Rashomon and other stories pdf

RASHOMON FROM AKUTAGAWA TO KUROSAWA

Kurosawa's Rashomon (or "The Great Rashomon Murder Mystery," as Donald Richie once dubbed it with the director's apparent approval l) involves, like more conventional murder mysteries, two distinct narrative lines: the story, or stories, of a crime (the various contradictory accounts of the murder of a samurai and the rape of his wife) and the story of an investigation (the attempt of the characters at the Rashomon gate to sort through these contradictions and determine what really happened). In the case of Rashomon , though, these two narrative lines actually originated in two separate literary sources, and the union of the two, according to Kurosawa himself, was essentially a marriage of convenience:

When I had finished Scandal for the Shõchiku studios, Daiei asked me if I wouldn't direct one more film for them. As I cast about for what to film, I suddenly remembered a script based on the short story "Yabu no naku" ("In a Grove") by Akutagawa Ryänosuke. ... It was a very well-written piece, but not long enough to make into a feature film.

... At the same time I recalled that "In a Grove" is made up of three stories, and realized that if I added one more, the whole would be just the right length for a feature film. Then I remembered the Akutagawa story "Rashomon." Like "In a Grove," it was set in the Heian period (794-1 184). The film Rashomon took shape in my mind.2

"In a Grove," then, apparently provided Kurosawa with the story of a crime; "Rasho- mon" with the story of its investigation.3

These two Akutagawa stories have * othing obviously in common beyond the fact that both are in turn derived from episoc^s in Konjoku Monogatari ("Tales of a Time Now Past"), a vast twelfth century collection of stories drawn from diverse sources. "In a Grove" is ultimately based on a simpift tale of a bandit who captures a samurai and his wife through trickery, rapes the w Je, then goes on his way, leaving the

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mutually embittered couple to continue their journey. Akutagawa alters the actual narrative line by having the husband killed and the bandit captured, but transforms the story much more radically by having it presented through the testimony of a series of witnesses questioned by a police commissioner. These accounts are presented to the reader directly, without an explanatory narrative frame of any kind, and as they progress from the corroborative testimony of the disinterested bystanders (a woodcutter, a priest, a policeman) through to the blatantly contradictory versions of the bandit, the wife, and the husband (whose ghost testifies through a medium), it becomes increasingly clear that Akutagawa is less interested in the contested facts of the crime itself than in the difficulty, or impossibility, of determining them. The medieval anecdote is transformed into a peculiarly modern meditation on the relativity of truth.

Akutagawa' s concerns in "Rashomon," on the other hand, are less epistemological than ethical. Set in a much more concrete and detailed version of late Heian society than "In a Grove," the story concerns an unemployed samurai's servant who has been reduced to a choice between starvation and a life of crime. Taking refuge from the rain in the ruins of the Rashomon gate, he comes upon an old hag stealing hair from corpses to make wigs. When the morally repelled servant indignantly intervenes, the hag protests in her own defense that the woman whose corpse she was robbing had been no better than herself (she had made her living by selling snake flesh as dried fish), but that neither woman had any choice, that any conduct is justified by self-interest and the need to survive. The servant ironically acknowledges the cogency of her argument by promptly turning it against her; concluding that he has no choice either, he proceeds to rob her of her own clothes. Essentially a study in moral psychology the story focusses consistently on the ethical waverings of its protagonist, as he progresses from "Helpless incoherent thoughts protesting an inexorable fate," through "a consuming antipathy against all evil," to his final commitment to survival at all cost.

Kurosawa's indebtedness to these apparently unrelated stories is as radically dissimi- lar as the stories themselves. The influence of "In a Grove" on the scenes in the woods

and in the magistrate's courtyard in Rashomom is patently obvious. Kurosawa treats it with scrupulous fidelity, not only in fundamental matters of technique (in both story and film, for instance, the witnesses' testimony is delivered in response to implied, but unheard, questions from the investigator), but even in seemingly inconsequential narrative details. As Donald Richie points out, for instance, there is "no reason at all for the bandit to be discovered by the police agent near a small bridge (seen in the film) except that this is where Akutagawa says it happened."4 If Kurosawa's indebted- ness to "In a Grove" is too obvious to miss, it seems unlikely, in contrast, that anyone would ever even have suspected the influence of Akutagawa' s "Rashomon" were it not explicitly acknowledged in the title of the film. The critical consensus is that "the title story has little in it that Kurosawa used, except the general description of the ruined gate, the conversation about the devastation of Kyoto during the period of civil war and the atmosphere of complete desolation,"5 to which we might add the notion of the theft of clothing from a defenceless victim.

The most significant influence of "Rashomon" on Kurosawa's film, however, is not direct and narrative, like that of "In a Grove," but rather oblique and thematic. And an appreciation of that influence serves to illuminate the real nature and function fo the frame sequence. For, despite Kurosawa's account of the film's origins, the events at the gate are not merely narrative padding, and the woodcutter, the priest, and the commoner do a good deal more than provide narrative exposition and a bit of sententious choric commentary. The drama in which they participate constitutes, rather, a sort of interpretive re-enactment of the earlier drama, and it is on the parallel between these two dramas that the thematic coherence of the film as a whole is based.

As the bandit, the wife, and the ghost of the husband offer contradictory accounts of what happened in the woods, so the second trio of characters offer equally contradictory responses to those accounts. Where the woodcutter responds to the situation with

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bewilderment and the priest with growing disillusionment, the commoner greets it with complacent cynicism.

Both of these narrative strands function, in different ways, to translate an epis- temologica! dilemma, the viewer's inability to determine with any certainty what actually happened in the woods, into ethical terms. One aspect of the interrelationship of ethics and epistemology in the film has been widely recognized, the role of egoism in motivating the contradictory accounts of the crime. The film goes beyond relativism,

as Stanley Kauffmann says, to reveal "the element that generates the relativism: the element of ego, of self."" In fact, it is "not so much about the relativity of truth," in Bruce Kawin's view, "as it is about selfishness, from the ego-supportive fictions of the narrators to the outrages they commit."7 Kurosawa's addition of a fourth version of the events in the woods to those provided in "In a Grove," the woodcutter's eyewitness report, reinforces this emphasis on egoism in two different ways: first, the woodcutter's farcically ignoble version of the crime exposes the full extent of the self-aggrandizement involved in the earlier accounts; and second, the commoner's subsequent accusation that the woodcutter himself has lied in concealing his theft of the dagger extend the realm of self-interest and deceit within the world of the film even further.

It is not only the manner in which the witnesses tell their tales that has to be seen in a moral context, however, but also the manner in which the characters at the gate respond. If the events in the woods reveal the motive that generates the relativism of the courtyard, the events at the gate remind us of its potential consequences. And it is Akutagawa' s "Rashomon" which provides the model for the central point made by Kurosawa in the framing sequence of the film, its exposure of the way in which our judgements of the behaviour of others serve to license our own. "In a Grove" emphasizes the necessary arbitrariness of epistemological choice (the story gives us even less reason to trust one version of the crime more than the others, in fact, than does the film); "Rashomon" stresses the inevitability of moral choice. Where the former insists on the impossibility of certainty, the latter insists just as strenuously on the need, even in the absence of certainty, to make a commitment. The intersection of these opposing thematic emphases in the film results in a particularly clear instance of what Naomi Schor has described as the "hermeneutic double-bind" characteristic of modernist

narratives focussing on the interpretive process, in which "the absolute necessity to interpret goes hand in hand with the total impossibility to validate interpretation."8

The central interpretive decision faced by both the figures at the gate and the viewers in the audience, of course, is to determine, not which of the contradictory stories to prefer, but rather the significance of the contradictions themselves. And it is the final episode of the film, the incident of the abandoned baby, which points up the real importance of this decision. Interestingly, though, if there is a single matter on which the film's critics are largely in accord, it is their condemnation of this incident. Dismissing it as "false and gratutious,"9 in Joan Mellen's words, they generally feel relieved of any need to discuss it further. Even the few defences that have been offered tend to be curiously left-handed, like Stanley Kauffmann 's suggestion, for instance, that "one can argue that Kurosawa felt the very arbitrariness of this incident would make the central story's ambiguity resonate more closely."10 The one critic to accord the episode the attention it deserves is Keiko McDonald, who sees its effect as ultimately subverted, however, by the darkening of the closing shot of the film, which serves, she contends, "as another justification for supporting the relativity of man's nature as the film's final implication."11

But this is scarcely the implication of the episode as a whole, for the behaviour of the commoner in robbing the baby of its clothing serves precisely to expose the connection between epistemological relativism and moral anarchy. Interpreting the stories he has heard from the woodcutter and the priest as further evidence that the world is shaped and governed soley by the demands of the ego, he accepts the

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implications of his interpretation and proceeds to act upon them. Conversely, the woodcutter's decision to adopt the baby is not merely a sentimental afterthought on Kurosawa's part, but rather, in effect, an unintentional contribution to the debate, a refutation of the commoner's cynicism through an actual demonstration of the possi- bility of selflessness, an assertion of something beyond ego.

If the behaviour of the commoner makes essentially the same point as the ironic conclusion of Akutagawa' s story, then, the behaviour of the woodcutter makes a very different point. And if that point has been lost on those of the film's critics who continue to see it as a demonstration, sometimes even as a celebration, of relativism, its force is clearly appreciated by the third figure at the gate, the priest. Misunderstand- ing the woodcutter's intentions in picking up the baby, assuming that they are no better than the commoner's, the priest initially concludes that the commoner's cynicism was apparently justified, after all; but the realization of his error enables him, as he tells the woodcutter, to regain his faith in humanity and in the possibility of a morally meaningful universe. With the action of the woodcutter, Kurosawa's Rashomon permits the priest, and its viewers, a way out, an existential escape from moral relativism, denied the readers of Akutagawa' s "Rashomon."

David Boyd University of Newcastle

Notes

^ Donald Richie, "Introduction," Focus on Rashomon (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1972), p. 1.

2 Akira Kurosawa, Something Like An Autobiography , trans. Audie E. Bock (New York: Knopf, 1982),

pp. 181-82.

^ Both "In a Grove" and "Rashomon" are reprinted from Ryonsouke Akutagawa, Rashomon and Other Stories (New York: Liveright, 1952) in Focus on Rashomon.

^ Donald Richie, "Rashomon," from The Films of Akira Kurosawa , 2nd ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970), reprinted in Focus on Rashomon, p. 85.

^ Richie, " Rashomon ," pp. 70-71.

^ Stanley Kauffmann, Living Images (New York: Harper and Row, 1975),. p. 319.

^ Bruce Kawin, Mindscreen: Bergman, Godard, and First-Person Film (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), p. 86.

o

Naomi Schor, "Fiction as Interpretation/Interpretation as Fiction," in Susan R. Suleiman and Inge Crosman, eds., The Reader in the Text (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), p. 169.

^Joan Mellen, The Waves at Genji's Door (New York: Pantheon, 1976), p. 206.

^Kauffmann, p. 319.

' ^Keiko E. McDonald, "Light and Darkness in Rashomon ," Literature! Film Quarterly, 10,2 (1982), 128.

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Contents
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p. 156
p. 157
p. 158
Issue Table of Contents
Literature/Film Quarterly, Vol. 15, No. 3 (1987) pp. 137-205
Front Matter
"Breaker" Morant In Fact, Fiction, and Film [pp. 138-145]
"The Road Warrior" and the Fall of Troy [pp. 146-150]
Bewitched and Bewildered Over "Eastwick" [pp. 151-154]
"RASHOMON": FROM AKUTAGAWA TO KUROSAWA [pp. 155-158]
Vision Denied in "Night" and "Fog" and "Hiroshima Mon Amour" [pp. 159-163]
Cinematic Qualities in the Novel "Kiss of the Spider Woman" [pp. 164-168]
"The Persistence of Proust, The Resistance of Film" [pp. 169-174]
Woody Allen's "Comic Irony" [pp. 175-180]
"Classical Cinema" and The Spectator [pp. 181-189]
"The Birth of Venus" and The Death of Romantic "Love in Out of the Past" [pp. 190-197]
"Birdy": The Making of the Film-Egg by Egg [pp. 198-199]
An Anatomy of Horror [pp. 200-202]
A Bibliography of English-Language History, Theory, and Criticism of Italian Cinematic Neorealism [pp. 203-205]
Back Matter