I just watched Rashomon several times and developed a theory about the film and I would love to hear your thoughts on it. I believe this theory balances almost all stories.
Here we go:
Almost everyone begins their story with a shared narrative, so we can set that common part aside and go straight to the point where the accounts diverge.
The bandit rapes the woman, but afterward he regrets it and asks her to come with him, saying he finds her "very beautiful" and has been drawn to her. The woman, in turn, asks him to fight her husband. In her mind, if her husband (a samurai) is freed, he might be able to take revenge and also wipe away her shame. This makes sense even though in her own testimony she claims to have partially loosened her husband's bonds. If she truly wanted her husband dead, she could have simply asked the bandit to kill him right there while he was still tied up, rather than demanding a duel. But her husband misunderstands her intention.
After the bandit leaves, the husband becomes disgusted with his wife. The wife is trying to explain to him what happened when the woodcutter approaches her from behind, attacks her, and knocks her unconscious and rapes her in front of her husband, seeing as she is very beautiful. The woman is not lying about this—she genuinely was struck from behind and lost consciousness. This is precisely why the woodcutter omits this entire part from his own version of events: if he admitted that the samurai was still alive and his wife was talking to him after the bandit left, it would eliminate the bandit as the murderer entirely.
As a result, the husband is still alive after the bandit leaves, and the wife is explaining things to him out of guilt and desperation—but the woodcutter does not want anyone to figure this out. He wants to pin the blame on the bandit, the very man who confessed to the crime himself. The bandit takes both swords and later sells the samurai's sword for sake money. We never actually see him kill the husband. The bandit assumes the samurai died from the wound he inflicted, which is why he confesses (since he knows he will eventually be caught anyway). But he is mistaken; he is not lying, just honestly wrong.
Because the bandit took the swords, it is absolutely impossible for the husband to have been killed with a sword. The wife, meanwhile, has no reason or intent to kill her husband with the dagger, since she is in the middle of explaining everything to him. While she is unconscious and her husband is still bound, the woodcutter rapes her—also because he finds her so attractive that even the bandit could not walk away from her.
Afterward, the woodcutter takes the dagger and kills the samurai. We know he is lying because he claims the samurai was killed with the bandit's sword—but that cannot be true, since the samurai was still alive after the bandit left and his wife was speaking with him. The woodcutter's entire invented duel narrative is designed to erase his own presence from the scene.
The samurai, realizing what has happened (his wife raped twice by two men), alters his own story and claims he committed seppuku (ritual suicide) in order to preserve his honor. Since he ends up dead, he does not want anyone to know that an ordinary woodcutter killed him.
But we know the dagger was not in his own hands, because the woodcutter took it. Even the samurai himself says that someone removed the dagger from his body. So clearly the sword was not the murder weapon, and the woodcutter is lying. The woodcutter killed the samurai with the dagger, took it, and fled. That is why, when the woman regains consciousness, her husband is dead and the woodcutter is gone.
If the sword had really been the murder weapon, why would anyone pull the dagger out of a dead man's body while the wife was still alive and had only just fled? Perhaps she had gone to fetch an official. That would only incriminate the woodcutter further. He takes the dagger—not because it is valuable, but because it is the actual murder weapon. Since there is no sword left to pin the crime on the bandit, he is forced to remove the dagger. After that, we never see him try to sell it or mention it again; he simply goes straight to report the incident.
With the woman unconscious, she could not possibly have killed her husband, since she had no dagger, and her husband himself never names her as the killer. The wife is also telling the truth when she says that when she woke up, her husband was already dead and the dagger was gone. So, the only person who could have taken and used the dagger is the woodcutter.
However, the wife misinterprets the situation and believes she herself is the killer, because she saw no woodcutter and attributes the trauma of the rape to the bandit. She also saw the bandit take the swords and assumes the dagger was the murder weapon, and that only she could have used it. But in reality, the dagger was never in her hands after that, because the woodcutter had already taken it and used it to kill the samurai.
Afterward, the wife flees and goes to the temple because she thinks it is a safe place—or perhaps to repent.
This is the only scenario that fits all the pieces of testimony and evidence together without contradiction. The woodcutter invents the entire "duel at Rashomon" story from scratch in order to remove himself from the picture, erase the dagger, discredit the woman, and construct a plausible narrative.
The film also shows that whenever characters look at the sky or the sun, they are telling the truth, and when it is rainy and dark, they are lying or distorting the facts—because that part of their stories is the same for everyone.
In the end, everyone is hiding part of the truth. The message of the story is not "one out of four people is telling the truth"; it is that no one is completely honest.
- That concludes my theory. Do you see any flaws in it? I'd love to know! Thanks!