Her story, in contrast with the other two, present the utter despair of the victim of such a horrible crime, a crime that in her day would have shamefully marked her for the rest of her life. We colloquially say the road to hell is paved with good intentions, and perhaps in this case, ashamed at what her husband might say if she removed the gag of leaves, she saw, rightly or wrongly, a request to die from him because she wanted to see it and felt such a suicide pact was fitting and then was unable to follow through with it. Suicide pacts have long been escalated to a kind of romantic art in Japanese and Western literature alike. In such a voluntary situation it’s hard to imagine why she would lie, and there is a plausibility to her story. Yet, her story is not meant as a defense but was given as a confession in a temple. Details of her testimony, such as three successive suicide attempts failing, or the A Matter of Perspective 2unspoken request from her husband to kill him, are highly suspect and when compared to the testimony of the two men her story has less in common. Of all the character’s retellings, the wife’s is perhaps the most easily discarded as false. We as readers are then forced to use our own judgment, replete with our biases of gender, class, and culture, to decide whose account is the most trustworthy. In each re-telling certain elements are suspect, certain elements are corroborated by other accounts, and all three present a different killer. Of the three most contentious accounts of events presented within the story, none can really be perceived any more or less true by the account alone. It does, however, possibly open itself up to a questioning of pre-Meiji (and, pre-Western) values. In A Grove does not lend itself to such a clear-cut argument of Western resentment. It has been argued in cases like his 1920 short story The Ball, a re-telling of an earlier work by a French author, that he was “clearly deploying these literary techniques to articulate a strongly felt political sensibility, particularly with regard to the issue of Western cultural imperialism in Japan.” (Rosenfeld, 2000) Several of his story stories present a re-telling of events or intertextualization of previous literary works that call into question the assumed truths of the narrators. The instability of linear truth for Akutagawa is not limited just to In a Grove. Through this device, Akutagawa pursues the question of truth not as a constant but as a subjective element of the human experience. Three of the seven accounts clearly contradict each other, calling into question not only their accuracy but the accuracy of any of the seven accounts. Within the story Akutagawa presents seven accounts surrounding the murder of a samurai named Kanazawa no Takehiro in a bamboo grove. While it is not bound to that coat in particular, it is the one we generally see him use it with.For a reader, Ryunosuke Akutagawa’s 1922 short story In a Grove gives more questions than answers as the last sentence ends. While the base layer is a simple fancy ruffled shirt, black pants, and black shoes, the high collar black jacket he wears overtop acts as a conduit for his ability, Rashoumon. The outfit that he has is a bit special in terms of composition. Much like Atsushi, Akutagawa has rough, choppy hair, though his is pure black with white tips at the ends of the front bits. Neither of them are very happy with this, but they’re figuring it out. While mainly a part of the Port Mafia, through Dazai’s connections and in response to a larger growing threat concerning both them and the Armed Detective Agency, Akutagawa has been assigned to work with Atsushi under the title of Shin Soukoku (New Double Black). The downside is this person was Dazai, so it left him with a rather large complex for constant approval after a while. Raised to fend for himself and his sister Gin on the streets, Akutagawa grew up with a great distrust for people, but also the need to be seen as worthwhile in the eyes of people he looked to for advice. Akutagawa (voiced in Japanese by Kenshō Ono and in English by Brian Beacock) is one of the semi-antagonists turned reluctant part time good guy in the anime/manga Bungo Stray Dogs.
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