How virtue slips into the weaponisation of virtue, how storytelling slips into the weaponisation of storytelling. It’s one I’d do well to pay a lot of attention to, I feel. It’s also just a great story, quite unusually and yet, I think, very naturally framed.
Makes me think of another one I’ve long loved, Ryūnosuke Akutagawa’s ‘In a Bamboo Grove’.
First published in The New Yorker in 1990, and collected in the book of the same name that same year. It’s available to New Yorker subscribers, and non-subscribers who haven’t used up their monthly free quota, on their website. Also collected in Selected Stories, McLelland and Stewart, 1996 and Alice Munro’s Best: Selected Stories, Everyman, 2008
A Personal Anthology 