Ryunosuke Akutagawa's In A Grove

Improved Essays
The literary critic Howard Hibbett says of Ryunosuke Akutagawa that he successfully “converts an old melodramatic tale into a series of conflicting statements which undermine our prosaic confidence in distinguishing between subjective and objective, truth and fiction” (14.) This is especially true for “In a Grove” because each of the three main characters give the conflicting confessions about the death of the samurai. Furthermore, they each have something to gain by possibly lying, which make it even more difficult to separate the truth from fiction. The bandit, Tajomaru, might be lying that he killed the samurai because he wanted to reinforce his reputation by insisting that killing means nothing to him. He told the High Police Commissioner that “killing isn’t a matter of such great consequence as you might think. When a woman is captured, her man has to be killed anyway” (Akutagawa 21.) In addition, Tajomaru’s reputation was about raping and killing woman and children; yet this time, he claimed of killing a samurai, who was a great warrior, to show his skills in swordsmanship were not inferior to anyone. Besides, Tajomaru wanted to show his fairness in fighting the samurai as he “untied him and told him to cross sword” with him (Akutagawa 24.) Knowing that his “head …show more content…
When she saw her husband’s eyes, the “eyes was neither anger nor sorrow…only a cold light, a look of loathing,” she felt his scornfulness which hurts her even more than being violated by the thief (Akutagawa 25.) At that moment, she decided to kill her husband and ended her life after him. Furthermore, her attempts to commit suicide gave believability to her story as she was “still living in dishonor” after she failed to kill herself (Akutagawa 27.) Masago sought refuge at the temple and wished to spend her life to redeem her great sin towards her

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