10 / 10
Official trailer
Rashomon is the Akira Kurosawa-directed Japanese film that introduced Japanese cinema to international audiences and added a term to the vocabulary of philosophy, law, and narrative theory.
Kurosawa directed and co-wrote with Shinobu Hashimoto. They adapted the screenplay from two short stories by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa: “In a Grove” (1922, which provided the central plot) and “Rashōmon” (1915, which provided the framing device and title). Toshiro Mifune plays Tajōmaru, the bandit accused of rape and murder. Masayuki Mori plays Takehiro, the samurai who has been killed.
Machiko Kyō plays Masako, Takehiro’s wife. Takashi Shimura plays the woodcutter who discovered the body. Minoru Chiaki plays the priest. Kichijirō Ueda plays the commoner. The plot follows four conflicting accounts of the same incident in a Kyoto forest as recounted at a court inquiry and afterward at the ruined Rashōmon gate.
Of all Kurosawa’s films, Rashomon is the one I’d hand to anybody who thinks old movies are homework. It’s a crime story told four times, and every version grips me on its own terms. I’m delighted that Kurosawa never tells me who’s lying, and even more delighted that he ends on a baby at a ruined gate instead of a verdict. I can’t find a wasted frame in it, and that’s why it gets a 10.
Daiei Film Co. produced the film on a modest Japanese budget, and the initial 1950 Japanese release did modest business. The international breakthrough came when the film won the Golden Lion at the 1951 Venice Film Festival and the Academy Honorary Award (predecessor to Best Foreign Language Film) at the 1952 Academy Awards.
Rashomon consistently ranks among the most influential films in cinema history. The “Rashomon effect” has entered English-language usage to describe situations where multiple parties recall the same event in mutually contradictory ways.
The Multi-Perspective Structure
The film’s central structural innovation is the four-perspective account of the same incident. The bandit Tajōmaru gives one account. The murdered samurai’s widow gives a different account. The samurai himself testifies through a medium and gives a third account. The woodcutter (initially claiming only to have found the body) eventually provides a fourth account that contradicts the previous three. Each account is internally coherent. Each account presents the narrator favorably. Each account places the actual responsibility for the violence on someone else.
The film doesn’t resolve which account is true. The audience can’t identify a definitive answer.
The technique is the foundation of the “Rashomon effect” as a concept.
Multi-perspective narrative had existed in literature before 1950. Faulkner, Browning, and other writers had deployed comparable techniques. Rashomon’s specific contribution was the cinematic implementation. Each account is staged with full production values as if it were the actual event. The audience experiences each version as if it were happening. The contradictions emerge through the impossibility of reconciling the staged experiences. Cinematic perspective work can produce effects that literary perspective work approaches differently.
The viewer is given each version as direct experience instead of as narrated account. The result is the most-imitated multi-perspective structure in later cinema.
The staging is the part I like most. Each liar’s version plays out with full conviction, and I end up believing each of them while it’s on screen. That’s an uncomfortable place for a film to put me, and I enjoy every minute of it.
For Writers
Multiple irreconcilable accounts of the same event can be presented as direct experience instead of as narrated comparison. Rashomon stages each version with real commitment. The audience experiences each account as if it were the actual event. The lesson is that multi-perspective fiction works hardest when each perspective is given equal dramatic weight. Don’t signal which version is correct. Don’t editorialize. Let the audience experience each version completely. The contradictions emerge through the experience instead of through commentary.
The Mifune Performance
Toshiro Mifune plays Tajōmaru with sustained physical and vocal commitment.
The character is a notorious bandit whose menace is partly performative and partly genuine. Mifune’s performance plays the bandit as a man whose self-presentation is so committed that the audience can’t distinguish between his actual identity and his constructed image of himself. The Tajōmaru character is the source of the most-imitated visual material in later samurai cinema. Mifune’s physical mannerisms, vocal delivery, and movement vocabulary became templates that later generations of performers would draw from.
The performance also commits to Tajōmaru’s specific version of the incident as if it were the truth. When Tajōmaru tells his account, Mifune plays the events with the energetic commitment of someone describing his own greatest moment. The audience reads the account as Tajōmaru reads it. When the other characters provide their accounts, Mifune plays the same character through different lenses.
The bandit who appears in the woman’s account is the same actor playing a different character. The performance has to work at multiple tones at once.
Mifune is the best thing in a film with no weak parts. His bandit in his own telling is a man reliving his finest hour, and the swagger Mifune gives that version is my favorite thing in the picture. Then he turns around and plays the same man smaller and meaner in someone else’s story, and I believe him both times.
For Writers
A character can be embodied in multiple incompatible versions when the performer commits to each version as if it were the truth. Mifune plays four different Tajōmaru characters across the same film. The lesson applies to fiction. Characters can appear differently in different perspectives without losing their identity. Write each perspective’s version as if it were the actual character. The reader will absorb the multiple versions. The character’s true nature remains the question the reader answers through their own engagement with the contradictions.
The Forest Cinematography
Kazuo Miyagawa’s cinematography is a hugely influential individual craft contribution in mid-century world cinema. The film’s forest sequences use lighting techniques that produce the appearance of sunlight filtering through canopy across multiple angles and times of day. Miyagawa reportedly used mirrors to bounce sunlight into the forest interior across long takes. The audience experiences the Kyoto forest as a specific place instead of as a generic setting. The cinematography has been studied extensively in later decades as foundational craft.
The technique also is the film’s argument about perception. The dappled sunlight, the constantly shifting patterns, and the visual instability of the forest create environments where definitive observation becomes difficult. The audience reads the forest as a place where truth is hard to see. The technique supports the film’s thematic content. Multiple perspectives aren’t only psychological. Multiple perspectives are also visual. What each character saw depends partly on what was visible from their own position. The cinematography embodies the philosophical content.
The forest photography stuns me. Miyagawa’s shifting sunlight makes the place feel alive and untrustworthy at once, so the images make the argument about perception before anybody says a word.
For Writers
A setting’s specific physical characteristics can embody thematic content the dialogue can’t deliver. Rashomon’s forest is visually unstable in ways that match the film’s argument about perception. The lesson is that physical environments in fiction can do philosophical work. Pick your settings deliberately. The geography, weather, and light should match what the work is about. The reader will absorb the alignment without recognizing it as deliberate craft.
Craft Note
The closing infant sequence is the film’s most economical thematic statement. The three characters at the Rashōmon gate (the priest, the woodcutter, and the commoner) hear a baby crying. They discover an abandoned infant in the ruined gate. The commoner attempts to steal the infant’s clothes. The woodcutter prevents him, then announces that he’ll take the infant home and raise it with his own six children. The priest, who had been despairing about human nature throughout the framing scenes, recovers his faith in humanity.
The sequence runs about four minutes. The film argues that ethical action remains possible even after the testimony to human capacity for deception, violence, and self-justification the four accounts have just provided. Instead of despair, the closing is the assertion that human goodness is a choice that individuals can continue to make despite the structural evidence to the contrary. The infant sequence is the film’s actual final word.
Does Rashomon still hold up?
10/10. This is the film that introduced Japanese cinema to international audiences and gave several disciplines a term they still use. Kurosawa, Mifune and Miyagawa are all at the top of their game, and I wouldn’t change a shot. What pushes it to a 10 for me is the ending: after four stories built on lies, a woodcutter carries an abandoned baby home to six children of his own, and the film trusts that small decision to answer everything before it. Watch it, then read Akutagawa’s stories.
