(1950, b/w; Japanese) What is the dappled nature of truth, hidden in a forest of falsehoods? asks director/co-writer Akira Kurosawa in his masterpiece - plot based on Ryunosuke Akutagawa's 1921 short story, "In a Grove," with a thematic element (theft of a kimono associated with the moral ambiguity of stealing to survive) taken from his 1915 story "Rashomon" - of poetic drama in which everything and nothing is real.

During a heavy rainstorm (the intense, incessant wet weather is like the snowstorm in The Idiot), set in an unspecified time of the medieval past, three men take shelter under a gatehouse with the name Rashomon (the main city gate in Heijoky?, Nara Prefecture). Repeating over and over, "I just don't understand," a woodcutter (Takashi Shimura) says that though he has seen plagues, famine, and other disasters, men killed like insects, this latest horror is the worst. A young priest (Minoru Chiaki) concurs: "I may lose my faith in the human soul."

Three days earlier while traipsing through the woods with his axe, the woodcutter relates to the third man, a stranger (Kichijiro Ueda), he found a woman's hat and veil, a samurai's cap, and strands of rope before coming upon a man's corpse. To all of this he has just testified before a court (with an invisible interrogator, ourselves the audience). The priest also has testified to having met on the road on the same day a nobleman, bearing a sword and a bow with a quiver of arrows, leading a horse upon which a veiled woman sat.

In the courtyard as well sits the notorious bandit Tajomaru (Toshiro Mifune), bound with rope but laughing with mockery, who tells his version of the events, reminding the interrogator that since he is condemned to die he has no reason to lie: readily admitting to having killed the nobleman after raping the wife ("I thought I saw a goddess"), he explains that after tricking the husband, Takehiro Kanazawa (Masayuki Mori), and tying him up, he wrestled with the fierce-spirited woman, who fought him with her dagger, before having her in front of her husband; out of shame, she demanded, "Either you die or my husband dies; I will go with the survivor." Freeing the husband to allow him an honorable death, Tajomaru says his opponent fought valiantly; during the sword fight the woman disappeared.

The woodcutter says that the bandit lied; lies can be entertaining, replies the stranger. The next witness is the woman, Masako Kanazawa (Machiko Kyō), the victim of the rape, crying pitifully, whom the police had found hiding in a temple, who tells a different story (Bolero playing throughout): after the rape, the bandit departed, leaving her with her husband, who looks at her without anger or sorrow, only loathing and contempt. Cutting him free with her dagger, she pleads with him to stop staring at her and kill her. She faints; when she regains consciousness, her dagger is planted in his chest.

There are no good people, says the stranger: the good stuff about ourselves we invent. Yet another spoke before the interrogator, the husband ("dead men don't lie") through a female medium (Fumiko Honma) in a trance: as he tells it, the cunning thief consoled his wife after raping her, telling her he acted out of love. "Take me wherever you want," she said to Tajomaru, but first she pleaded with him to kill her husband. Instead, Tajomaru asked the husband what he should do - kill her or let her go? When she fled, Tajomaru chased after her, but he returned hours later without her and freed the husband, who wept alone before committing hari-kari with the dagger.

All lies, repeats the woodcutter: the husband was slain with a sword, not a dagger. Realizing that the woodcutter must have seen the entire event, the stranger asks why he didn't say so in court. "I didn't want to get involved." The woodcutter's version is that Tajomaru begged the woman's forgiveness, asking her to marry him. "It's impossible," she answered before cutting her husband free, but he refused to fight for "such a woman … a shameless whore" not worth his horse. Calling both men cowards - "A man must make a woman his sword" - her taunts provoked their duel, though each lacked skill and feared the other. As they fumbled and tumbled about, she ran off.

Inside the gatehouse an abandoned infant begins to cry. Taking the kimono in which the baby's swaddled, the stranger thinks he sees through the woodcutter's ruse, demanding to know what became of the valuable pearl-handled dagger. "Everyone's selfish and dishonest," confesses the woodcutter, who has six children of his own.

Though the story is Japanese (Kurosawa has interpreted Western literature from Shakespeare and Dostoyevsky in his films), I found myself thinking of the four different versions of the same death as a reinterpretation of the four Gospels of the New Testament.

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Copyright © 2008 Patrick Ivers. All rights reserved.
Reproduced with the permission of the copyright holder.

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