Summary
As the woodcutter begins his tale, the scene flashes back to three days prior. Under a bright sun shining through the trees, the woodcutter is walking through the forest with his axe leaning against his shoulder, accompanied by a steady drumbeat in the background. As he continues his journey into the heart of the forest, which Kurosawa's camera captures from a number of angles, the drumbeat gradually intensifies. It stops entirely when the woodcutter spots a woman's hat atop a rock. Seeing no one around, he continues to walk, now on alert.
The woodcutter then finds a crumpled samurai's cap lying on the ground, and takes it with him. The next thing the woodcutter finds on his walk is a pile of rope. Surveying the clearing for other items, the woodcutter spots an amulet case, near which lies the corpse of a samurai, its hands horrifically outstretched. The woodcutter shouts, drops all of his belongings, and runs away. In voice-over, the woodcutter explains to the commoner that he ran as fast as he could back into town to notify the police three days ago, and only testified in the courthouse that very morning.
The scene then shifts to the courthouse testimony of the woodcutter, seen kneeling before an unseen judge in front of a wall. The woodcutter affirms that he was the first to find the samurai's body. Asked if he found a sword, the woodcutter says no, and lists the things he did find—a woman's hat, a samurai's cap, some rope, and an amulet case. Next, the woodcutter watches while the priest's testimony is called. The priest explains to the court that he had met the slain samurai three days before on the road from Sekiyama to Yamashina.
Once more, the scene flashes back three days prior, this time from the priest's perspective. While walking along the road with the assistance of a cane, the priest spots a samurai walking alongside a woman on a white horse. She and the samurai are wearing the same items (the woman's hat and the samurai's cap) that the woodcutter describes in his account of the story. The priest notes that the woman's face was covered by a veil, and then concludes his testimony by lamenting the fragility of life—"as frail and fleeting as the morning dew."
Next, the woodcutter and priest both watch as the testimony of another party is given—a policeman, and a notorious bandit he has captured named Tajomaru. The policeman mentions having almost apprehended Tajomaru before, and that he carries a sword. The policeman begins his story two days ago "at dusk" by the Katsura River. While walking along the riverbank, the policeman reports hearing a commotion and finding an injured Tajomaru writhing on the ground, having been shot with several arrows. The policeman mentions also seeing a leather bow and a horse nearby, all of which he claims must belong to the dead samurai.
The policeman registers the sweet irony of Tajomaru being thrown from his horse and shot with arrows after allegedly robbing and killing another man. Tajomaru cackles and calls the policeman a fool, before providing his version of the story. Still tied up in rope, Tajomaru testifies that two days ago in the evening he was riding his horse when he became thirsty and stopped to drink from a spring around Osaka. Tajomaru tells the court that he later felt ill and stopped to relieve himself near the river, where the policeman merely happened to find him.
Tajomaru once again laughs at the policeman and insults his preposterous version of events, calling it the work of a fool. Recognizing that the police will eventually manufacture some reason to arrest him, Tajomaru pledges to the court that he will not hide anything in the story he is about to tell. He confesses upfront to the murder, and remembers there was a "cool breeze" on that hot afternoon. Before launching into his story proper, Tajomaru mysteriously comments that, "If it hadn't been for that wind, I wouldn't have killed him."
Analysis
Rashomon's narrative structure is unlike that of most other feature films of its day, which tended to tell stories as a sequence of reliably narrated events, unfolding in linear time. Tellingly, Kurosawa's film only begins three days after the inciting event has already happened, in the midst of a massive storm. Instances and patterns of the number three in the film often raise notions of separation, division, and relativity—the constant triangulation and fluidity of forces and knowledge that prevent the woodcutter, priest, and commoner from pinning down something like the "truth." Thus, it is significant that the story in question is three days old, being pieced together by three men's variously reliable tales (the woodcutter, the priest, and the commoner), who are in turn reporting three other testimonies (Tajomaru, the wife, and the medium).
The ritualistic repetition of the number three suggests a complex, mythical, perhaps inaccessible field of knowledge from which the film's storytellers attempt to elicit meaning. Whereas the frame narrative in Rashomon draws from Ryu Akutagawa's 1915 short story of the same name, the reported narratives are drawn from Akutagawa's 1922 short story "In a Grove," which offers the reader several competing accounts of an encounter between a thief, samurai, and his wife. In both Akutagawa's short story and Kurosawa's film, each speaker's tale contains at least one detail that refutes something testified in at least one other account. As a result, Rashomon unfolds so that the same event is narrated multiple times, each time from a different perspective, so that various layers are strategically exposed and concealed for the viewer to decipher.
In an effort to emphasize the transition from the omniscient, objective narration of the frame narrative to the mythical, imaginary, and perhaps unreliable world of storytelling, Kurosawa designed a sequence that is now among the most well known in world cinema. It begins with one of the film's signature images: a shot facing directly upward at the sun shining through the trees, its blurry edges flaring through the leaves. Kurosawa aimed the camera at the sun at a time when doing so was considered taboo by many cinematographers, in part because they believed it could burn the celluloid or the operator's eyes. The image of the blinding sun, which Kurosawa captures filtering through the trees, is one of the film's key symbols, epitomizing the desire of the film's characters to inquire into images and events that defy human perception and comprehension. The sun also conveys the blinding intensity that such mysteries and injustices compel from mankind's truth-seekers—the courtroom scenes, for example, are drenched in harsh sunlight.
The second image of the sequence is the woodcutter's axe. The weapon anticipates the violence that will take place in the "horrific" story to which the woodcutter is introducing the commoner, and also carries some symbolic significance merely as a wood-fashioning instrument. In the scene before the woodcutter begins his tale, the commoner and woodcutter have gathered around a piece of firewood that the commoner has foraged. In addition to providing a literal campfire around which the men exchange tales, wood-gathering works as a kind of metaphor for the information-gathering drive and desire for revelation that motivates the telling of the narratives.
The lengthy duration of the woodcutter's journey into the forest, coupled with the hypnotic, ritualistic drumbeat that rises and falls in intensity throughout the scene, dramatizes the film's departure from the world of reality and entry into a purely subjective realm of fantasy, memory, and myth. In Rashomon, stories divulge information about people and events that is often contested, unreliable, or unverified. Perhaps in a deeper sense, however, they are able to reveal the content of the storytellers' characters. Tajomaru implies as much when he openly scorns the policeman's absurd, self-promotional version of the events surrounding his arrest, saying "A fool can only think foolish thoughts."
