What Remains First: A Rope and a Comb#

After the woodcutter, a traveling priest, the hōmen who captured Tajomaru, and Masago’s mother answer the kebiishi in turn. Their four statements do not complete the picture. They narrow its bounds.

At noon the previous day, the priest saw a man and a woman traveling together. The man walked; the woman rode a pale-gold horse. A veil concealed her face, so the priest never saw it. He remembers that the man carried a sword, a bow, and more than twenty arrows. That night, the hōmen caught Tajomaru after he had fallen from a horse. He found the horse nearby and recovered the bow and arrows from Tajomaru. The objects correspond to the priest’s description. The hōmen saw them himself. His certainty that Tajomaru must be the murderer comes instead from what he knows of the outlaw’s past.⁴

The old woman identifies the dead man and the missing woman. She says that her son-in-law, Takehiro, was gentle and could have had no enemies. She calls her daughter Masago strong-willed and insists that Masago had known no man but her husband. Intimacy makes her account of their identities credible, but it cannot show her what happened to Masago after the assault or rule out every enemy Takehiro might have had. Her closeness gives her knowledge and a reason to defend them.

By then, the inquiry has assembled a substantial body of cross-checkable material. Takehiro is dead with a stab wound in his chest. He traveled with Masago the day before. The rope and comb remained at the scene. Weapons that had belonged to Takehiro and the horse the priest had seen with them later appeared with or near Tajomaru, who is now in custody. None of the first four witnesses saw what happened inside the grove. Their statements cannot yet establish the binding, the sexual assault, or how Takehiro died.

Evidence has limits, but those limits do not erase it. If conflicting accounts mean that “nothing can be known,” the corpse and the transferred possessions vanish with the rest. A body of shared facts is not an all-encompassing story. It is closer to a sourced floor: what someone saw, what someone inferred, when each person learned it, and which items can corroborate one another. I will call this the factual floor.

The next three accounts split apart on that floor. The speakers dispute more than who killed Takehiro. Each tries to decide who, at the end, still counted as a person capable of acting.

All Three Take Back the Manner of Death#

Tajomaru admits that he lured Takehiro into the grove with a story about buried treasure, tied him to a cedar, and raped Masago. He does not claim innocence. When he reaches Takehiro’s death, however, he changes the form of the scene. Masago, he says, demanded that only one of the two men remain alive before she would follow the victor. Tajomaru therefore untied Takehiro and fought him honorably, killing him on the twenty-third stroke. At the end of his confession, he even asks the authorities to impose the harshest punishment.⁵

The confession retains the crime while selecting its shape. In Tajomaru’s account he is a deceiver, rapist, and murderer, but also a fighter who accepts a woman’s demand, wins by skill, and faces death without flinching. The heroic pose would collapse if he had stabbed a bound man. Tajomaru accepts the gravest charge and still keeps control of the scene in which Takehiro dies.

Masago’s confession moves the death to another moment. Tajomaru leaves after assaulting her. Her husband remains tied to the tree, his mouth stuffed with leaves. She rushes to him and meets what she reads as a cold, contemptuous gaze. She asks that they die together, then reads one word from the slight movement of his lips: “Kill.” She drives the dagger into his chest and tries several times to kill herself, without success.⁶

Takehiro cannot speak clearly in Masago’s account. His contempt and the command to kill are meanings she reads from his eyes and lips through her own shame. She casts herself as the person who killed her husband, then recasts the killing as the first half of a double suicide to which he had consented. The unverifiable word on his lips also becomes her reason for acting.

The third death reaches us through a medium. The dead Takehiro says that Masago agreed to leave with Tajomaru, then asked the bandit to kill her husband. Tajomaru responded by kicking her down and giving Takehiro the choice of whether she should die. While Takehiro hesitated, Masago escaped into the grove. Tajomaru took the weapons and cut through one of Takehiro’s bonds. After freeing himself, Takehiro picked up the dagger Masago had left and stabbed himself in the chest.⁷

This version makes the wife a betrayer, grants the bandit a measure of mercy, and returns Takehiro from murdered body to final agent. He admits no offense, but claims his own death. As a warrior recounting his humiliation, Takehiro lets his last action remain his and takes the cause of death out of the other two speakers’ hands.

Takehiro’s account adds one final event. Before consciousness sinks into darkness, he hears someone creep toward him. An unseen hand pulls the dagger from his chest. Within his version, this explains why the woodcutter found no weapon the next morning. The story never tells us whose hand it was, and it never summons the woodcutter back to confess that he stole the dagger.

Each speaker pays for the account offered: Tajomaru admits rape and murder, Masago admits killing her husband, and Takehiro identifies himself as a suicide. Their costs differ, yet all three rearrange the scene. The two living speakers take the killing upon themselves; the dead man takes possession of his death. None remains only the humiliated, abandoned, or murdered party.

We do not need to decide that all three consciously lie. Shame, fainting, misrecognition, self-protection, and deliberate invention may mingle in one memory, and Akutagawa never tells us in what proportion. We can still see what every account does: each moves the death to a point where its speaker can act.

Another Voice Does Not Automatically Yield More Truth#

The phrase “everyone lies” flattens the differences among the seven statements. The woodcutter reports a scene and infers a struggle from leaves. The hōmen supplies recovered property, then uses Tajomaru’s reputation to complete the identity of the killer. The old woman identifies her family and vouches for their character. Tajomaru and Masago confess in different settings. Takehiro speaks through a medium. They possess different knowledge and defend different things.

Once the three central accounts enter, the factual floor gains two facts that all three corroborate: Takehiro was tied up, and Tajomaru sexually assaulted Masago. They agree on those acts and give three mutually exclusive answers about who performed the final action that killed Takehiro. The conflict does not turn violence into opinion. It blocks the direct passage from known violence to one complete causal account.

The occasions of speech also remain distinct. Only the headings of the first four statements explicitly say that the speaker is being questioned by the kebiishi. Tajomaru confesses to an official with the power to punish him. Masago confesses at Kiyomizu-dera. Takehiro speaks through a medium. Readers often inherit from film and popular summaries an image of seven witnesses assembled in one court, but Akutagawa never stages such a hearing. The kebiishi organizes the first four exchanges. The story arranges all seven voices.

These materials require two levels of description. The factual floor preserves sourced, cross-checkable objects, events, and bodily consequences. An attribution account records how a speaker orders actions, interprets a look, supplies motives, and assigns responsibility. A third operation has not yet appeared: someone might adopt one account to find guilt or standing, allocate resources, or decide what happens next. In a Grove gives us material and attribution, then suspends the judgment that would produce such consequences.

“Everyone has their own truth” sounds generous because it relieves the reader of work. It loosens the stab wound, rope, and assault into opinions no firmer than an account of motive. Averaging the three versions of the death fares no better. Three incompatible actions do not combine into a fourth fact.

An additional voice still has value. No single account can monopolize the entire route from the scene to the death. We can see who observed something, who inferred it, and who translated another person’s silence into a command. Polyphony preserves the dispute; it does not hand down a just verdict. The crucial vacancy in In a Grove is therefore the judgment rather than truth itself. Akutagawa gives us neither the kebiishi’s final handling of the evidence nor an omniscient narrator who closes the case.

The empty seat leaves the work to the reader. Recording an account, believing it, publishing it, and acting on it are separate operations. Chiaki’s route in CC puts those differences on a stage.

The Play Succeeds; History Remains Unsettled#

Chiaki gathered Haruki’s past from several sources. Three years earlier she watched the trio perform at the school festival, then questioned Takeya about Haruki. Later, she found on Haruki’s shelf the festival committee DVD that Mari Kazaoka had given him. Haruki let her watch it with him. Chiaki drew further material from his narration, her observations, and her own inquiries. He consented to the viewing and confided private experiences to her. He never gave Chiaki permission to stage those experiences in public.⁸

Chiaki does not reproduce the material unchanged. Her play makes one small displacement. An exchange that took place between Haruki and Setsuna during the school festival’s closing celebration moves to Kazuki and Haruna before the contest, even though Haruna draws chiefly on Kazusa. Haruki realizes at once that the playwright knew what happened and changed the other person on purpose. Setsuna lays her hand over his; as she watches the altered scene, her eyes widen and she bites her lip. This is neither a factual correction nor new evidence. Chiaki has turned the thought “what if the other woman had stood there?” into a message that only Haruki and Setsuna can recognize.⁹

On stage, Chiaki plays both Haruna and Yukine. Yukine draws chiefly on Setsuna, while the later acts mix Chiaki herself into the part. Chiaki also writes a direct confrontation between the two women, a confrontation that never took place in WHITE ALBUM 2: Introductory Chapter (IC). The invented scene gives form to a gap in the relationship. Kazusa and Setsuna had understood each other through Haruki; the play forces into speech the conversation they kept going around.

A strong interpretation does not convert fiction into fact. Setsuna and Haruki stand at the back of the auditorium and remain until the end. During the third-act confrontation, Setsuna corrects the play in real time: neither she nor Kazusa, she tells Haruki, possessed the strength that Chiaki has given them. Afterward she borrows the play’s image of the kept guitar pick to say goodbye to Haruki. She can correct the account from the audience and answer it once the performance ends, but she cannot enter a finished production and change its lines. Kazusa is absent and receives no chance to respond after the show.¹⁰

By the time the applause begins, Chiaki’s account has succeeded as a play. The ordinary audience has seen fictional characters under other names; its applause establishes the performance’s success and nothing more. Haruki recognizes the reply Chiaki has addressed to him and goes to wait for her at the station. Setsuna corrects both roles, then uses the image of the guitar pick to part from Haruki. Their actions give the performance an operative effect within the present relationship. They do not settle the trio’s history. Setsuna has already contested the characterization, Kazusa remains absent, and the stage has no authority to fix a final version on their behalf.

The sequence needs one more correction. Haruki had chosen Chiaki and drawn a boundary with Setsuna before he entered the theater. Setsuna still proposed that they watch the play to the end. The performance did not cause his choice. It showed him how Chiaki had answered, and it gave Setsuna a language for leaving.¹¹

The game contains another kind of multiple version. IC supplies the common prior history from which every Coda route proceeds, while choices generate mutually exclusive events after the branches divide. The statements in In a Grove compete over an event that has already happened. Routes go on to make different histories. A player may compare repeated playthroughs; the characters live through one route. Later actions can change what IC counts as within that route, but they cannot cancel the concealment and hurt that occurred or import consequences from another route.¹²

Asking whether an account “counts” is therefore incomplete. We must ask what status it has acquired. It may count as a work, as a message between people, or as evidence about an event, and each answer can differ.

These are questions of operative effect. Success as a work or message does not strengthen the evidence for the factual floor or a particular attribution account. Applause cannot turn the invented quarrel into an IC event. Setsuna’s response proves that the message reached her; it cannot provide Kazusa’s consent in her absence.

Who Makes a Shared Past Count?#

No one in In a Grove holds the entire past. The woodcutter, priest, homen, and old woman supply different material, while the kebiishi’s questions organize the first four records. Tajomaru, Masago, and Takehiro reorder the death in separate accounts. Akutagawa preserves voices from different settings for the reader and leaves the seat empty when judgment becomes necessary.

Chiaki’s route distributes the work another way. Haruki tells the story and corrects details. Chiaki selects, writes, and performs. The troupe makes a public production possible, and the audience’s applause confirms a successful play. The account enters the relationship only when Haruki recognizes Chiaki’s answer and Setsuna contests the roles before parting from him. Chiaki decides how the play begins, but not how the people who see themselves in it will respond. The audience can recognize a work; it cannot claim that history on Kazusa’s behalf.

Essay III, “The Third Person Returns from the Workplace” examined another arrangement. Haruki was at once participant, interviewer, and editor, and the magazine reached Setsuna before his explanation did. That essay asked who controlled the moment of knowledge. The present problem lies one step later: every time a version advances, someone has to establish the capacity in which it counts.

“Who makes it count?” cannot be answered with one person’s name. Witnesses provide material; a questioner decides what to ask. Authors and editors arrange accounts. A troupe and its audience establish a public work. The people affected must recognize themselves before they can accept, correct, or refuse a version. Anyone who then wants to assign responsibility, redistribute resources, or determine a course of action must say who judges, on what facts, and how objections return. Authority for one operation does not authorize the next.

A shared past need not wait until everyone accepts the same complete story. When the same actions and consequences bind several people, they need a factual floor that no single account may erase. They may continue to disagree over what a glance meant, whether a confession arose from fear or desire, and whether a departure was sacrifice or flight.

The missing dagger in In a Grove is a useful warning. In Takehiro’s account, he kills himself with it and an unknown hand pulls it from his chest. In the woodcutter’s statement, the weapon is absent from the beginning. We can preserve that gap and keep searching for evidence. We cannot close the story by assigning the hand to someone Akutagawa never identifies.

The empty seat of inquiry does not say that everyone owns an equal truth. Seven voices remain, and fact must still be separated from attribution. Akutagawa does not tell us how an objection might change the distribution of responsibility or the actions that follow. The next essay, “After Reconciliation Fails, How Can ‘No’ Take Effect?”, asks what happens when no common interpretation emerges and a relationship may no longer be repaired: how people can still refuse, leave, and continue to live. In a Grove stops sooner. The dagger is gone, and the seat remains empty.