In a Grove

In a Grove is a short story by the Japanese writer Ryunosuke Akutagawa, first published in the January 1922 issue of the literary magazine Shincho under the Japanese title Yabu no Naka. The story recounts the violent death of a young samurai found in a bamboo grove near Kyoto through seven separate, mutually contradictory testimonies given by witnesses, a suspect and, through a medium, the murdered man himself, leaving the reader with no single reconciled account of what actually happened. Akira Kurosawa's celebrated 1950 film Rashomon drew its narrative primarily from In a Grove, borrowing only its title and framing device from Akutagawa's separate short story Rashomon, and the international prominence of Kurosawa's adaptation has made In a Grove's structure of irreconcilable perspectives influential enough that the phrase Rashomon effect is now used generally, in Japan and beyond, to describe situations where differing accounts obscure an underlying truth.