In a grove

In a Grove is a short story by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa; it first appeared in the January 1922 edition of the Japanese literature monthly Shinchō. Akira Kurosawa used this story as the basis for the plot of his award-winning 1950 movie Rashōmon.

Akutagawa Ryūnosuke (芥川 龍之介) was one of the first prewar Japanese writers to achieve a wide foreign readership, partly because of his technical virtuosity, partly because his work seemed to represent imaginative fiction as opposed to the mundane accounts of the I-novelists of the time, partly because of his brilliant joining of traditional material to a modern sensibility, and partly because of film director Kurosawa Akira’s masterful adaptation of two of his short stories for the screen.