutagawa’s “In a Grove”
Compositionally, the story resembles dramatic poem The Ring and the Book (1868-1869) byRobert Browning, which gives three versions of the same events, but, unlike Akutagawa’s work,
it is known who committed the crime. A similar collision/conflict between spouses was
described in Japanese family saga of the thirteenth century Rise and Fall of Genji and Heike(Genpei Seisuiki Monogatari) that allows us to speak about imitation of the ancient Japaneseplots in which the writer often drew inspiration. This assumption can also be confirmed by theuse of the name of Tajomaru, a mythical robber, famous in the past. This “gentleman of theroad” becomes the hero of many medieval stories, and many of these narratives were alteredinto dramatic works and performed on the scene. Critics also consider that the plot of the story
was adapted by the author from the Japanese collection of over a thousand Tales of Times Now
Past (Konjaku-Monogatari) written during the late Heian period (794-1185). In this book, one
can find a small story which has a name that can be translated as “How a Man Who Was
Accompanying His Wife to Tanba Province Got Trussed Up at Oeyama” (Tales of Times Now
Past, 1993, pp. 184–185). It is an example of a traditional narrative prose. Its title almost totally95

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reveals the plot, except that the woman was raped and abandoned along with her husband. The
plot of Akutagawa’s story almost coincides with the story from Tales of Times Now Past
(Konjaku-Monogatari). Akutagawa does not introduce any change in its developments, exceptthat in the story from Konjaku-Monogatari there is no plotline pertaining to murder.
According to the classification given in Veller’s theoretical work Technology of the Short Story,
Akutagawa’s work has a composition determined as “a turret” or “revolver” (Veller, 1989). In
the stories with this kind of plot, events are given from different perspectives through the eyesof several characters. This allows considering dialectically what is going on and showing thecharacters from both outside and inside perspectives. Veller identifies the following types of“revolver” stories: each of the characters repeats its own version of the same events; or,narrators are replaced as the events keep on developing (Veller, 1989). As one can see,Akutagawa builds his story by the former principle, so that from the confessions of thecharacters, like from a mosaic, it seems to be possible to reproduce the whole picture. However,in fact, it is not so. The genius of the writer is manifested in the fact that after reading the story
there is no coherent picture of the said events. The story remains illogical and incomprehensible
till the very end.
The plot of Akutagawa’s story presents the murder and the rape that took place in a bamboo
forest near Kyoto, and the story is based on setting the events in motion by questioning
witnesses and participants and presenting their testimonies and confessions. The story consistsof seven parts; the first four are testimonies of four witnesses: the woodcutter who found thebody, the priest who saw the deceased and his wife on their way, the mother of a young woman
and the guard who caught the robber Tajomaru. At this point, the plot develops quite
traditionally and consistently according to the expectations of the reader: though thetestimonies contradict each other, they do it not in an obvious way. In the last three parts of thestory, the word is given to direct participants of the events, and Akutagawa presents:
questioning of Tajomaru and his confession in the court; confession of the raped widow in thetemple Kiyomidzu; and the story of the murdered samurai himself, whose spirit was called
upon by a medium.
Thus, Akutagawa builds the plot in such a way that the answer to the question “Who is thekiller?” is deliberately not given and the problem of whose account of events is the true one
remains purposefully unsolved. By applying the principle of variability, the author addresses
the problem of irrepresentability of truth. Koblenkova comments on this as follows: “As a result,the idea of the unknowability of man and the world, which has become one of the conceptualideas in modernism, turns out to be enclosed, in essence, in a postmodern construction, since
the text creates several realities independent of each other” (Koblenkova, 2003, p. 64). 7
Everything which is considered as a reality or truth, becomes in Akutagawa’s story nothing but
a representation of it and depends on perspective which changes and shifts throughout the story.
7

Translation is mine. The original text is as follows: “В результате идея о непознаваемости человека и мира,ставшая в модернизме одной из концептуальных идей, оказывается заключённой, по существу, впостмодернистскую конструкцию, так как текст творит несколько реальностей, независимых друг отдруга...” (Koblenkowa 2003, p. 64).

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To make it even more ambiguous, the author uses fantastic elements in his story, which I am
going to address below.
Fantastic Elements of Akutagawa’s “In a Grove”
Based on folktales of the past, “In a Grove” appears to contain a certain number of fantastic
features. Presentation of the “content” already indicates its potential unreliability – judicial
officials have interest only in the testimonies performed directly in the court. However, thewriter is clearly interested in the concept of “truth” which he tries to reinvent and in the end of
the story (as I will prove later) he shows the impossibility of such reinvention. Each participantof the unfortunate events making their respective confessions claims to be telling the truth. The
robber appears in court and nobly confesses claiming he is the one to blame. The woman
confesses in a temple (it seems to be unreasonable to tell lies in a holy place while talking only
to a deity and herself with no witnesses around).
Confession of a samurai’s ghost deserves a separate specification. In this regard the role of the
fantastic elements of the story should be noted. According to the tradition of the stories of themiraculous and unbelievable, known in Japanese literary tradition as genre kaidan,8 the wordsof the spirit represent truth, by definition. Spirits in Japanese folklore (and other genres
influenced by it) often serve to solve complex issues and find the final truth of what really
happened.9 It is the ghost of the story according to all genre rules one would expect to be abringer of a “traditional” truth and solve the puzzle. However, Akutagawa challenges thistradition providing a playful reinterpretation of it. Thus, the appearance of the spirit is presented
as a fact in the title of the last part of the story and is only a means of conveying the story,
which belongs to the deceased samurai. Thus, if in the traditional kaidan stories the appearanceof the representative of another world usually puts everything in its place, because its versionof events is treated as a kind of “ultimate truth”, the testimony of the given spirit is even more
confusing, because it is not less controversial or subjective than the confessions of a robber ora woman. In other words, the use of fantastic elements as writing technique only emphasizes
the attitude of uncertainty in the unknowable world, so modernist in its essence.
Speaking of modernist understanding of truth, Karl Benesch, the researcher of Heidegger, aprominent modernist philosopher, summarizes Heidegger’s views on the problem as follows:“to speak the truth can manifest itself in two, fundamentally opposite ways: for one, it can be
an uncovering or dis-covering (ent-decken) and, for another, a covering-up, a “zu-decken” and“ver-decken” of Being” (Benesch, 2020, p. 4), and it seems, in Akutagawa’s story, thedifference between covering-up and discovering the truth is indistinct. None of the direct
8

Kaidan (怪談) literary means, if we take a look at the Chinese characters of the word, “the talk or narrative
about mysterious, strange, or bewitching ghosts or apparitions”, which is often referred to ghost stories or horror
stories. Noriko T. Reider, who studies the genre, explains that the term is used in connection to Japanese literary
and oral tradition specifically of Edo period (1600-1867) (266), and it has been already established that Akutagawa
had no problem borrowing plots, characters, devices and atmosphere form the stories of the past.
9
For more information about the peculiarity of kaidan ghost stories of Edo period see Reider’s works “TheAppeal of ‘Kaidan, Tales of the Strange” and “The Emergence of ‘Kaidan-Shū’ the Collection of Tales of theStrange and Mysterious in the Edo Period” as well as World within Walls: Japanese Literature of the Pre-Modern
Era, 1600–1867 by Donald Keene (1999).

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participants have any serious reasons to tell lies and invent things and yet everyone narrates his
own version of “reality”. All of them talk with passion so it may seem they really believe intheir own words. As Morrison outlines, “the reader wants to piece together the puzzle, but thepieces don’t fit. Without any omniscient narrator to tell us what actually happened, the story
ends with the truth lost somewhere in the yabu no naka” (Morrison, 2012, par. 4). By doing so,
Akutagawa denies the very possibility of the truth – in modern world there are as many “truths”,
as there are perspectives and participants of a certain event, so there is no pint figuring out
whose story is the true one. Below, I look closely into each and every truth presented by theparticipants of the event.
The Plot: Common Facts and Differences in the Versions of What Happened
The plot of “In a Grove” revolves around a murder that takes place in a bamboo grove. The
story is presented as a series of testimonies from various characters involved in or connectedto the crime. Each character provides their perspective on the events transpired in the grove. In
this section, I would like to look closely into the differences among the accounts of the events
that happened in a grove. My goal here is by no means to reconstruct the plot but to show how
Akutagawa addresses the idea of truth and its irrepresentability by offering multiple
perspectives on the same events showing that truth stays beyond any representation.
There are a few facts that remain the same in each narrative: Tajomaru leads the spouse to theforest; Kanazawa no Takehiko (samurai) is dead; Tajomaro raped Masago (wife of thesamurai); Tajomaru steals Tekehiko’s bow, quiver and horse. In each of the testimonies,
Masago wants Takehiko to be killed. Masago and Tajomaro do not end up together.
Differences between the stories of the characters vary from trivial to fundamental. Thus, thecomb described by the woodcutter, is not brought up by any of the other characters. “Fierce
fighting”, which results in the pile of trampled leaves which the woodcutter describes, ispresent only in version of Tajomaru. The woodman also argues that the samurai was killedwith a sword but from the first attempt. According to versions of Masago and Takehiko, he
was killed with a dagger not a sword. The woodman argues that Takehiko’s hat was a Kyotostyle sabi-eboshi however the woman’s mother insists that Takehiko has never been to Kyoto.
Here the author obviously wants to draw attention to this point, and the investigator deliberately
asks whether Takehiko is from Kyoto. Wandering priest says: “Well, the man was armed witha sword as well as a bow and arrows. And I remember that he carried some twenty odd arrows
in his quiver” (Akutagawa, 1952, p. 19). The guard, who caught Tajomaru, argues that there
were only seventeen arrows. The woodman says Takehiko was dressed in a blue kimono.
Buddhist priest says Masago was wearing a purple kimono. But Masago herself says that it was
her husband who was wearing purple kimono and Tajomaru was in a blue one. Tajomaru does
not say anything about how the woman’s dagger disappears. In versions of Takehiko andTajomaru, there is a description of a long conversation between a woman and a robber after
the rape, during which she asks Tajomaro to take her with him. Masago in her confession
chooses to miss the point completely. Additionally, Masago does not say how Takehiko’ssword disappears from the scene. It also seems unlikely that Masago fails to commit suicide so98

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many times in a raw, especially considering the first attempt, when she cannot stick the dagger
in her throat. Masago says that it was her who actually killed Takehiko after being raped.
However, Takehiko says that he was not killed by her. On the contrary, she demanded that therobber kill him. According to the robber, samurai still loved his wife and was willing to fightfor her. Samurai proves it when he says that his wife was never so beautiful as in the moment
after the rape. Then Takehiko introduces a new character who never appears on a stage: thischaracter takes the dagger from Takehiko’s chest just a few seconds before his death. But
woodcutter points out that all the blood had been dried up, when he came, while Takehiko saysthat when someone pulled out his dagger, blood was gushing to his mouth. Masago andTakehiko claim that he robber badly hit her after the rape, but the robber did not mention this.
To summarize, every testimony contains at least one thing that contradicts the statements of
the others which underlines the impossibility to find universal truth. The author does not makeany comments upon characters’ narrations and versions of the mentioned events, he takes theneutral position, leaving it to the reader to recognize the futility of the quest for truth. The
striking feature of Akutagawa’s work is the shifting nature of subjectivity: situational andpsychological roles constantly change in the story. One can say that Akutagawa reveals to thereader the secret corners of the inner world of a human being, and in this the purpose of thewriter is also fulfilled. Akutagawa uses the story from Tales of Times Now Past (Konjaku
Monogatari) only as a basis to show the inner life of each of the characters, exposing theirsubstance that motivated their actions. Akutagawa developed three versions of the descriptionof events in order to present psychological background of characters’ actions, creating threedimensional picture of the characters and their social relations. In all three cases, the woman,
one way or another, was ready to abandon her husband but she never abandons demonic
Tajomaru, showing thereby the downside of obedience and chastity of Japanese samurai’s wife.
Takehiko (samurai) and Tajomaru (the robber) also behave differently than one would assume
according to their assigned traditional models of behaviour: the first one who is supposed to be
the sample of valour and honour, is greedy and weak in battle, another one, the carrier ofimmoral qualities, however, shows nobleness: he is not willing to kill Takehiko (according not
only to his own words but to Takehiko’s testimony as well) and is forced to fight with him, andin the version where he kills him (his own version) he kills him in a fair fight. In general, it
seems that an external appearance of the characters is completely opposite to their essence.
As my purpose here is not to reconstruct what actually transpired in Akutagawa’s story, I would
like to underline once again the importance of how each narrative varies from one another. It
is clear that by introducing small and much bigger differences in every conflicting testimony,
Akutagawa reflects on human subjectivity and questions the possibility of existence of one
objective truth, leaving, instead, more room for the ambiguity of any human experience. Not
only does the author demonstrate the problematic nature of truth but shows in a creative andculturally specific manner the unknowability of human nature.

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The Shifting Role of a Woman
Another aspect of the story has been pointed out by researchers: the change of situational andpsychological roles of the protagonists (Koblenkova, 2003, pp. 62–67), and perhaps the moststriking shift happens to the female character. Thus, the woman first appears as a victim, but inthe course of the situation she turns into opposite – the one who wants the samurai dead.
Morrison focuses his only on the woman’s role and considers the story “a meditation on thequestion: what is woman?” The researcher points out that “in each of the seven testimonies
Masago embodies a different aspect or archetype of woman” (Morrison, 2012, par. 7).
Following his analysis of the changes in woman’s role, we can see yet again the relativity oftruth.
In the woodcutter’s testimony there is no mention of the woman and it presents Masago asabsence. The testimony given by the wandering priest presents her as enigma. The priest
narrates “catching a glimpse of Masago, whose face is veiled in a dark red and blue cloth”(Morrison, 2012, par. 11) – an image, as Morrison claims, evoking a mood of mystery andexoticism. Morrison underlines that in priest’s narrative “she is the enigmatic noblewoman
behind the screen, much like that female archetype that appears in so many of Tanizaki’s
works. The fact that he is a Buddhist priest may also explain why he refers to her only indirectly,
as women are generally regarded as impure in Buddhist teachings. A woman as a namelessobject of male desire appears in the fourth testimony of the magistrate who describes Tajomaru
as a “lustful onnazuki (fancier of women)” (Morrison, 2012, par. 13), alluding that Masago was
his target. The next statement given by the woman’s mother presents her as the obedientdaughter and faithful wife. Tajomaru’s confession shows Masago as a “modern woman”(kindai josei). Masago’s testimony presents herself as yamato nadeshiko, the traditional ideal
in Japan.10 Thus, as Morrison underlines, “Masago has tried to present herself as a devout,principled (as defined by the male-dominated order), self-sacrificing, but ultimately weak
woman” (Morrison, 2012, par. 23).
The last narration given by the spirit of the dead samurai presents Masago as “pure, unbridledfeminine desire or will” (Morrison, 2012, par. 7). Interestingly, Takehiko’s ghost notices that
it is precisely at the moment of being with another man she looks to her husband more perfectthan ever before: “While the criminal talked, my wife raised her face as if in a trance. She had
never looked so beautiful as at that moment” (Akutagawa, 1952, p. 27). But when he realizes
10

Yamato nadeshiko (大和撫子), as it is stated in Kenkyūsha's New Japanese-English Dictionary 5th edition, is“personification of an idealized Japanese woman”. Tamura in her book Michi’s Memories. The Story of a Japanese
War Bride, analizes the meaning of the term and the concept as follows:“Yamato means ‘pure Japanese’” without any foreign influence. Nadeshiko is a type of plant which belongs
to the dianthus genus and has pink flowers in early autumn. Although this term was traditionally used todescribe the delicate beauty of Japanese women, in contemporary Japan, “Yamato nadeshiko” is generally
regarded as old-fashioned and rarely used to praise the virtues of Japanese women” (Tamura, 2001, pp. 9394).
Tamura also claims that the term does not only describe the physical ideal, and may refer to Japanese womenbeing “flexible but resilient in change, just as the flower might sway in a strong wind but never break” (Tamura,
2001, p. 94).

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her truly self, “he is so horrified by her that he plunges the dagger into his breast and kills
himself” (Morrison, 2012, par. 25).
Such interpretation leaves other characters beyond the critic’s attention which makes the study
incomplete. Besides, Morrison claims that the most trustful testimony is the one by Takehiko
but it is more likely that the whole traditional concept of wise spirit revealing all the truth isreconsidered in Akutagawa’s masterpiece. My argument here is that trying to prove theimpossibility of any truth, Akutagawa offers the figure of the spirit in an ironic way
representing unreliability of all subjective narratives. In the next section, I attempt to show how
the spirit’s testimony, while being the key here, is not the key to understanding the truth, butthat truth is no longer possible in this ever so changing and complex world of constantly
conflicting subjectivities.
Narrating Guilt, I-Novel Critique and Zen Motifs
As mentioned above, while Morrison states that the whole concept of truth in the story isconcealed in the women’s role: “she is a beautiful, wilful, vain, and ruthless femme fatale
capable of anything, even matricide” (Morrison, 2012, par. 26), the supporters of traditional
kaidan genre (see section 2) would expect the spirit of the dead to deliver the ultimate truth
from behind the grave. However, I am going to risk arguing against such interpretation becauseof the permutations in the versions of what happened that do not necessarily have anything to
do either with the woman or with the spirit. For instance, the role of the robber also changes:
being the culprit and the master of the situation eventually he becomes a murder weapon;
moreover, he refuses to kill as well as participate in further events at all. However, it might beeasy to fall under the impression that the key role is associated with the samurai himself. He is
not directly involved in the confrontation and coming together of his wife and Tajomaru. Hestands apart from the initial conflict but he is the one to be killed, while a woman and a robber
are still alive. The only “key” he may present here, though, is to understanding of Akutagawa’s“new concept of truth” – there is no such thing, shows the writer in this story. However, apartfrom truth, though closely connected to it, there is another issue that needs addressing here,
which is the concept of guilt, also widespread in modernist writing.
Akutagawa chooses the crime to be the story’s central event and it is represented in every
narrative of the three characters. Moreover, all of them plead guilty. And in such a way author
raises the philosophical problem of the story. Obviously, it is impossible to determine who isa real “criminal” here and which version of the events is truthful, if any. However, the fact that
all of them confessed of a murder, indicates a shaped concept of a guilt / sin rooted in theirconfessions.
As Napier points out, “modern psychology with its new awareness of the self obviously
stimulated a consciousness of the psyche’s complexities” (Napier, 1996, p. 112). Suchmodernistic tendency with its awareness of one’s guilt, representations of identity crisis andthe complicated state of human’s mind can also be found in Akutagawa’s story. Motives ofguilt create the concept of the crisis of faith and hint at the unknowability of ultimate truth.

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It is also possible to regard Akutagawa’s story as the representation of the critique of thenaturalistic techniques which flourished in Japanese literature in the beginning of the twentiethcentury (e.g. Shiga Naoya, Tayama Katai, Kunikida Doppo, and so on). Not only does the shortstory question the essence of literary realism but also shows skepticism toward narrative
strategies of naturalistic I-novels based on confessions and testimonies that constitute the longlasted tradition of Japanese literature. Thus, the story is also an ironical interpretation of aJapanese I-novel technique.
Besides, the influence of Zen philosophy should not be unobserved, with its emphasis on therelativity of any truth. As Napier boldly (and justly) stated, “final truth is never discovered”.
She argues that it is “the unknowability of the truth” that is discovered by the author rather than“the end of all truth” (Napier, 1996, p. 112). However, there is another specificity of
Akutagawa’s short story that should be underlined. Rudnev claims that “In a Grove” represents
the idea of the playful attitude of the author to its work that can be analysed in the frameworkof the philosophy of the event which is characteristic of the twentieth century art and literature(Rudnev). Thus, the short story can be considered in the following way: events represented in
the story are not contradictory. All versions can be true, but the story cannot be reduced to asimple chronological sequence. The art of the twentieth century problematizes the idea of
logocentrism, and Akutagawa turns his story into a kind of Dzen koan where all versions haveequal standing and can be true and all the contradictions are not contradictory at all, and thesearch for truth itself is considered an illusion.
Koblenkova seems to have reached the similar opinion: “Akutagawa obviously admitted thatthe world is the coexistence of many subjective realities and that ultimate truth (…) is either
unknowable or does not exist at all” (Koblenkova, 2003, p. 63).11 It is worth mentioning that
Akutagawa forestalls such views on truth and reality, since in modernist literature there will belater others examples of this idea of “parallel truths”, the most vivid of which can be found in
William Faulkner’s works such as The Sound and the Fury (1929) and As I Lay Dying (1930).
This puts Akutagawa’s search for truth in a broader literary context.
Conclusion
The question of truth and its representability was at the core of modernist literary tradition, andJapanese literature of the time with its search for new modes of expression was not left behind.
Akutagawa is now known for his nuanced and innovative short stories, which often draw upon
traditional Japanese tales and legends but are written in a modern style that reflects the author’sinterest in Western literature and psychology. In the best tradition of western modernism (and
often ahead of it), Akutagawa’s stories are characterized by their psychological depth andcomplexity of characters. The writer often explores themes such as the nature of identity, themeaning of existence, and the conflict between traditional Japanese values and the influence of
11

Translation of the author. The original text is as follows: “Акутагава, очевидно, допускал, что мир — этососуществование множества субъективных реальностей и та конечная истина, которой одной ведомо, каксводятся в вечности концы с концами, или непознаваема, или не существует вовсе” (Koblenkowa 2003, p.
63).

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the West, and the problem of personal and objective truth is among them. Not only did
Akutagawa inherit traditional traits of Japanese literature but also put them provocatively on
display thus accentuating his new ideas about multivalence of artistic effects in approachingultimate truth.
In this paper I attempted to analyze Akutagawa’s “In a Grove” from the thematic point of view
showing the motif of searching and ultimately not finding the final truth – the task that theauthor completed by using a “revolver” compositional structure (by the definition of Veller,1989) and a number of unreliable narrators, neither of whom seems to have had the reason tolie and yet all the accounts ended up different. The paper offered a brief list literary pieces ofthe past that may have served as the basis of the story. Furthermore, the article addresses
Morrison’s model of shifting roles of a woman (Morrison, 2012) in the story and argues thatthough she is certainly one of the central characters, she is not the main one, for, since the truth
has never been discovered, there cannot be any main characters (nor their confessions) at all.
The testimonies of every narrator here are equally contradicting and ambiguous. In this way,
Akutagawa creates a peculiar narrative which demonstrates that the real account of events may
never have existed and it is simply impossible to ever learn the “truth”.
The idea of the unknowability of the world and a man in it has become one of the leading
concepts in modernism. Akutagawa’s “In a Grove” incorporates the modernist search for truth
and intrinsic to it a multi-layered and often conflicting vision of events. The story questions thevery ability to produce and accept the objective truth. However, Akutagawa’s short story
creates new realities, independent of each other. This strategy of narration is not limited to
Akutagawa and Japanese literature but is explored more (though later) in the texts of westernmodernists, William Faulkner being the greatest example. Thus, Akutagawa’s work can beplaced into the worldwide modernist tradition since Akutagawa’s stories often featurefragmented narratives and multiple perspectives, which reflect the modernist interest in
subjectivity, complexity of human experience and unreliability of any ultimate truth.

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Corresponding author: Eugenia Prasol
Email: prasol.yevheniia@nagasaki-u.ac.jp105