A Study Guide for Ryunosuke Akutagawa's "In a Grove"

By Gale and Cengage

A Study Guide for Ryunosuke Akutagawa's "In a Grove," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Short Stories for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Short Stories for Students for all of your research needs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cengage Learning - Gale
• Release date: Jul 27, 2016
• ISBN: 9781535825733

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In a Grove

Ryūnosuke Akutagawa

1922

Introduction

Ryūnosuke Akutagawa's In a Grove, published in 1922 in Sincho magazine, is a detective story set in ancient Japan. It has become well known throughout the entire world as the basis of Akira Kurosawa's breakthrough 1950 film Rashomon. The story appears in The Essential Akutagawa, edited by Seiji M. Lippit, published in 1999.

In a Grove tells its story through the testimony of three witnesses in a murder investigation, each of whom confesses to the killing. The third witness is the victim himself, claiming to be a suicide, speaking from beyond the grave through a spirit medium. Through this device, Akutagawa evokes the ancient shamanic traditions of Japan, as well as the spiritualist movement that swept over the world in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The impossibility of reconciling the three versions of events suggests the impossibility of finding truth and meaning in an irrational cosmos. In a turn of events its author could never have envisioned, the technique of telling the same story from different and irreconcilable viewpoints has become one of the mainstays of the entertainment industry, forming the skeleton of countless films and television programs, from art film to sitcoms.

Author Biography

Akutagawa was born on March 1, 1892, in Tokyo, Japan. According to traditional Chinese astrology, he was born in the year, month, day, and hour of the dragon, so he was give the name Ryunosuke, which means son of the dragon. The Akutagawa family had been court nobles of the Tokugawa, responsible for conducting the culturally and spiritually significant tea ceremony, so his family life was steeped in tradition. Akutagawa was given a first-class education based equally on the Japanese and Chinese classics and Western literature.

While at Tokyo Imperial University, Akutagawa became an editor of the student literary magazine, Shinshicho (New Currents of Thought), as well as a frequent contributor of both original short stories and translations of Western poetry. He became a disciple of Natsume Sōseki, who was at the time the most prominent novelist in Japan. Akutagawa wrote more than one hundred fifty short stories, only some of which have been translated into English, but never produced a full-length novel. His first short story, Rashomon, was published in 1915. In a Grove was originally published in the magazine Sincho in January 1922.

Akutagawa taught English briefly at the naval engineering school in Yokosuka before becoming a full-time writer. During his life, Akutagawa was