Rashōmon

This is a story from the war-torn Heian period.
A woodcutter is saying at the magistrate’s office that he found a corpse.

I went into the mountains to cut wood.
It was the path I always took, so at first I didn’t think anything was strange.
But a little deeper in, I found a samurai’s body.
His sword was nowhere to be seen.
Instead, there was a woman’s hat,
a samurai’s hat,
and a rope that had been cut.
When I pushed through the brush,
I found one more thing: a small amulet box wrapped with rope.
That was all.
I found it, and that’s why I came to the magistrate’s office.

There is another man as well.
He brought in the notorious bandit Tajomaru,
and he is speaking about it at the magistrate’s office.

Two days ago, by the riverbank, I found a man.
It was the notorious bandit, Tajomaru.
He was collapsed next to a horse.
The horse, the bow, the arrows…
they all belonged to the dead samurai.
I tied him up and brought him to the magistrate’s office.
From the looks of it, it seemed like he had fallen off the horse.
That is all I saw.

Hearing that, Tajomaru flies into a rage.
Don’t be ridiculous.

You think Tajomaru fell off a horse?
I was thirsty, so I drank from a spring.
Then my stomach suddenly twisted in pain.
I don’t know if it was poison, but I collapsed right there.
I do not lie.
Everything I say from now on is the truth.

In the forest, I saw a samurai and a woman.
The woman… was beautiful.
At first, I had no intention of killing the samurai.
I tricked him with talk of treasure and led him into the forest.
Then I ambushed him from behind and tied him up.
And I brought the woman there too.
That was when her hat caught on a tree branch.

In front of the samurai, I sexually assaulted his wife.
Then the woman said this:
“One of you must die.
I will follow the one who wins.”
So we fought.
Fair and square.

That samurai was strong.
He endured more than twenty of my strikes.
It must have been around twenty-five.
In the end, I won.
And I killed him.
The woman disappeared in the middle of it all.
The dagger?
I don’t know about that.
It looked expensive…
I was a fool not to take it.

There was also a lady at the magistrate’s office.
This is what she says.

After the bandit sexually assaulted me, he ran away.
But my husband…
he kept staring at me.
Without saying a word.
I couldn’t endure that gaze.
I begged him to kill me,
and I offered him my dagger.
But my husband didn’t listen.
He just kept… glaring at me.
In that moment, I lost my mind.

And I lost consciousness.
When I opened my eyes,
the dagger was buried in my husband’s chest.
I ran out of the forest
and tried to throw myself into a pond.
But…
I couldn’t die.

As the case falls deeper into confusion,
the magistrate summons a medium
to speak with the dead samurai.
This is what the samurai says.

The bandit told my wife to run away with him.
My wife urged him to kill me.
But the bandit grew disgusted with her.
He asked me,
“Should I kill her, or let her live?”
I did not answer.
My wife ran away.
A little later, the bandit returned and untied me.
In that moment, I forgave him in my heart.
But soon, betrayal and shame surged over me.

I picked up my wife’s dagger, lying there,
and stabbed myself in the chest.
That was when I felt it—
someone pulling the dagger out of my body.

Days later,
beneath the Rashomon Gate,
the woodcutter tells a stranger he has never met before
what he truly saw.

I…
was actually there.
I saw everything.
After assaulting the woman,
the bandit asked her to become his wife.

The woman said this:
“What can I possibly say, as a woman?”
Then, with her own dagger,
she cut the samurai loose.
Tajomaru took that as a signal to fight.
But the samurai said,
“I don’t want to risk my life because of a woman like this.”

The bandit also changed his mind
and tried to leave the woman behind.
At that moment,
abandoned by both men,
the woman burst into wild laughter.
She insulted them both,
and drove a wedge between them.
In the end, the two men drew their swords.
But it wasn’t a heroic duel.

It was an awkward, terrified scuffle.
At last,
the samurai was stabbed and killed by Tajomaru.
Tajomaru tried to take the woman with him,
but she shoved him away and ran.
The bandit took the samurai’s sword
and fled alone.

In Rashomon, the most important keyword is probably “truth.”
But the strongest message this work delivers
is that a single truth can never exist.
Truth is like flowing water—
the moment you try to grab it, it scatters.
Human language and narrative
can never capture it whole.

There was one incident.
The bandit invents a story
to preserve his bravery.
The wife chooses the narrative of a victim
to endure her shame.
And the samurai constructs a story of suicide
so that he will not lose honor, even in death.

They reconstruct the incident
so that they themselves will not collapse.
Naturally, the audience wants to step back from these narratives.
So we look for the person who seems closest to the truth.
And almost by instinct, we choose the woodcutter.
He looks like a third party,
a detached observer with relatively little at stake.

A similar example might be the trendy word “gaslighting.”
A serious flaw in the concept of gaslighting
is its self-contained nature.
In a romantic relationship, something happens,
and many people quickly label it “gaslighting”
and deliver that label to others with ease.
But why was it gaslighting?
Because I decided to call it gaslighting.
The other person doesn’t see it that way at all.
If a psychology PhD comes in and declares,
“Yes, that is gaslighting,”
it feels closer to the truth.
The woodcutter ends up playing a role
similar to that psychology PhD.

But the director sets a brilliant device.
At the end of the work,
the woodcutter who spoke beneath the Rashomon Gate
is revealed to be “the man who stole the dagger.”
He spoke as if he were very close to the truth,
but his narrative contains no answer to the question:
“So where did the dagger go?”
In the end, the director asks
whether even a psychology PhD
can truly “diagnose gaslighting.”
Whether it is academic authority,
or distance from direct interest,
a human being cannot be unrelated to self-narrative.
The dagger is the key device that shows this.

At this point, we can recall another principle.
A Latin phrase: Cui bono.
Who benefited from this incident?
If we strip away every narrative
and look only at the outcome,
we might get closer to understanding.
For example, because Tajomaru is a notorious bandit,
if he does not beautify himself as
“the man who won a magnificent fight against a samurai,”
he would suffer serious disadvantages in his social role.
In this way, we can analyze narratives
through gains and losses.

But the interesting part is this:
Even the moment we judge
that the characters’ narratives are not true,
we are already constructing another narrative.
“I’m free from interests.”
“I’m looking at the structure coldly.”
“I wasn’t fooled.”
That belief is another gain the reader receives,
and it is itself a self-narrative.

The moment we fail to notice that,
the reader is not essentially different
from the characters in Rashomon.
In the sense that we build a self-narrative,
and obtain relief and superiority inside it.

Right here—
in the very moment the reader thinks that—
the director completes the most elaborate trap.
Rashomon…

On the surface, it looks like a work
telling us to reconstruct a difficult story
from multiple angles.
But in truth,
it targets the human being
who believes they have understood the story.
And in the end, it asks:
What am I understanding right now—
and what am I gaining from it?