Kurosawa's Search For The Truth In Rashomon

Everyone in the world has probably played the game telephone at one point or another. In this game, people will gather in a circle and one person will whisper a message into another person’s ear. This process will continue until the first and last person in the circle compare what was heard to what was actually said. A vast majority of the time, the resulting message is not at all similar to what was originally spoken. This simple example illustrates just how easy it is for the truth to be polluted. Akira Kurosawa in his film Rashomon illustrates a similar idea. He paints the viewer a portrait of a crime scene in which a woman has been raped and her husband murdered. However, Kurosawa provides the viewer with four competing narratives that tell different stories of what actually happened in the forest. At the …show more content…
By the end of the movie, the viewer is left pondering how the truth could become so twisted. Kurosawa seems to suggest that individual observers can have different interpretations of the same event. This makes it problematic when attempting to establish objective truth, as Kurosawa encourages his viewers to attempt to do. However, Kurosawa uses Rashomon to prove that justified true belief cannot be a part of the human experience. Kurosawa intentionally makes it difficult to find the truth in the story of Rashomon. This is due to the fact that Kurosawa does not intend for his viewers to know what actually happened in the crimes he describes; rather his goal is to force his viewers to question all of the narratives presented. Even though he presents the viewer with