Review: Rashomon (1950)

Directed by acclaimed director Akira Kurosawa, it stars Toshirō Mifune as the bandit Tajōmaru; Takashi Shimura as a nameless woodcutter; Machiko Kyō as the Samurai’s wife; Masayuki Mori as the murdered Samurai; and Minoru Chiaki as a budhist priest. Kurosawa worked in collaboration with cinematographer Kazuo Miyagawa.

The film is based on two short stories by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa. “Rashōmon” provides the setting of Rashōmon Gate, while “In a Grove” provides the characters and the plot. Rashomon is the seminal film which introduced Kurosawa and subsequently Japanese cinema to the West. Rashomon is considered to be one of Akira Kurosawa’s masterpieces.

The film went on to win the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival, an Academy Honorary Award at the 24th Academy Awards as well as numerous other awards.

Rashomon is a stunning film and included numerous groundbreaking devices at the time it was created. Since then it has become a timeless classic. Among the devices employed by Kurosawa includes filming directly into the sun and the use of black died rain to stand out better against the backdrop. It’s use of human falability and subjectivity was also groundbreaking at the time.

Rashōmon Gate.

It begins with a heavy downpour, where three characters meet as they hide from the rain at the crumbling Rashōmon Gate. Here a priest and a woodcutter sit deep in their thoughts, contempating the strange story that had unfolded not long ago. They are joined by a third man, a commoner played by Kichijiro Ueda, who sensing something amiss questions them. The priest and the woodcutter then begin to recount a very strange tale.

“I’ve seen so many men getting killed like insects, but even I have never heard a story as horrible as this.Yes. So horrible. This time, I may finally lose my faith in the human soul.” - the priest.

The Woodcutter recounts his story, starting with how he went into the woods three days ago to collect some wood. This scene opens up to mysterious almost snake-charmer-like music that leads us through the winding journey of the woodcutter. This scene seems to take forever, so that the audience is pulled out into the world of the story and made to feel as if they have journeyed deep into the forest, far from civilization. The woodcutter finds first a hat and a veil, then cut rope lying on the ground, and finally the body of a murdered Samurai. He flees in a panic to tell the authorities.

The woodcutter finds the woman’s veil.

Next the Buddhist priest tells the authorities how three days ago he was walking in the woods when he saw both the Samurai and his wife as they passed him.

The notorious brigand Tajōmaru who has been captured by the authorities then recounts his own version of the story, punctuated by his hysterical laughing. He claims that he saw the Samurai and the woman pass and was so enchanted by her that he decided he wanted her at all costs.

The bandit points to a cache of weapons.

He used his guile to trick the samurai to follow him off the mountain trail to look at a cache of valuable ancient swords he discovered and buried. In the grove he tricks the Samurai into stepping ahead of him and knocks the Samurai down from behind and ties the man to a tree.

The bandit fetching the Samurai’s wife.

He fetched the woman who was waiting for her husband to return by saying that her husband had fallen ill. He claims that he tried to rape the woman, but though she initially tried to defend herself she submitted to his advances and was “seduced” by the bandit in full view of her husband. The woman, filled with shame, then begged the bandit to duel with her husband so that she can be saved from both men knowing her guilt and shame.

The bandit honorably set the samurai free and they duel. Tajōmaru recounts the fight as being fought fiercely, and skillfully, but in the end Tajōmaru gains the upper hand and killed the Samurai. The bandit claims that he crossed swords with the Samurai 23 times, and was impressed with the man’s skill since no one had ever lasted more than 20 before then.

He then tells the magistrates how when he turned to look for the woman, she was gone, and supposed that she fled in fear. At the end of the story, the officials ask him about the expensive dagger owned by the Samurai’s wife. He replies that, in the confusion, he surely forgot all about it, and says forgetting about it was the biggest mistake he had ever made before laughing hysterically.

The Samurai’s wife, who was discovered hiding in a temple is then brought before the authorities to recount her story. She is a pathetic figure, bundled up on the ground and weeping as she tells her version of the story. After being raped by the bandit, the bandit fled laughing hysterically as he went while she lay sobbing beside her husband.

Her husband sat quietly beside her, still tied up, lost to his own thoughts. She begged him for forgiveness and was instead met by a cold, dissinterested stare. As the expression on her husband’s face tore her apart, she cut the rope that tied him and begged for him to kill her. As the tension mounted, and she flew into an ever more hysterical fit, she fainted with the dagger in her hand and woke up to find that same blade plunged into her husband’s chest. In her shame she tried to kill herself by throwing herself in a nearby lake, and eventually ended up at the temple.

The deceased samurai is then given the opportunity to recount his version of events, through the voice of a medium. This eerie scene unfolds as the spirit thrashes about in the medum’s body and tells how he has been cast into a dark empty void. He claims that after Tajōmaru captured him and he was forced to watch the bandit rape his wife, Tajōmaru asked her to travel with him. She accepted then asked Tajōmaru to kill him so that she wouldn’t feel the guilt of belonging to two men. The samurai says that such hateful words coming from his wife’s mouth tore him apart inside and his world fell apart around him.

The samurai then recounts how Tajōmaru, was so shocked by this request that he grabbed the woman and threw her to the ground. Then the bandit gave the samurai the choice of letting the woman go or killing her. The Samurai tells officials; “I almost forgave the bandit,” his actions in some way redeeming him from his earlier crim. The woman fled followed by Tajōmaru giving chase. Many hours pass and the Samurai is left in his own thoughts all alone in the grove. Finally Tajōmaru returned to free the Samurai, having given up chasing the woman. The samurai then killed himself with his own dagger. Before the spirit fades back to oblivion, the ghost then tells officials that somebody removed the dagger from his chest.

The Samurai contemplating the dagger he would use to kill himself.

Back to the present, as the three characters sit at Rashōmon Gate, the woodcutter is startled by the recounting of the Samurai’s tale and claims that the dead is lying since he was clearly killed by a sword. The priest claims the dead don’t lie.

The woodcutter then confesses to the commoner that his earlier version of events was a lie, since he didn’t want to get too involved in the debaucle. Having actually witnessed events he reveals that Tajōmaru raped the samurai’s wife and begged the weeping woman to marry him. She freed her husband and said it was not for her to decide, then returned to her incessant weeping.

The Samurai tels her that he refuses to die for a woman like her. Tajōmaru, hearing the words, loses interest in the samurai’s wife and starts to leave. The wife cries even harder, and prompts her husband to demand that she stop. Tajōmaru repremands the Samurai calling it “unmanly” of him because women are weak and can’t help but cry. This provokes the woman into an embittered tantrum about both her husband’s reluctance to protect his wife and Tajōmaru’s who’s passionate affection having so suddenly changed.

She spurs the men to fight for her, and then appears to regret it as soon as they do. Both fight pitifully and Tajōmaru wins, mainly through luck. At the sight of her husband’s death, the woman screams and runs from Tajōmaru. Unable to follow her, the bandit takes the samurai’s sword and leaves the scene limping.

In the end we return to Rashōmon Gate. The commoner laughs at the woodcutter, claiming to know that the woodcutter stole the expensive dagger. As they stand talking they hear a noise nearby and then the three men find an abandoned infant tucked into a corner of the building. The commoner takes the baby’s possessions and runs off claiming that all men are wicked. The priest says he has lost all faith in mankind. The woodcutter moves to take the baby and the priest snaps at him, thinking he too is going to steal from the child. Instead the woodcutter says he has six children at home and one more will not make any difference. The rain stopps and the woodcutter walks away from Rashōmon Gate with the child.

The priest protectingly holds the child.

So as the film ends we are left with what seems like a definitive version of events, and yet we are also left enturely unsure if we can believe any of them. Surely the truth lies in there somewhere, as a combination of all the seperate stories, but it is so tangled up that the thread is impossible to unravel. This exploration of human subjectivity was so expertly handled by Akira Kurosawa that the film, in the single word; Rashōmon conveys to all who have seen it the sense that we can never truly know anything and that everything is coloured by our own imperfect perception.

Films in general are full of Psychological cliches, so much so that they influence the world of Psychology in the strangest of ways. Hollywood picked up on the word Psychopath and turned it into the steriotype of deranged knife wielding killer behind the shower curtain or the killer businessman with plastic over his couch to stop the blood ruining it as he kills his unsuspecting collegues. Because of that Psychologists were forced to find an alternative word to avoid the stigma associated with Psychopath and instead turned to the word Sociopath (to highlight the social nature of the condition). As more and more films, books and games make use of the new term, eventually Psychologists may be forced to change even it.

Yet here Rashomon is a film so powerful, so profound, that psychologists are using its name as shortcut for the effect that subjectivity plays in our perception and recollection. The paper “The Rashomon Effect: When Ethnographers Disagree,” by Karl G. Heider, published in American Anthropologist in March 1988 demonstrates the profoundity of the film in capturing something unique to film and something unique in understanding our own psyche.

Sixty years on and Rashomon I still highly watchable and enjoyable. Like all classics it seems to never get old. There simply aren’t enough superlatives in the english language to do it justice. It is a must watch. Those who do will soon find themselves great fans of Kurosawa-san.

Note: Screenshots are in the public domain. (Due to a 2006 Japanese court ruling; all movies produced in Japan prior to 1953 are in the public domain.)