Summary
In the courthouse, the samurai's wife cries while the woodcutter and the priest look on in the background. She confirms that Tajomaru, the man in the blue kimono, overpowered her until she yielded, and then taunted her captive husband. The scene once again flashes back from the courthouse to the grove, now from the wife's perspective. She reports trying to run to her husband's side before being pushed aside by Tajomaru, who in this version of the story merely laughs at the samurai and runs away, rather than killing him in a duel. When the wife remembers pulling herself up from the ground to meet her husband's steely gaze, she describes it to the court as "a look of loathing" that made her blood run cold.
The wife begs her husband not to look at her with such contempt, and covers her face with her hands, before collapsing once more in tears. Suddenly, she pulls the dagger she dropped previously from the ground, and offers it to her husband, instructing him to kill her. Rather than take the dagger, he merely watches her as she frantically paces and brandishes the blade. The wife testifies that she fainted then, and that when she awoke, she found the dagger planted in her husband's chest. She describes being in such shock she barely remembers leaving the forest until arriving at a pond, where she tried drowning herself. She pleadingly asks the court what a widowed woman in her situation should do.
Under the Rashomon, rain continues to pour. The commoner complains that the more he hears, the more confused he gets, and that "women... fool everyone." The priest remarks that he hasn't yet heard the dead man's story. When the commoner asks how a dead man can speak, the priest reveals that a medium provided his testimony. The woodcutter dismisses this story, too, as a lie, but the priest maintains that dead men can't lie, because it would be too "sinful." The commoner teases the priest for his innate belief in man's goodness, ominously suggesting, "Maybe goodness is just make-believe."
Back in the courthouse, a medium in flowing robes and ceremonial face-paint performs a ritualistic dance around a low, flat table, flanked by tall reeds tied together with string and ribbons. On the table is a small bowl burning some kind of incense or offering. The medium stops dancing and begins to speak, with the woodcutter and the priest witnessing in the background. Through her body, the samurai's booming voice intones that he "curses" those that doomed him to "suffer" in darkness.
Speaking through the medium, the samurai begins his tale: like the wife's story, it begins after the event of the rape. He explains that Tajomaru subtly tried to manipulate and coerce his wife after attacking her by claiming that he loved her, and that she could no longer return to her husband now that the incident had occurred. The scene shifts back to the grove, now from the perspective of the samurai, where at Tajomaru's urging, the wife agrees to run away with him. The samurai registers his shock at his wife's betrayal, but alleges this alone is not what makes him "suffer" in the afterlife. As Tajomaru and the wife turn to walk away together, she then insists that Tajomaru kill the samurai, declaring, "While he's alive, I cannot go with you."
When the samurai's ghost remembers how Tajomaru responded to this plea by defiantly throwing the wife to the ground, he cackles with delight through the body of the medium. Tajomaru asks the restrained samurai whether he should spare or kill the wife, and the samurai solemnly recalls that "for these words alone, I was ready to pardon his crime." In the midst of the commotion, the wife manages to run away into the woods, and Tajomaru chases after her, leaving the samurai alone and restrained for hours.
When Tajomaru returns, he finally frees the samurai from his bonds, who looks to the heavens and cannot bring himself to stand upright until night falls. He recovers the dagger that his wife dropped to the ground and wanders through the forest, grief-stricken. Through the physically wracked body of the medium, the samurai's voice recalls how after a time everything fell silent, and the last thing he remembers is someone approaching and withdrawing the dagger from his heart. After these final words, the medium faints.
Analysis
Each courtroom scene is notable for who is in the foreground testifying, and who is in the background witnessing. The film has already provided several key variations: the woodcutter (no witness), the priest (woodcutter as witness), Tajomaru and the policeman (the woodcutter and priest as witnesses), the wife (the woodcutter and priest as witnesses), and the medium (the woodcutter and priest as witnesses). Therefore, the woodcutter is the only character who has been present at every testimony, including his own, although he and the priest seem to rely on each other's accounts in relating the tales to the commoner.
Kurosawa emphasizes the separation between the testifiers and the witnesses in the court scenes with a horizontal line of demarcation between the shade and the sunlight against the gravelly chamber floors. The perspective, which orients the audience in the judge's position facing forward, creates a two-dimensional tableau of shade and light, foreground and background, speaker and observer. The dialectic between shade and light in Kurosawa's film is also present in the grove scenes, which make considerable use of a "dappled" lighting effect to capture the look of sunlight filtering through the treetops.
Like the storm, the sun is also a key symbol that repeats over the course of the film. Whereas the storm represents the chaos, ruin, and despair against which the men in the city-gate are attempting to draw some meaning from life, the sun represents in a complex sense mankind's imperfect ability to reason and imagine. The court scenes divide light and shadow into tidy planes, reflecting the court's institutional function to uncover truth, adjudicate disputes, and mete out justice. In the grove scenes, Kurosawa uses the hazy interplay between light and shadow over the actor's faces and bodies to suggest the mythical, imagined world of storytelling. The director also probably expected his metaphors of exposure and light to resonate with those familiar with the mechanical processes of modern cinema (in which emulsion on celluloid film stock was exposed to light).
Rashomon's narrative structure allows the film to experiment with different genre stylings with each retelling of the main tale. Whereas Tajomaru's tale was a typical pulpy swashbuckler with himself cast as the hero, the wife's tale and the dead man's tale at times unfold more like moving paintings, incorporating the gestural language of Japanese Noh plays. Both stories, unlike Tajomaru's, are relayed from states of extreme suffering and grief, and infused with intense emotion and sentiment. The wife's tale is a Gothic story that exploits themes of male domination and tropes of female hysteria. In the wife's testimony, she is raped by Tajomaru, then scorned by her husband, driving her into a state of panic and frenzy. Her steely gaze in the courtroom when reporting her husband's betrayal contrasts with her covered, fearful face in the grove. Although there are gaps in what the wife remembers, the implication in her version is that she kills the samurai in an uncontrollable state of shock, which casts doubt on Tajomaru's confession.
In the samurai's story, it is he who is the wronged party. The commoner and the priest have a key exchange before the medium scene about whether dead men would lie if they had the ability to speak. The priest says no, still clinging precariously to his faith in the human soul, but the commoner disagrees. The two perspectives represent competing forces and world-views that could apply equally to twelfth century Japan and twentieth-century film-going audiences: faith and secularism, tradition and modernity, truth and falsehood, good and evil, meaning and confusion. The samurai's story, expressed through the medium, is a baroque horror story from beyond the grave—the fact that the samurai is able to "reach back up" from the afterlife is hinted at early in the film, when the woodcutter finds the samurai's corpse with outstretched hands. The samurai's tale, which excoriates his wife for betrayal and exonerates Tajomaru, is a nightmarish male fantasy about female power and agency over men, rendered ironic by the fact that the samurai's ghost must inhabit a female body (the medium) to articulate the tale in court.
