“The Moonlit Road” and “In a Grove” are both murder mysteries that confront the reader with the question of truth in storytelling. The texts present the reader with several first-person accounts of a crime, or the witness's involvement in it, but provide no definitive solution. No one is found guilty or hanged; the reader must decide, taking into account the testimonies and his own reason, what happened in the Hetman estate and in the grove next to the Yamashina stage road. Both texts challenge the reader to construct an accurate story from several accounts of questionable reliability. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get an original essay Both texts approach the narrative with suspicion; it is a form of communication that cannot be trusted because it relies on narrators who can never be completely objective or disinterested. Each text features only one relatively reliable narrator – Joel Hetman Jr. in “The Moonlit Road” and the Lumberjack in “In a Grove.” The other narrators cannot be trusted. In “The Moonlit Road,” the reader must rely on the statements of Casper Grattan, a man without a past and a ghost who no longer thinks or feels like a human being. In "In a Grove", the reader realizes that each witness has a connection to the crime and therefore has an interest that prevents him from being objective. The priest is too interested in a woman for a holy man, the policeman calls Tajomaru a criminal at the beginning of his testimony, Masago's mother tries to paint a certain picture of her daughter, and the wife, husband and rapist have their own opinion. own interest in shaping their stories. Texts see storytelling as a form of communication that modifies the facts it wishes to present and its reliability depending on its medium. Thus, in "The Moonlit Road", the reader is asked to assume that some men's violent dreams are Joel Hetman Sr.'s version of the night of his wife's murder, and a medium is supposed to bring Julia Hetman's statement . These mediums are far from reliable and natural, and therefore the reader cannot determine which part of these statements belongs to the natural world and which part belongs to the supernatural world. In "In a Grove", the reader encounters the same problem: Tajomaro's confession may be somewhat forced, Masago's confession is made in a moment of emotional distress, and the husband speaks from the other world, through a medium and even forgives Tajomaro. Again, psychics are unreliable and the reader cannot determine which part of each testimony may be true. "In a Grove" also argues that narratives change based on social values ​​and conventions: the wife, husband, and rapist shape their testimonies so that they still appear honorable to society after the act of shame, rape. The truth, at this point, is lost and its place is taken by the social conventions of honor. Since the texts are presented in the form of a police investigation or trial, the reader assumes that the truth must be hidden somewhere within or between the witness statements. In most investigations or leads, the reader is given a definitive solution to the crime, but Bierce and Akutagawa offer no such solution. As the testimonies and witnesses are very unreliable, no precise story can be reconstructed from the accounts. The reader must go through the testimonies again and again to draw their own conclusion – just like in real life. Learning the truth in the world outside of literature..