Rashomon

Rashomon is a short-story written by one of the most celebrated Japanese authors of all time, Ryunosuke Akutagawa. The setting takes place during the Heian period at the Rashomon city gate of Kyoto, Japan. The story tells of a recently fired servant who sits by Rashomon and contemplates his fate; to starve or steal for survival. The servant struggles with this moral dilemma until encountering an old woman who he observes stealing strands of hair from a female corpse. Disgusted by what he sees, the servant decides he would rather starve to death than become as the old woman is. Drawing his sword, he threatens the old woman for her morbid thievery. After hearing the old woman explain that her stealing to survive is not wrongful, especially from a corpse who, in life, was a thief herself, the servant rationalizes that theft is a normality and necessity of life. With that, the servant steals the old woman’s kimono and says, “Then I guess you won’t blame me for turning highwayman, will you? I, too, must starve else.”

While the movie carries the same name, its plot and characters are derived from another story by the same author, titled In a Grove . The powerful scene settings in Rashomon, were enough to provoke Akira Kurosawa into the creation of a film, and the curiosity of those settings are what led me to read and interpret the story myself. After examination of the story, I perceived strong themes of naturalism which suggests that human nature and normality is shaped by their environments and social classes. These ideals align with the Japanese Buddhist belief that, while human nature is innately good because humans come from nature and nature is good, the actual state of every human person in their moral behaviors cannot avoid the conclusion that an original evil exists in human nature and is brought forth by circumstantial decision