Cinema 1544: The As-Official-As-It-Gets Site

For the second film in our at-your-leisure Akira Kurosawa Winter Marathon, we went with the 1950 classic Rashomon.

Once again, our film stars Kurosawa regulars Toshiro Mifune as Tajomaru the bandit and Takashi Shimura as the woodcutter.  In this case, Rashomon stands as an early exercise in unreliable narration.

If you think this is rough, you should see the bureaucracy you’ve got to go through to put up a swing set!

The film starts in a heavy rainstorm, where a woodcutter, a priest, and a commoner are sheltering under a dilapidated city gate of Kyoto known as the Rashomon gate.   The woodcutter and the priest have recently returned from an inquest into a murder – a samurai was found dead, by the woodcutter no less, and there have been three incompatible stories as to the nature of his death.  The woodcutter tells the tale of the inquest to the commoner, reporting that while gathering in the woods he came across some items – a woman’s veil, a samurai’s cap, a cut rope, and an amulet, before coming upon the body of the samurai himself.  More he cannot (or, as it turns out, will not) tell.

Is this your first rodeo?

However, it turns out that there are three witnesses (sort of) lined up to testify.  The first is the bandit Tajomaru, who has been recently captured.  Tajomaru, with the maniacal laughter of clinically insane, tells the story of his encounter with the samurai.

Blame it on simoom/Brought me to my doom/Blame it on chinook/Gave me just a look/Blame it on the Ze-ze-ze-ze-ze-zephyrus

He blames the wind.  As he was resting by the side of the road, with no particular intent to rob a passing samurai and his wife, the wife’s veil was brushed aside by a gust of wind and Tajomaru was smitten – he had to possess this woman.

Peter Jackson decides to recast Aragorn and Legolas

And so, he lured the samurai into the woods under the premise of a horde of found weapons that he would be willing to sell the samurai on the cheap.  Once deep in the woods, he overpowered and tied up the samurai, then returned and brought the wife to the same spot, claiming that her husband had fallen ill.

The heartbreak of halitosis

Once she realized what was happening, she attempted to defend herself with a dagger, but Tajomaru easily overpowered her and ravished her.  She begged Tajomaru to duel her husband to the death, out of shame and that two men not know her dishonor.  Accordingly, Tajomaru freed the samurai, and they fought nobly and skillfully, until the bandit finally gained the upper hand and killed the samurai.  After the battle, he found that the wife had fled.  When asked about the wife’s dagger, he wistfully said that he forgot about it – a shame, because based on the inlaid pearl in the handle it was clearly very valuable.

It’s worse than that – he stole my eyebrows!

That would seem to be the end of things, what with a confession and all, but then the wife comes forward to testify.  There is no point of dispute before the ravishing, but she claimed that after the ravishing the bandit ran off, and her husband looked at her with such a cold and heartless visage that she begged him to kill her with her own dagger to end her suffering.  When he did nothing but continue to look upon her with loathing, she fainted, and accidentally fell upon him with the dagger, killing him.

In the Japanese conception of Hades, Tantalus has to flick a cig, but can never quite reach the ashtray

But once again, we have not reached the end of things, as the court has brought forth a medium to commune with the spirit of the dead samurai, and to get the tale from his point of view.  He claimed that after the ravishing, Tajomaru asked his wife to run off with him – she agreed, but insisted that Tajomaru kill the samurai first.  Tajomaru was shocked, and freed the samurai, telling him he could either let the woman go, or kill her for her impudence.  The samurai saw Tajomaru in a new light, but the wife ran off, and the samurai killed himself with his wife’s dagger.

The boys get lonely after you leave/It’s one for the dagger and another for the one you believe

Now we have three incompatible versions of the story – and finally the woodcutter decides to amend his version, and tells another.  In this version, he does not come upon the dead samurai, but instead comes upon the scene of the crime as it is happening.  He tells that the bandit begged the wife to run off with him, but instead she freed her husband.  However, instead of the samurai nobly fighting Tajomaru he refused, unwilling to risk his life in defense of a spoiled woman.  After sufficient criticism from the wife of both parties, they reluctantly took up a battle, but far from a noble and skillful battle, it was instead clumsy and oafish, and the bandit ended up killing the samurai merely by chance.

Honey!  Stork came!

Suddenly, a crying baby is heard from the other side of the gate, having been abandoned.  The commoner finds the baby and steals the kimono it was wrapped in.  When the woodcutter admonishes him for it, the commoner retorts, saying that the woodcutter is no better – after all, the dagger was never found, and nobody was able to account for where it went.  The woodcutter, clearly, has stolen the valuable item, the commoner explains, before heading off.  The priest is taken aback by this revelation, but when the woodcutter takes the baby, saying that he has six children, and raising another won’t make much difference, the priest has his faith in humanity (even thieves, apparently) restored.  The rain has stopped, and the sun peeks through as the woodcutter walks off with his new child.  The End.

So of course, Rashomon is a great movie.  In the end, we don’t really know what happened.  We do know that most of the stories we have been told cannot be fully true, and there’s no way to know for certain whether what is untold (e.g. the fate of the dagger) may hold the true key.  What about the amulet?  It doesn’t seem to play into any of the narratives outside of the woodcutter’s first story.  Could the woodcutter have killed the samurai?  We don’t really know, I guess.  Nobody reported that – but nobody was particularly reliable in regard to the events at the key scene.

As one who believes in the existence of objective truth, it’s very tempting to find the objective truth of the story told in Rashomon.  If I had to give my opinion, I would point out that while each storyteller (save one) claims the blame for the samurai’s death, each tells the story in such a way as to paint themselves in the best light.  The bandit, now caught and certain to be put to death anyway, takes credit for killing the man in a noble duel.  The wife’s story is told in such a way as to best preserve her honor at the expense of a cowardly bandit and a cruel husband.  The samurai’s tale recasts events to heap dishonor on his wife and portrays himself as an honorable suicide.  And the woodcutter, while pointing out the dishonorable acts of all three parties, leaves out his own presumed theft.  What to believe?  For my part, I’m inclined to believe the woodcutter – perhaps because his perspective is told last, perhaps because he has less reason to lie about the event (dagger excluded).

But this all loses sight of the fact that there’s not always a place for objective truth in art.  Unlike the court in the film, we are not obligated to come to a conclusion about what happened, and who killed the samurai.  More precisely, nothing actually happened.  There was no samurai to be killed in the first place, there is only a movie – there are only four conflicting stories about one event, brought together to make us think.  And if we watched the film, and enjoyed it, then the film did its job even though it doesn’t answer the question it laid out for itself.  It doesn’t have to.  It never meant to.