Subjectivity
Rashomon is a story that centers around one tale. However, the film provides multiple, competing accounts of what happened the day the samurai was murdered. This film examines how the truth can be distorted, obscured, even lost depending on who is telling the truth (and who is listening). There is no "objective" account—only an incomplete picture pieced together from various partial perspectives. The variability in the tales occludes the court's ability to render justice and the listeners' ability to draw meaning and understanding from the event. Rashomon not only challenges the viewer to evaluate the veracity of contradictory, subjective accounts—something many films and television programs have imitated—but also raises the possibility that philosophical notions like "truth" and "goodness" might be subjective in the final estimation.
Pride
Kurosawa remarked that human beings are unable to be honest with themselves about themselves. In Rashomon, each character tells a different version of the story, embellishing the truth to make themselves feel like better or stronger people than they actually are. Tajomaru describes himself to the court as a virile, cunning young outlaw. The wife reports being a victim of rape and disownment. The samurai's ghost, three days after his death, paints himself as the victim of his wife's betrayal. The ego is the prism through which each speaker relates their testimony, contributing to their unreliability in various ways. The woodcutter's admission that he did not tell the truth the first time around marks a breakthrough, in that he claims to be honest the second time. However, the commoner correctly accuses the woodcutter of lying a second time, concealing the fact that he stole the dagger, demonstrating how difficult and precarious it can be for humans to always be truthful and honest.
Faith
The theme of the loss of faith in Rashomon is about no longer trusting human beings, society, and God. The priest originally raises this issue when he comments that the story of the samurai might make him finally "lose his faith in the human soul." The commoner's outlook represents a cynical, nihilistic worldview that has already long dismissed mankind's capacity to do good and be trustworthy. The woodcutter is essentially the soul caught in the midst between the faithful and faithless perspectives that the priest and commoner hold—indeed, the Rashomon gate, caught in a heavy storm, has been interpreted as a purgatorial space, one where the men must wait and discuss notions like nature, faith, and fate.
Truth
The search for the truth is what motivates the plot of Rashomon. The first line of the film is, "I don't understand... I just don't understand." Two of the film's three locations—the courthouse and the Rashomon gate—serve as scenes of storytelling where various accounts of the samurai's tale are told and retold in an effort to arrive at a satisfactory understanding of the events. Kurosawa gives the viewer access to the third location, the grove, only through the testimonies of various characters—the priest, the woodcutter, the bandit Tajomaru, the wife, and the samurai's ghost. Despite such scattered perspectives, the priest believes the truth is reachable, because mankind is essentially good. Kurosawa's elevation of subjectivity and consciousness over objectivity and reality visually reflects the spirit of early to mid-century Japanese modernist writers like Ryu Akutagawa, as well as a broader questioning, in the 20th century, of the nature of reality and the role of perception.
Storytelling
One can easily interpret Rashomon as a grand metaphor for literature, painting, theater, cinema—the timeless art of storytelling across all forms. A number of artistic media converge and come to bear on Kurosawa's modern brand of filmmaking. The "wipe" edit, which mimics the turning of pages, and the serial, chapter-like structure of the film, both owe a debt to print literature and manga. Kurosawa's stylized, two-dimensional compositions, which often entail characters posing still in the background and foreground, turn each cell of the film into a painting to be contemplated. The story's sensational events and dreamlike images are consumed by an audience of storm-bound men stuck in the Rashomon gate, not unlike a packed multiplex on a rainy day. In Rashomon, storytelling itself is the main event—as a rule of thumb in the film, each act of storytelling tends to reveal more about the speaker than about the story's content, in a way that only becomes apparent when piecing the various accounts together to form a grand understanding.
Power
The events in the grove between the thief, the samurai, and the samurai's wife are mythical and timeless—each version reflects different fantasies and nightmares that men and women have about feeling powerful or feeling powerless. In each version of the story, the stakes in the grove are always life or death, an arena where matters of honor, virtue, and integrity are decided. Also in each version of the story, power is exchanged between parties, sometimes multiple times. The four versions of the samurai's tale explore various political arrangements between Tajomaru, the samurai, and the wife. In the samurai's ghost's tale, for example, there are two key power exchanges—first when Tajomaru restrains the samurai and rapes his wife, and then after her betrayal when Tajomaru asks the samurai to decide her fate. In each tale, laughter symbolizes the moment of gaining power or control over another—Tajomaru laughs over killing the samurai, the samurai's ghost laughs at Tajomaru's offering up of his wife, and the wife laughs in the woodcutter's tale before berating the men for their cowardice.
Performance
Rashomon is heavily influenced by the tradition of Japanese Noh theater, which gathers a range of stylized bodily gestures into a repertoire meant to evoke emotional states and natural landscapes. In Kurosawa's film, the ritualistic, performative staging and movement of bodies becomes a dynamic kind of storytelling device, complimenting the other visual and sonic elements of the mise-en-scene. For example, sitting cross-legged, usually around firewood, is the position the men in the Rashomon gate assume when telling stories. The woodcutter finding the samurai's body with its hands outstretched foreshadows the samurai's ghost's testimony. The wife's body in the courtyard, wracked with shame and guilt, uncannily resembles the body of the medium in the following scene, which channels her dead husband. The deliberate placement of testifiers in the foreground and witnesses in the background of the courtyard scenes creates a stern feeling of formality and distance between speakers and observers, unlike the more free-roaming spaces of the grove.
