The "Rashomon effect" occurs whenever at least two witnesses provide competing testimonies about a given event. The word is attributed to Akira Kurosawa's 1950 film Rashomon, which in turn is adapted from Ryu Akutagawa's short stories "Rashomon" (1915) and "In a Grove" (1922). In Rashomon, four testimonies are relayed by two narrators to one listener, who provides a surrogate for the cinematic audience. Rather than getting one reliable story, which most film-goers in the mid-twentieth century expected from feature films, Rashomon's viewers instead get a frame narrative built around an unstable system of stories, which acquire significance as something like a variable myth cycle rather than as a mutually determined series of events.
The "Rashomon effect" has since been deployed often in other television shows and films. It provides an effective plot device through which writers can experiment with character, tone, and dramatic structure. It engages the viewer by asking him or her to evaluate contradictory versions of events, essentially turning the viewer into a kind of detective. Besides Akutagawa, other modernist writers like William Faulkner and Virginia Woolf have used something like the "Rashomon effect" to generate unstable, impressionistic worlds that bend and distort according to the perspective of narration.
