Tajomaru is obvious to blame because in what I read he was the criminal in the story. He does confess to the crime. There are moments where he is describing Takehito and they don’t necessarily reflect him. Some evidence such as the police man saying there is no room for a horse to be near a murder scene, when he didn’t have a horse as well as tajomaru luring them in to get swords and mirrors which was the main reason. The high police commissioner testified the weakness for women in case of robbery of Tajomaru which tends to be the only focus why tajomaru appeared in the story to be the killer.

Now to remove the idea that it was the wife all on her own. First off, the way she is describing the event, she states that she had attempted to run to his side when all of a sudden she was knocked down by the robber. But you have to ask yourself, why didn’t she fight for the man that she had seemingly loved so much? She had her small sword by her side, couldn’t have she at least tried to fight off the robber instead of just basically throwing herself at him? The last reason why I believe her story is false, is that although we never get to truly hear the condition of her body and if she really stabbed herself in the throat other than her own story. In the other accounts you hear that she had run away from the scene. Going back to the point I made earlier, she had stabbed herself in the throat, and that is somewhere you do not want to get stabbed. The human body has many essential things that if ruptured could kill you almost in an instant, even if the wound was shallow. So when she states that not only did she attempt suicide in this way, but failed even after she jumped from the mountain into the pond is preposterous.

Taking the Samurai’s telling of the story into account, it doesn’t even seem believable to me from the start. Even from the beginning there is a major part of the story missing, how did he get tied up in the first place? Not only that but after he was freed, deciding not to go after the man that raped his wife seems almost impossible, even though he had his wife’s small sword by his side. It just doesn’t seem plausible to me how he would rather kill himself than go after them when they weren’t that far away.

Now this is what I really think happened. The robber was more than likely well known in the area where the mother and daughter had lived. The mother stated in her testimony that she even knew who the robber was and hated him. Well I think that the robber happened to pass by there every so often and eventually took a liking to her, as did she to him. Then they co-conspired to have the wife lead him close to the grove when they were traveling and have the robber knock him unconscious. He would then drag him into the grove which would explain the trampled greenery around. Where they would then soon kill him and leave the rope nearby to make it seem like it was someone else who did it, although they did not want to leave a trace. That is exactly why the small sword( which was used to kill him), the Samurai’s sword, and his bow and arrows were gone. The wife then disposed of the actual murder weapon and was successful in doing so, however the difficulties with the horse led his results to be unsuccessful. The troubles he had riding the horse managed to make him drop three arrows, and on his way to dispose of the other weapons caused him to fall off the horse becoming immobilized till the Policeman had arrived. Which lines up exactly with the condition of the robber as stated in the testimony of the Policeman.