Truth Contains Nothing, So Everyone Fills It with Themselves. Akutagawa’s Gate.

Morality is a function of circumstance, and truth a luxury evolution never prepared us for. In "Rashōmon" and "In a Grove," Akutagawa Ryūnosuke revealed how people construct ego-protecting narratives — even beyond death. Who was the writer who stripped masks down to the bone?

Stripping Masks Down to the Bone

At the southern end of Suzaku Avenue — the central axis of the capital city of Kyoto — there once stood a gate meant to protect civilization from chaos. Rajōmon (羅城門) was built in 789, when Emperor Kanmu was relocating the capital to Heian-kyō — the “Capital of Tranquility.” A thirty-five-meter-wide, two-story structure, it rose twenty-one meters high, casting its shadow over the temple Tō-ji to the east and Sai-ji to the west. The gate was the first and last thing any traveler arriving at or departing from the capital would see — a monumental statement: here order begins; here wilderness ends. But nothing lasts forever. Two typhoons — in 816 and 980 — reduced it to ruin, and no one ever fully restored it, because the western district of Ukyō was emptying out and there was no need for a gate at the end of a road nobody walked anymore. By the twelfth century, Rajōmon was a skeleton. In the shadow of its beams, people abandoned corpses, unwanted infants, and those whom society preferred not to see. The demon Ibaraki-dōji — if legends are to be believed — made the upper story his home. The gate stood on a border. Between civilization and decay. Between who a person wants to be and who they become when no one is watching.

Seven hundred years later, in 1915, a twenty-three-year-old English literature student at Tokyo Imperial University wrote a short story about that gate — one that fit into just a few pages but contained the entire abyss of human nature. Akutagawa Ryūnosuke (芥川龍之介) — a descendant of samurai who had served the Tokugawa clan, raised by his uncle because his mother lost her mind nine months after his birth. The story, “Rashōmon” (羅生門): a servant dismissed by his master stands in the rain beneath the ruined gate and chooses between an honest man’s death by starvation and a thief’s life. Upstairs he finds an old woman pulling hair from a corpse — because the dead woman had been a cheat in life, so she “deserves” it. The servant feels revulsion at such reasoning. But he thinks, he ponders… And he adopts the woman’s logic, strips her of everything she has, tears the kimono off her body, and leaves her naked among the dead. Akutagawa passes no judgment, offers no explanation, provides no answer. The final line: where the servant went — no one knows. Darkness closes behind him like a door.

Seven years later, Akutagawa would write “Yabu no naka” (藪の中, In a Grove) — the murder of a samurai told by seven witnesses, each of whom lies and each of whom tells the truth. From this text would grow Kurosawa’s film, a psychological term enshrined in textbooks — the “Rashomon effect” — and a question that has given no rest for a hundred years: does such a thing as truth exist, or are there only narratives we sell to ourselves so we can look ourselves in the eye? Akutagawa stripped the stories people tell about themselves, layer by layer, and looked to see whether at the very bottom there lay truth, or… — nothing.

Who Is the Author?

Akutagawa came into the world on March 1, 1892, in Tokyo’s Irifune district, in the Year of the Dragon — hence the name Ryūnosuke, “son of the dragon.” His father, Toshizō Niihara, ran a dairy serving foreign residents of the Tsukiji settlement. His mother, Fuku, suffered a mental breakdown before the boy turned one. The official version spoke of “nervous weakness.” The truth was that Fuku lost her grip on reality and never regained it. The father gave the boy to his maternal uncle, Michiaki Akutagawa, who gave him the family name. The Akutagawa lineage came from the samurai class and had served as okubōzu (奥坊主) — ceremonial tea servants at the Tokugawa court. The uncle’s household was steeped in literature, full of Chinese classics and Japanese tradition. Young Ryūnosuke absorbed it all like a sponge, but he carried within him a fear that never faded: that his mother’s madness was hereditary, that it sat inside him like an embryo, waiting for the right moment to emerge.

That fear shaped the writer. Akutagawa did not write about himself — at least not directly, not in the early phase of his work. Instead, he reached for ancient tale collections: the Konjaku Monogatarishū from the turn of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the Uji Shūi Monogatari from the thirteenth — reservoirs of Japanese folklore, anecdotes, ballads, and chronicles teeming with thieves, demons, treacherous wives, and monks of dubious morality. He took these old tales and injected new blood into them: Western psychology, modernist skepticism, his own obsessions. He read Poe and Baudelaire, Nietzsche and Strindberg, Gogol and Chekhov. At Tokyo Imperial University he studied English literature and wrote his thesis on William Morris. But his closest spiritual kin was Edgar Allan Poe — another loner from a crumbling family, another linguistic perfectionist, another man who sought meaning in art because he could not find it in life.

There is something moving in the way Akutagawa approached writing. He had no interest in fiction as an escape from the world. What interested him was the exact opposite: how close can you get to the truth before the truth begins to destroy you? In one of his late texts he wrote a sentence that could be carved on his tombstone: “Life is not worth a single line of Baudelaire.” This was the confession of a man who genuinely believed that the only thing of value is the precision with which we can name things. The rest — feelings, relationships, the everyday — was raw material that acquired meaning only after being processed through literature. Akutagawa was an archaeologist of human lies. He stripped the stories people tell about themselves, layer by layer, and looked at what remained underneath. Most often — nothing.

“Rashōmon”

“Rashōmon” (羅生門), published in 1915 in the journal Teikoku Bungaku, was Akutagawa’s third story and one of the shortest texts he ever wrote. A few pages. One evening. One man. One question that corrodes everything.

The scene is simple, almost theatrical. Late Heian — let us say the twelfth century; Akutagawa deliberately does not specify. Kyoto is rotting. Earthquakes, whirlwinds, fires, famine — the city slides into decay. Shattered Buddha statues lie by the roadside, sold as firewood. Beneath the gate stands a servant — unemployed, masterless, without a future. The rain does not stop. On his right cheek a pimple ripens, swollen with pus. That pimple is no realistic detail — it is a physical marker of inner infection, of indecision festering like an untreated wound. The servant stands on the threshold of a choice: die as a decent man or live as a thief.

The thought circles in his head as though on a closed track. “If I am not prepared to do whatever it takes, I’ll die beneath a wall or in the gutter” — but that “if” remains a hypothesis. The servant cannot cross the threshold. Only when he climbs to the upper story and sees an old woman pulling hair from a corpse does something shift inside him. The woman explains herself: the dead woman had sold dried snakes as dried fish in her lifetime, so she was a cheat, so she “deserves” it. The servant feels revulsion — but at the same time something grows in him that the narrator calls “the courage he had lacked before.” Except this courage leads in the exact opposite direction from the one that had compelled him up the stairs. Now the servant no longer debates whether to steal — he tears the kimono from the woman, leaves her naked among the corpses, and vanishes into the darkness.

What Akutagawa does here is an act of intellectual courage. He does not condemn the servant. He does not condemn the woman. He does not even condemn the dead cheat. Instead, he reveals a mechanism — cold, precise, surgical — by which morality ceases to be a constant and becomes a function of circumstance. The servant does not choose evil. He adopts someone else’s logic, adapts it to his own situation, and wields it as a weapon. This is exactly the same mechanism that operates in every war, every fraud, every act of betrayal: not “I am bad” — “I must, because of circumstances.” And circumstances are always eager to cooperate.

Akutagawa knew Nietzsche — he read him in the German original and through English translations. In “Rashōmon” one hears the echo of “Beyond Good and Evil”: morality is not absolute; it is a tool. It changes when the context changes. But Akutagawa takes a slightly different path than Nietzsche. Nietzsche builds the Übermensch — a man who transcends morality and creates his own values. Akutagawa creates no superman. He creates someone who simply vanishes into the darkness — after the theft, without catharsis, without transformation, without a lesson (one might debate whether this was Zarathustra’s “Last Man” or someone else entirely, wholly unforeseen). The chain of reasoning is airtight: others stole to survive; this woman steals; I can rob her. The logic is merciless. And that is precisely why it is terrifying, because it shows how little separates a decent person from a thief — sometimes only rain that refuses to stop.

There is one more detail that circles through the story like a quiet echo. The narrator — omniscient, ironic, cosmopolitan — at one point uses the French word “sentimentalisme,” written in Roman letters even in the Japanese original. This is no editorial error. It is a signal. Akutagawa tells the reader: look, this servant in twelfth-century Kyoto is close to every one of us, because the question he asks himself is neither Japanese nor European. It is human. It is timeless. It endured in the year 1150, it endures in 1915, and it will endure as long as human beings face decisions.

But there is yet another, deeper level. Akutagawa is not writing only about morality as a function of circumstance — he is writing about the very nature of decision. The servant does not make a decision in the classical sense of the word. He does not weigh arguments, does not balance gains and losses. He undergoes a transformation — slow, bodily, almost physiological. The narrator describes how “courage” grows in the servant’s body, how it fills him from within. This is not an act of will. It is a process in which circumstances pour through a person and turn him into someone else. Kierkegaard would say the servant makes a “leap.” Akutagawa asks: what if there is no leap? What if there is only a sliding — slow, imperceptible, without a clear moment of transition? Just as there is no clear moment when dusk becomes night.

“In a Grove”

In 1922, seven years after “Rashōmon,” Akutagawa publishes in the monthly Shinchō a text that would change world literature. “Yabu no naka” (藪の中, “In a Grove”) is a story about the murder of the samurai Kanazawa no Takehiro, whose body is found in a bamboo thicket near Kyoto. The text consists of seven testimonies given before the high police commissioner. There is no narrator. There is no commentary. There are only voices — seven different versions of the same event.

First come the indirect witnesses. The woodcutter who found the body. A wandering monk who saw the couple on the road. The policeman who captured the bandit Tajōmaru. The murdered man’s mother-in-law. Each provides facts, but each also filters them through their own lens. Then come the three principals: the bandit Tajōmaru himself, the wife Masago, and — in what is Akutagawa’s masterstroke — the ghost of the murdered samurai, speaking through a medium. And here the real nightmare begins.

For instead of what we expect — that everyone will claim innocence — the opposite happens. All three confess to killing the samurai. The bandit Tajōmaru claims he killed him in a fair duel — on the twenty-third stroke of the sword — because he wanted to win the man’s wife. In his version, he is a brave warrior who fights face to face with an equal opponent. The wife Masago claims she killed her husband with a small sword — after the rape, in despair, because she could not bear the contempt in his eyes. In her version, she is a victim acting in a frenzy of pain. The murdered samurai himself — through the medium — claims he committed suicide with that same small sword, because his wife betrayed him by asking the bandit to kill him. In his version, he dies with honor, as a bushi, choosing death on his own terms.

Each testimony is internally consistent. Each contradicts the others. And none is credible — because each protects the teller’s identity. The bandit must be a hero, because without that he is a common rapist. The wife must be a victim, because without that she is an accomplice. The husband must die by his own hand, because without that he is a cuckold who perished in a manner unworthy of a samurai. Akutagawa does not adjudicate who tells the truth. And this is an act of intellectual cruelty toward the reader — because it forces a confrontation with the fact that truth is not something one discovers but something one constructs. Each of us is simultaneously witness, perpetrator, and judge of our own story — and each of those roles produces a different version of events.

What Akutagawa achieved in “Yabu no naka” preceded by a decade the American experiments of Faulkner and Dos Passos with multi-voiced narration. Akutagawa himself pointed to Robert Browning and his “The Ring and the Book” as an inspiration — Browning, too, built a plot from testimonies. But the difference is fundamental: in Browning, truth waits somewhere at the end, ready to be discovered. In Akutagawa, there is no end. There is only the grove. The title itself — “in a grove” — has become an idiom in Japanese for a situation in which truth is unknowable. “It’s yabu no naka,” the Japanese say with a shrug. Three words that close the subject.

(The most common form is 真相は藪の中だ (shinso wa yabu no naka da) — “the truth is in the grove.” It is a recognized kan’youku (慣用句 — idiomatic expression), its origin confirmed by dictionaries such as Daijisen. Curiously, although the idiom itself is widely known, remarkably few people realize it comes from Akutagawa’s story.)

Akutagawa and Modern Psychology

Modern psychology confirms what Akutagawa knew intuitively a hundred years ago. Memory is not a tape recorder — it is a story-making machine. Every recollection is a reconstruction, not a reproduction. Every act of summoning the past is a creative act in which the brain fills gaps, amplifies what fits our self-image, and mutes what threatens it. We do not lie — at least not consciously. We tell a version of reality that protects our sense of identity, our self-esteem, our self-image. Psychologists call this confirmation bias, hindsight bias, self-narration. Akutagawa did not use these terms. He used scenes and situations.

Let us look at the three protagonists of “Yabu no naka” once more, not as literary characters but as case studies. The bandit Tajōmaru constructs a heroic narrative because without it he is nobody — a drifter, a rapist, a man who kills not in battle but by treachery. Twenty-three sword strokes — that detail is crucial, because the number is precise and heroic, suggesting a long, evenly matched duel between two masters. Tajōmaru builds a version of events that lets him look in the mirror: I am a bad man, but a brave one. I steal a man’s wife, but I give him a chance. I kill, but fairly. This is a narrative that makes it possible to live with oneself.

Masago — the wife — builds a victim’s narrative. She was raped, she looked into her husband’s eyes and saw contempt there — not sympathy, not anger, but contempt — and in a frenzy of pain she killed him. Then she tried to kill herself but failed. In her version she is a tragic heroine, a woman broken by a world of men, acting in the grip of overwhelming emotion. She is not an accomplice. She is not the treacherous link between husband and bandit. She is a victim who became an executioner because she had no other way out.

And the samurai’s ghost? He builds a narrative of honor. He was not killed by a bandit — that would be humiliation. He was not killed by his wife — in those times, that would be twice the humiliation. He took his own life because his wife asked the bandit to kill him — and he, as a bushi, preferred to die by his own hand rather than allow his honor to be defiled. Note: even in death, even speaking through a medium from the beyond, the samurai does not stop protecting his identity. Death does not free one from ego. Ego survived even the crossing to the other side. This is perhaps Akutagawa’s darkest thought: that the narrative we tell ourselves is stronger than our survival instinct.

Let us note one more thing. Each of the three testimonies contains the same element: shame. The bandit is ashamed of his cowardice, so he builds a narrative of courage. The wife is ashamed of her helplessness in the face of rape, so she builds a narrative of struggle and desperate action. The husband is ashamed of his disgrace, so he builds a narrative of honorable suicide. The Japanese haji (恥) — shame — is the real engine of these narratives. It is not truth that drives these testimonies, but shame. Not the desire for self-preservation, exoneration, or escape from punishment — only shame. Each version of events is a mirror in which the teller sees themselves in the most bearable form. Akutagawa reached the same truths as Freud and Jung — only not from a consulting room but from inside an ancient tale. He shows that the most enduring structure of the human psyche is not the desire for truth but the desire for a bearable image of oneself. Truth is a luxury. Dignity — a necessity.

In 1950, twenty-three years after Akutagawa’s death, the director Kurosawa Akira (黒澤明) layered two stories on top of each other: from “Rashōmon” he took the frame — the gate, the rain, the moral decay — and from “Yabu no naka” the entire plot: murder, testimonies, the impossibility of establishing truth. The film “Rashōmon” won the Golden Lion in Venice and the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, and sent a shockwave through the West — for although Western audiences were already familiar with stories told from multiple perspectives, the absence of a clear resolution drove them to distraction. But Kurosawa makes one change that is treacherous in its subtlety. He adds an objective witness — a woodcutter who saw everything from hiding. He gives the viewer hope for truth. Akutagawa does not do this. Akutagawa is merciless; Kurosawa took pity on the audience.

From this film grew the term “the Rashomon effect,” which penetrated psychology, sociology, law, epistemology, and cultural studies. The effect describes a situation in which different participants in the same event present contradictory accounts, each reflecting their subjective perspective rather than objective reality. Researchers have identified three components: contradictory perspectives, a lack of evidence capable of resolving the dispute, and social pressure to arrive at a single version nonetheless. This is the pattern of every trial, every quarrel between loved ones, every historical debate about “what really happened.” Akutagawa discovered this mechanism through literature before science gave it a name.

There is yet another dimension here — a deeply Japanese one. The concepts of honne (本音) and tatemae (建前) — “true feelings” and “public facade” — were familiar to Akutagawa from daily life, from the social code that surrounded every Japanese person from the cradle. But Akutagawa goes further than the classical distinction. In “Yabu no naka” he suggests something more unsettling: that even honne — that supposedly “true face” beneath the mask — is itself another construction. There is no face beneath the face. There are only layers of stories we tell ourselves so we can get up in the morning and look in the mirror. Japanese culture has known this for centuries — nō theater is, after all, an art of masks, and each mask reveals a different truth. Akutagawa simply admits what society does not want to hear: that beneath the last mask there is nothing.

“Hell Screen”

Three years after “Rashōmon,” in 1918, Akutagawa writes a story that closes the triptych on truth from a different angle — from the artist’s side. “Jigokuhen” (地獄変, “Hell Screen”), based on an anecdote from the thirteenth-century collection Uji Shūi Monogatari, tells the story of the painter Yoshihide — the supreme master of his time, employed at the court of the Lord of Horikawa during the Heian period.

The Lord of Horikawa commissions Yoshihide to paint a folding screen depicting a vision of hell. The artist agrees but encounters a problem that is also the central problem of his entire creative philosophy: he cannot paint what he has not seen. He paints prisoners, demons, fires — but he lacks the central scene: a carriage burning in midair with a woman inside. He asks the Lord to set a carriage ablaze with a living person in it. The Lord agrees — and places Yoshihide’s daughter inside. The painter watches his child burn. For a moment, horror crosses his face. Then — the rapture of the artist. He paints a masterpiece. The next day he hangs himself.

With this brutal story, Akutagawa asks: what is the obsession with authenticity? What is this craving to see things “as they truly are”? Yoshihide cannot paint from imagination — he must see, must experience, must stand face to face with fire in order to render it on silk. This is the tragedy of every realist artist, every writer who refuses to “invent” and insists on “writing the truth.” Akutagawa’s question is: what if truth destroys? What if, in order to see reality stripped of all shields, one must sacrifice everything — including what one loves most?

Here again we find an echo of Nietzsche — because Nietzsche was more than a philosopher for Akutagawa; he was a fellow traveler — the Nietzsche who writes in “The Birth of Tragedy” of a tragic hero possessing not a flaw but a fatal excess. An excess of sensitivity, of seeing, of the need to reach the core. Yoshihide is not evil. He is excessive. His art demands total commitment — and that commitment devours everything around it, including the people he loves. Akutagawa wrote about himself in similar terms. In one of his final texts he confessed: “I have seen, loved, and understood more than others. This alone grants me some measure of solace in the midst of insurmountable sorrows.” This is not pride but diagnosis. An excess of seeing as illness. Clarity as poison.

In “Jigokuhen” a second mechanism is also at work, one that connects this story with “Yabu no naka”: the narrator is unreliable. The story is told by a servant of the Lord of Horikawa — a man loyal to his master who systematically ignores evidence that the Lord desired Yoshihide’s daughter and was likely exploiting her. The servant refuses to see what his eyes see. He refuses to interpret what is obvious. He builds a narrative in which his master is noble and Yoshihide is mad, dangerous, inhuman. And for a moment the reader believes him, because each of us prefers clean narratives to dirty truth.

Akutagawa saw himself in Yoshihide. A writer who stripped people of their narratives, who removed mask after mask, who could not paint from imagination because the only thing that interested him was the brutal precision of truth. But how many masks can one remove before one strips away one’s own art? And what remains when all of them are gone?

Toward the Abyss

In “Haguruma” (歯車, “Cogwheels,” 1927) Akutagawa describes hallucinations: semi-transparent, rotating cogwheels that multiply across his field of vision. He also sees a recurring image of an empty overcoat hanging in a room — without a person inside — which turns out to be a premonition: shortly afterward he learns that his brother-in-law has committed suicide. In this text, the boundary between seeing and knowing begins to blur.

In “Aru ahō no isshō” (或阿呆の一生, “The Life of a Stupid Man,” 1927) he writes an autobiography in fifty-one fragments — as though the short history of his life were a woodblock-print album in which each image is self-sufficient, yet together they form a portrait of a man walking toward the abyss. In one fragment he gazes at a cast-iron sake bottle with finely incised lines and experiences an epiphany of “the beauty of form.” In another he listens to Mozart’s “The Magic Flute” and knows that Mozart was a man who “had broken all the commandments and suffered” — just like him. In these final texts, Akutagawa no longer writes about truth as a philosophical problem. He writes about truth as a substance that poisons him.

On July 24, 1927, Akutagawa swallowed a lethal dose of Veronal — a sedative he had received from his physician friend Mokichi Saitō. He lay down on a futon beside his sleeping wife. His wife awoke in the morning to find him dying. He had left several letters — to his wife, to friends, to family. In the farewell letter to the writer Kume Masao he wrote a sentence that became as famous in Japan as his stories: “I feel bon’yari shita fuan (ぼんやりした不安) — a vague unease about the future.”

That sentence is fascinating precisely for its lack of precision. A man who devoted his entire life to precision — who polished every sentence like a jeweler polishes a diamond, who demanded surgical exactness from words — writes, at the end, something blurred, undefined, hazy. Bon’yari means “misty,” “vague,” “out of focus.” This is not a cause. This is not a diagnosis. It is a feeling that would not let itself be caught in words. Throughout his life Akutagawa studied how people construct narratives to give reality meaning. In his farewell letter he admits that meaning has run out. He builds no narrative. He protects no ego. He plays neither hero, nor victim, nor sage. For the first time he says something that is no one’s version — it is simply fog.

In his letter he also wrote: “I do not believe, as Westerners do, that suicide is a sin.” A sentence that carries an entirely different weight in the Japanese context than in the European one. In the samurai tradition, death by one’s own hand was an act of courage and unity with oneself — not an escape but a choice. Akutagawa was too modern, too steeped in the West, to truly believe this. But he was also Japanese enough not to treat his own death as a metaphysical sin. Akutagawa’s friend Kan Kikuchi wrote after his death that Akutagawa’s entire life had been “stoic” and that his suicide was not a suicide of defeat but a “suicide of victory” — that in death he had completed his art. A beautiful narrative. But Akutagawa taught us not to trust such narratives.

He was thirty-five years old. He left behind more than a hundred and fifty stories, three sons — the eldest, Hiroshi, would become an actor; the middle son, Takashi, would die as a student-conscript in Burma during the Second World War; the youngest, Yasushi, would become a composer — and a question that has given no peace to anyone who has heard it once: does truth exist, or only the stories we sell to one another?

After Akutagawa

Akutagawa left behind something more than literature. He left a way of seeing the world. In Japan his stories are assigned reading in schools — high schoolers read “Rashōmon” in Japanese language classes, and the title “Yabu no naka” (藪の中) is an everyday idiom. Japan’s most prestigious literary prize — the Akutagawa-shō (芥川賞) — bears his name and has been awarded to debut authors since 1935. But Akutagawa’s legacy reaches far beyond Japan and far beyond literature.

What Akutagawa revealed is a psychological lesson that modern science is still catching up to. Each of us is the narrator of our own life — and each of us is an unreliable narrator. Not because we are liars. Because we cannot do otherwise. The human brain was not designed to record truth — it was designed to build coherent stories that allow us to survive, act, function. Truth is a luxury for which evolution did not prepare us.

The consequences reach far beyond literature. In courts, eyewitness testimony is considered one of the weakest forms of evidence, yet we convict on its basis. In the media, every report is a perspective, and objectivity is a facade behind which lurks another perspective. In personal relationships, every argument has two versions, and both are true, and both are false. Akutagawa offered no solution, because there is none. He offered a diagnosis — and the diagnosis is irrevocable.

But there is also something else in Akutagawa’s work, something easy to overlook when focusing on his intellectual coolness. Underneath — beneath the irony, beneath the skepticism, beneath the surgical precision — there is compassion. The servant in “Rashōmon” is not condemned. The old woman is not condemned. The bandit in “Yabu no naka” is not condemned. Even Yoshihide — the painter who watched his daughter burn — is not condemned. Akutagawa understands them all, because he understands the mechanism. He knows that people build narratives not out of malice but out of necessity. That lying is a form of survival, not sin. That each of us, placed in sufficiently extreme circumstances, will tear a kimono off someone and disappear into the darkness. And will have a fitting justification for it.

And this is perhaps Akutagawa’s deepest truth: not that people are evil, but that they are blank. They are an empty space filled by context — by circumstances, hunger, fear, desire, shame, honor. Morality is not the foundation on which we stand. It is a coating that changes with the weather.

Today in southern Kyoto, at the intersection of Kujō Street and Senbon Avenue, behind an unremarkable shop, right next to a playground, stands a stone pillar. It is the only trace of the Rashōmon gate. The bus stop nearby bears the name “Rajōmon,” but those who do not know what they are looking for will walk right past without noticing. Children run on the playground a few meters away. Weeds grow between the paving slabs. The Japanese sun shines on the asphalt the same way it once shone on the gate’s roof a thousand years ago.

The gate has fallen, and Akutagawa has been dead for nearly a hundred years. But the question they both posed — the gate through its decay, the writer through his stories — still speaks. You can hear it in every trial. In every quarrel. In every television news broadcast. In every memory we recount differently from the person who stood beside us.

Or perhaps the question should be put differently. Not “does truth exist,” but — is any one truth less true than the others?

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