In his introduction to the Penguin edition of the story, author Haruki Murakami says that writers, such as Akutagawa, are given national status if, among other things, they reflect the mentality of the Japanese in the age in which they are writing, so instead, I will try to see what Akutagawa might be commenting on early 20 th Century Japan through his In a Grove. Seriously read the story, it takes like fifteen minutes).Ĭommentaries on In a Grove (and Kurosawa’s Rash ōmon) absolutely love to talk about how it is a commentary on the relative and unknowable nature of truth, and some even more irreverently try to solve the mystery, so I don’t feel the need to cover that well-trod ground. Meanwhile, the ghost of the samurai says that his wife is swayed to join the bandit and begs him to murder her husband, which he declines and they both run away separately leaving the samurai to kill himself in his grief (and then then a forth, perhaps unknown, person is added into the mix, which gave me chills. The bandit says he then unties the samurai so they can duel for the samurai’s wife and he then kills the samurai the wife says the bandit runs away and she kills the samurai, before attempting to kill herself, because they cant live with the shame caused by the bandit. To briefly explain (but it really is worth reading the story itself): a bandit named, Tajōmaru lures a samurai and his wife into a bamboo grove where he tries up the samurai and rapes his wife and it is here that the stories of the bandit, the wife and the (ghost) samurai diverge.
Ryūnosuke Akutagawa first published In a Grove or Yabu no Naka in 1922 as a modernist take on a classic Japanese folk story where readers are presented three conflicting accounts of the death of a samurai.
If you are like me and absolutely love to be a know-it-all and interject into friendly conversations with an unasked for, often irrelevant, fact, statistic or anything that you half remember, with a “WELL, did you know…”, in order to turn the conversation back to you and your brilliance…then this is for you! Here we can top cinephiles who love to let you know they have watched any Akira Kurosawa film, as they love to do (WELL, did you know Star Wars was inspired by the Hidden Fortress?), you can top this by steering them into talking about Kurosawa’s classic Rash ōmon, then you drop down a “WELL, did you know that Kurosawa’s Rash ōmon come more from Akutagawa’s short story In a Grove, rather than its namesake Rash ōmon?” Proceed to bask in the jealous eye rolls directed at you for grinding conversation to a halt with your superior knowledge of films and early 20 th Century Japanese literature.
0 kommentar(er)
