Life With Literature

“In a Bamboo Grove” explores how truth changes with perspective through many different narratives about a man who was apparently killed by a huge bandit, Tajōmaru. This short story highlights that not everything is set in stone, as one person’s perception can differ strongly from another’s.

Ryūnosuke Akutagawa describes seven different people commenting on what they believe the reality of the situation is, with four of them being testimonies and the remaining three being confessions. The writer chose for us to never hear the words of the magistrate, only the person giving the answers to questions that are repeated for the sake of the reader.

Akutagawa also chose to keep all the testimonies at the front and the confessions at the end, perhaps so that a confession, which is characterised as something we place our belief in, would not give us a bias when reading the testimonies. This format is especially interesting, as we know that if each type of first-person account were placed at the front or vice versa, our personal ideas of the truth would be altered.

In reading this short story and understanding that most accounts weren’t explicitly trying to be false, although some must be due to the inconsistencies within the story, the psychological idea of confabulation seemed apparent (when a person unintentionally fabricates or distorts a memory to fill in gaps without any intent to lie). If Akutagawa intentionally wanted to show this, he successfully portrayed how memory can vary, and revisiting a past truth isn’t always exactly right in the present.

As we near the final account, the narratives become more personal, from a woodcutter’s perspective to the dead man himself, told through a medium. As the reality of the situation is revealed, the narratives become more independent and seemingly have less relation to each other, almost as though the fact of the man’s death becomes less important than the individual perspectives and motives that shape each version of the truth.

The positions of the people giving their personal ideas of what actually happened tell a dramatic story. Chronologically, the accounts come from a woodcutter, a travelling priest, a policeman, an old woman who is the mother of the murdered man’s wife, Tajōmaru, the wife, and finally a medium who tells us the husband’s story.

As previously stated, this correlates with each new testimony revealing a witness who is increasingly close to the dead man. The mother, for example, is more significant than the travelling priest, who had no true relationship with the man and therefore has little to say beyond describing how the husband was “equipped” and had a “good-sized sword.” This may explain why each account becomes longer than the previous one, as the witnesses become increasingly important to the story.

The third account comes from the policeman and establishes how each person plays a part in delivering more knowledge to the trial. His job is to introduce the murderer as the “famous bandit, Tajōmaru.” Following this, the old woman states that the murdered man is called “Kanazawa” but, through her grief, provides little other useful information, yet shows that sadness and frustration can leave people both desperate and unhelpful.

The final accounts demonstrate that self-interest can distort the truth. Tajōmaru doesn’t hesitate to say that he “killed the man,” with his description of the previous events revolving around the power and dominance that they automatically give the bandit.

He focuses on everyone else’s weakness by heavily describing the process of tying up the man and the couple falling “right into (his) trap.” He almost attempts to portray himself as an honourable warrior, challenging the husband to a sword fight where his “sword pierced his breast” due to his wife saying she would go with the victor, and claiming that he did not kill the woman but instead she ran away.

The woman’s story makes her a victim of humiliation, where her husband’s look of “contempt and hatred” towards her means that she “cannot go on living with” him. She tries to highlight the disgust in her husband’s eyes as a justifiable reason for murder, so she “thrust the dagger through (his) chest.” She ultimately attempts to take her own life but fails.

The final confession blames his actions on the betrayal of his wife, seeing her tell the bandit to “take (her) anywhere” he likes. Yet, once she tells the bandit to kill her husband, Tajōmaru kicks her down and asks the husband if she should be killed, but by that time, she has already fled.

Kanazawa begins to cry while the bandit cuts his rope and tells us that he sees “the dagger that (his) wife had dropped” and “shoved it” into his chest. The entire story ends with an “invisible hand” pulling the dagger out as the man sinks into death. This becomes even more confusing, as the “hand” gives an even less definitive version of what happened.

As well as presenting the truth as contradictory, these accounts show that the same event can happen to different people and be experienced in entirely different ways, with the writer perhaps hoping to explore this through an exaggerated metaphor where Kanazawa is killed by the bandit, his wife, and finally himself.

To conclude, “In a Bamboo Grove” explores how truth can be altered by the person who is revealing it, and not in ways that can be blamed on lies, but instead through the perception and prior experiences of a person that make them identify a situation differently from someone else. Akutagawa hoped to deny reality and, like his characters, leave our opinion of the truth up to our own minds and experiences that shape our perspective.

Through the first-person accounts that force us to reconsider our opinion and the “invisible hand” that symbolises uncertainty, the writer arguably felt that humans cannot give objective truth due to every factor that makes up an individual life, such as memory, experience and emotions, which affect how we understand reality.