Summary
The film begins during a fierce rainstorm with a close-up of a sign that reads "Rashomon"—the Japanese word for a type of large city-gate. Images of rain falling from roof gutters, pouring through a dilapidated roof, and cascading down stone steps set the foreboding tone as the credits roll. The last image of the credits sequence, over which Akira Kurosawa's name appears, is a thick wooden post planted firmly in the stone. A wide shot of the city-gate reveals that only about half of its previously splendid roof is still standing.
Under one section of the crumbling structure are two men: a woodcutter and a priest. The woodcutter is sitting and the priest is kneeling; both look intensely out into the storm. The woodcutter murmurs, "I don't understand... I just don't understand." The priest gazes at him but remains silent, and both men continue to survey the heavy rain. In the distance, a commoner suddenly stomps barefoot through the mud toward the city-gate and ascends the stairs into the structure.
As the commoner dries himself with a cloth, he overhears the woodcutter repeat the same words ("I don't understand"), and approaches him. After listening to his words, the commoner asks the woodcutter what it is that he doesn't understand. When the woodcutter tells him about a "strange" story, the commoner entreats him to tell it, especially given the presence of a priest who could provide counsel. The priest's darkly pessimistic response to this suggestion makes the commoner realize that both men have already heard the story before.
The priest explains that he heard the story in a courthouse, and that it involved a man's murder. These details cause the commoner to cynically dismiss the story as ordinary, and that "five or six" unidentified corpses probably lay on top of the city-gate in which they currently sit. The priest acknowledges the range of natural and man-made disasters which have befallen mankind, and the scores of ugly deaths he has personally witnessed, but still maintains never having heard a story as "horrible" as this one.
The woodcutter agrees that the story is horrible, and the priest and the woodcutter exchange numb, blank glances. The camera zooms in on the priest as he dramatically pronounces that the story may cause him to finally lose his faith in the human soul, deeming the story to be worse than "bandits, the plague, famine, fire, or war." The commoner interrupts to chide the priest for sermonizing too much, and remarks that he only asked to hear the story because it sounded like an entertaining diversion during the storm.
The commoner wanders off and rips a plank of wood off one side of the city-gate, attempting to fashion something out of it before the woodcutter excitedly approaches him again. The woodcutter proposes telling him the story, in case the commoner might be able to tell the woodcutter what it means. The woodcutter alludes to not understanding "any of those three," and when the commoner asks him what he means, the woodcutter sits beside him and prepares to tell his tale. Both men look up toward the sky, and the commoner remarks that the storm does not look like it will stop anytime soon.
An exterior shot shows the "Rashomon" sign once more. The camera pans to show the rainwater pouring through the half-destroyed roof of the city-gate, under which the woodcutter and the commoner sit in a dry area around the broken plank of wood. Further away behind them, the priest also sits, looking at them. The woodcutter starts by telling the commoner that the story is he is about to tell begins three days previously, when he went into the mountains to get wood.
Analysis
Rashomon, and Ryunosuke Akutagawa's 1915 short story which preceded it, were both inspired by the Kyoto Rashomon, an actual Heian Period city-gate that operated between the eighth and thirteenth century, before gradually falling into ruin and disrepair. Akutagawa's story and Kurosawa's film are set in the twelfth century, when the Kyoto Rashomon had already lapsed into a state of ill repute, becoming a haven for criminals and nomads. The first line of Akutagawa's short story—"Evening, and a lowly servant sat beneath the Rashomon, waiting for the rain to end"—is brought to life visually in the film's introductory sequence, during which Kurosawa fixes the camera's lens on the interplay between falling rainwater and various surfaces, like ceramic tile, stairs, and earth-- the objects of the woodcutter and the priest's steady gazes.
As an image, an event, and an idea, the "storm" immediately establishes a number of the film's key themes and devices. First, the event of the storm is a significant plot device, the one that provides the conditions for the film's characters to gather and articulate their various self-reported narratives in the first place. The rainfall binds this unlikely group of men together in the city-gate, forging an informal, social scene of storytelling that differs from the institutional space of the courthouse, where the woodcutter first encountered the tale. The raging storm also piques the men's curiosity to tell and hear each other's stories and memories, especially the commoner, whose taste becomes a kind of surrogate for a contemporary movie-going audience: "It sounded interesting, at least while I kept out of the rain," the commoner initially tells the priest, craving entertainment to pass the time and stave off boredom. Before the woodcutter begins his tale, he and the commoner both look up at the falling rainwater, and the commoner says, "Calm down and tell me slowly. The rain's not going to stop any time soon."
The relentless storm also symbolizes the historical maelstrom of disasters that the priest wearily catalogues in his first monologue. Akutagawa's story begins in a similar manner, describing how twelfth-century Kyoto "had been struck by one calamity after another in recent years—earthquakes, whirlwinds, fires, famine..." Significantly, Kurosawa's film alludes also to man-made disasters like "warfare," and seeing men die like "insects." Although the Civil Censorship Detachment Office in American-occupied Japan prohibited explicit on-screen references to World War II and the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, this phrase of the priest's perhaps alludes to the horrors of warfare which twentieth century Japan was familiar. Nevertheless, the decrepit, deconstructed state of the Kyoto Rashomon, which Kurosawa carefully captures from several angles, is a testament to the atrocities of history, an emblem of the slow erosion of civilization and morality over time. At the time of Rashomon's release, it is easy to imagine weary postwar audiences perhaps identifying not only with the commoner, who is simply in search of escapist entertainment, but also with the priest, who feels fatigued by the moral atrocities of the modern world, and wavers in his "faith in the human soul."
Finally, the "storm" anticipates the central philosophical problem that the film addresses surrounding the interrelated nature of truth and perception. As the various images of the film's introduction bear out for the viewer, rainfall has made the environment inhospitable, inaccessible, and difficult to discern. The first time we see the woodcutter and the priest, they are gravely staring out into the rain, as if trying to decipher its meaning. The woodcutter's first words—"I don't understand... I Just don't understand" -- essentially articulate a persistent and preexisting perceptual problem, in which the mind cannot process information obtained by the senses. To visualize this philosophical and cognitive problem, Kurosawa pairs the woodcutter's declaration of incomprehension with the image of him squinting into the falling rainwater, which becomes something like an obscuring veil between the men in the city-gate and the outside world.
In this introductory sequence, sheets of falling rainwater, deconstructed wooden planks, and large interior-exterior spaces help Kurosawa create highly theatrical, two-dimensional compositions, which resemble the staging of traditional Japanese Noh plays. In particular, Kurosawa often uses visual combinations and spatial patterns built around the number three to create compositional symmetry, such as when the woodcutter and the commoner are squatting together discussing the story, the priest positioned perfectly between them in the background. The number three also appears early on in the woodcutter's dialogue ("I don't understand any of those three...") and in the first sentence of his story to the commoner: "It was three days ago." These early clues help anticipate the ritual significance that the number three will assume in the visual grammar of the film, and the content of each storyteller's tale.
