When Rashomon won the grand prize at the Venice International Film Festival in 1951, Kurosawa and his production team were stunned. They’d been reluctant to even enter the competition (it took an Italian film agent, Guilliana Stramigioli, to persuade the studio to do so). The lead producer claimed he never understood the film’s story or what the director was trying to say—a reaction, if we’re honest, many have had since. No matter, the prize was a breakthrough. Here was the antidote to the newsreels circulating in America and Europe at the time, documenting a pathological Japan, a conquered nation trailing in its dismal wake atrocities and kamikaze. Rashomon in Venice marked the victory of beauty over the beast of Japanese shame, just six years after the war ended and left Japan a shattered dead zone. So his Daiei producers swallowed their doubts, took the prize, and went home, knowing there was an audience outside Japan for what today we would call the “soft power” of Japanese culture.
Kurosawa had a different reaction. He took the win and relished the acclaim abroad. But he thought the prize went to the wrong film for the wrong reason. He was troubled by the carping criticism that it was the ancient costumes, the lure of the exotic, that had put Rashomon on top. He regretted not having won the prize for one of his “modern life” films, more obviously pieced together from the wreckage of the twentieth century, because it was to give us potent visions of that life, not to front a beautiful image of Japanese culture, that he was making movies at all.
The gate, lashed by driving rain, stands in the middle of nowhere. It is the first image we see. We don’t know how it fell into ruins. No structure is visible to the right or to the left of it, behind it or in the foreground, besides what we can see: a fallen pillar, splintered shards of wood, a soupy expanse of mud. Invisible in the earliest shots, two human figures grow from specks into full view as the camera slowly advances. “A picture puzzle landscape” we might call it, strikingly abstract, along the lines of an Abe Kobo novel—another Japanese allegorist foraging through the shadows and the hollowed-out emptiness of the postwar period.
Kurosawa, to the exasperation of his producers, had spent nearly the whole of his set and design budget on this single, dilapidated structure. He stretched for some justification, saying he meant it to represent the Rajo Gate that stood at the southern entrance to the imperial capital of Kyoto during the Heian period (784–1185). But the original was long since demolished (there is speculation it was never completely built, or had been destroyed already by 950). Despite their efforts, Kurosawa’s design team could find no extant paintings or screens from the period that took this gate as a focal point. Armed with text references only and nothing visual to faithfully replicate, Kurosawa had a free shot to imagine the gate’s shape and mass.
The result, he later confessed, was that “the Gate just kept growing in my mind’s eye.” It took his crew twenty-five days to build. Four thousand clay tiles were used to cover the vast, precariously sloping, overhanging roof of the structure. Because of its scale—almost sixty feet wide, forty feet deep, thirty-five feet high—a generic, traditional gate design was abandoned entirely in favor of one that simulated a grand Buddhist temple. Practically speaking, the type of sanmon he had in mind (perhaps resembling the still extant Nanzenji Temple in Kyoto) would stretch across multiple entry portals, necessitating more pillars, thought necessary by the construction crew to support the crushing weight of the tiles overhead. But this visual nod to Buddhist temple architecture would carry spiritual weight, too, giving the structure before us a solemnity and force beyond anything a merely secular gate could have borne.
A gate of such growing magnitude and expense, expanded to fit little more than Kurosawa’s own imaginings, caused him to cut out altogether another set in his original design plan. He had thought to fill the area in front of the gate with market stalls, of a kind, he remarked, “like those of our black markets today.” However focused Kurosawa was on building the main set for his experimental period film, requiring a construction effort of budget-draining dimensions, he remained alert to his film’s deeper purpose: namely, to tell a story set in the past, but one that illuminated the broken world his Japanese audience faced in the postwar present.
The yamiichi, or “black markets” that Kurosawa refers to, were a conspicuous feature of city life at the time of Japan’s unconditional surrender. They had existed long before it, to handle a street-level demand for staples and other goods that were strictly rationed by the wartime government. The number of such underground markets steadily increased as the fortunes of war turned sharply against Japan, no matter the official line that patriotism required extremes of self-sacrifice. We recall how often in a Kurosawa film such self-sacrifice, motivated by blind ideology or abject passivity and not by conscious choice, is held up for fierce ridicule and scorn.
Black market in Tokyo, 1945
The intensity of the firebombings that decimated Tokyo in the last months of the war, the cutting off of supply lines for resources from the colonies, and the consequent life-threatening shortages of fuel and food at its ignominious end gave a boost to the yamiichi, which sprang up at a fantastical rate. There are estimates that over forty thousand such stalls were in operation in Tokyo by the autumn of 1945, the majority falling under the control of yakuza, gangsters who seized the day and expanded their operations beyond the gambling and prostitution that had been their stock in trade.
Meanwhile, there was the August 15, 1945, radio broadcast, following the nuclear horror that made first Hiroshima, then Nagasaki, disappear. The emperor, in halting, barely audible locutions, hard to fathom by most Japanese, tried to proclaim to his subjects that at the war’s end, they must somehow endure the unendurable. In the wings, the American Occupation forces, under the imperious command of General Douglas MacArthur, were about to assume administrative control of the country, for what would be a nearly seven-year occupation. The Americans were eager to enact reforms and sweeping institutional change, but in Tokyo could not guarantee delivery of food for three and a half million people on the verge of starvation or shelter for all the homeless survivors. Nor could the Occupation feasibly manage distribution lines, given ongoing shortages, while attempting to maintain civil order. In that interval, the black market stalls became vital to the conduct of everyday life, and took a hodgepodge, scattered shape across Tokyo’s devastated remains.
The yamiichi were especially dense around rail hubs. Civilians and repatriates, desperately hungry and displaced, would trundle between the city and its outlying rural regions, or farther away to the country homes of their ancestral origins, in the hunt for food they might purchase at extortionary prices, or barter for, or steal. One Sunday in the winter of 1945, nearly a million Tokyoites boarded such country-bound trains, with expectations that rarely eclipsed bringing back a few potatoes or edible roots in their knapsacks. For many, there was no other place to turn to make up any shortfall, except to the yamiichi.
And so the almost crazed, scattershot quest for food and other necessities rezoned Tokyo in a sense and gave sudden rise to makeshift shantytowns, also to the outlaw frisson surrounding them. Kurosawa’s Drunken Angel (1948), made just two years before Rashomon, features this territory in both realistic and symbolic detail, as if the black markets and the yakuza-run cabarets and bars were all that remained of social life in the city. A year later, with Stray Dog, which begins on an overstuffed tram and ends in a showdown that spills out from a train station, Kurosawa further probed the black market. He would explore it as an underground hideout where those who had returned from the war and been in various ways shunned or rejected could disappear, almost nostalgically, inside another criminal danger zone.
At the end of the day, the yamiichi represented a postwar business that worked. What people needed, along with what they had to trade, kept the stalls busy. Their operators procured and made available life-sustaining basics, through barter or customer “payment” of several kinds: cash, but also family jewelry, kimono, tools, weapons, spot labor, sex. It is the promise of just such contraband—a cache of stolen swords—that the bandit uses to lure the samurai into captivity near the start of Rashomon.
Meanwhile, preparing to actually shoot his experimental period film, Kurosawa’s obsessive devotion to his mind’s-eye image of the gate left nothing in his set design budget to build any such bustling black market in front of it. Instead, we see nothing but empty space. Now “emptiness,” as a concept and an image, has a deep history in Japanese thought and visual culture. We may be tempted to see it here as Kurosawa’s faithful adaptation of traditional aesthetics, a product of Zen-inspired minimalism. More prosaically, of course, the emptiness just signals a bad budget decision and a hardball studio response. But in the environment of the Japanese postwar, “emptiness” also captures how the city looked and felt to its survivors at the time of surrender. Because besides the black market stalls, the other distinguishing aspect of life on the ground in Tokyo that autumn were the massive patches of vacant, scorched earth, or else the debris and rain-filled craters that stretched for miles across a once densely populated city, vast areas now given over to a desolation upon which nothing and no one was standing.
And so what Miyagawa Kazuo’s camera captured and Kurosawa would edit to frame Rashomon’s opening sequence, with the hoses from three off-screen fire trucks streaming water into the air and drenching the ground below, is a foreground of rain and mud—two signature elements of Kurosawa’s postwar style. In the background, shrouded by the downpour, the gate looms in all its twisted grandeur.
Although Kurosawa never got to build his yamiichi in Rashomon, his reference to the postwar black markets, even as he is making a period film set in the late twelfth century, usefully reminds us that no Kurosawa film is reducible to a single point in time. The world there on the screen, in either a historical piece like Rashomon or like those set in the present, bears the weight of several different eras. Sometimes, such temporal layering falls on a single image or on a transitional scene. Or else it is carried not by the visuals at all but by the music and other recorded sounds, even by off-screen voices.
For example, think of the first “action” scene involving the woodcutter, in period attire and shouldering his axe, as he purposefully makes his way through Rashomon’s deep forest (a scene Fellini loved, for the play of light around the axe blade). His body fairly glides over and under the elegant parabola etched by Miyagawa’s swooping, tracking camera, all but oblivious to the percussive, even martial repetitions of what sounds like Bolero. Many of us, on first seeing Rashomon, may have thought how bizarre it was to hear Ravel marching like that beside the woodcutter. But time passes. The film doesn’t change, but we do, to the point where we may now link the woodcutter, weaving between trails, on his way to being witness to a crime, with what we know of Ravel. In 1916—the year after the famous author Akutagawa Ryunosuke published a short story titled “Rashomon”—Ravel witnessed the ghastly aftermath of the Battle of Verdun. In Alex Ross’s telling:
[Ravel] often had to weave back and forth on pockmarked roads as the shells fell all around him. Once he found himself in an abandoned town on a sunny day, walking through the empty, silent streets. “I don’t believe I will ever experience a more profound or stranger emotion than this sort of mute terror,” he later recalled.
The woodcutter, accompanied however distantly by this musical passage, will make his way to a similar sort of clearing. He will come face-to-face with his own vision of ghastly death, be stricken, too, with “mute terror” as he stumbles upon first one, then three more clues, until a body with hands raised in rigor mortis finally brings him to a dead halt. Through a mismatched, or, as a Soviet filmmaker like Eisenstein would have called it, a contrapuntal use of sight and sound, which Kurosawa learned from the Russians and applied here, using Ravel, cultural separations collapse. The relevant time frames multiply. Ravel’s march and its driving repetitions, as adapted by Kurosawa and his great friend, the composer Hayasaka Fumio, builds a palpable suspense into the time shifting and mood swinging of this transitional scene.
We grasp here one aspect of Kurosawa’s gifts as a director, and the power of his images—to make everything on screen seem real and present. The ruins of several pasts, as well as the struggles of the present, or of two cultural worlds far removed from each other, are made to feel connected and proximate in the here and now. We might say of Kurosawa’s Rashomon what Jean Mitry once said of F. W. Murnau’s The Last Laugh: that the film’s images are guided by “the imaginative realism of poetry, and not the arbitrary psychology of a falsely realistic ‘slice of life.’”
Were we to see Rashomon again today on a big screen, in a darkened theatre anywhere in the world (the way Kurosawa thought we would see it, not in the isolating privacy of a small screen at home, much less a miniature one held in our hand), we may still feel embraced by the sublimity of a classic period film. It would start with the credits, the calligraphy laid over the structural details and bold geometries of the gate’s design. A massive wooden pillar lines up behind the vertical inscription of the director’s own name. The music swells from a vaguely “Oriental,” Western score. Indeed, we might feel swept back to the silent film era, possibly to D. W. Griffith’s own Orientalist Broken Blossoms—a film Kurosawa saw as a child—made by a director he revered and would even call his “artistic foundation.”
We may be in that theatre or in a school auditorium, because the sheer fame of Rashomon and its auteur put us there, or a given syllabus required it. Few movie titles, after all, have made it into common parlance the way we regularly cite Rashomon when faced with serial but contradictory accounts of “what happened,” of “he said, she said.” Few directors are as universally respected by their peers. Satyajit Ray said Rashomon changed the way he thought about light. Hou Hsiou Hsien studied Kurosawa’s rain in awe. Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas, and Steven Spielberg, to name just some of the Americans, identify themselves as disciples.
Yet such fame can be a burden. Kurosawa turns into a superhero, Rashomon into a name we drop even if we’ve never seen it. Or it can trigger a backlash, as occurred in Japan just after Rashomon won the Golden Lion, and some denounced Kurosawa for pandering to a foreign crowd. Since then, along with other famous directors of his generation, anti-auteur theorists have further managed to minimize or scale down his achievements.
Rashomon’s shadow, despite all this, casts itself over our world. It hovers in the background of our own shattered landscapes: a terror-struck city, a tsunami-swept coastal town. And as at Rashomon, after a photographic or video encounter with such sudden, inexplicable calamities, there gather voices, the beginnings of a story: about the end of a world we thought we knew or could explain; about witness accounts that don’t add up; about criminals who are not just invaders from outside, but who may dwell among us, close to home.
The rain at Rashomon’s opening is insistent, an implacable, elemental force. Many witnesses, Gabriel García Márquez among them, report being swept into the film because of it. The downpour prevails for an extended series of establishing shots. There is no music. No voices are heard on- or off-screen, just the sound of a torrent. Amid this driving rain Kurosawa’s camera shifts location, not once or twice but five times in its advance on the gate, never losing sight of it. These are moving pictures, but they are punctuated, coming to us by way of an allegory-charged sequence of what appear to be still shots. From a distance, the gate looks almost haunted, the tiled roof on its left side vaguely intact while our eye tracks the sharp downward angle of its disintegration on the right (the anime director Miyazaki Hayao recalls seeing Rashomon as a child, and the terror he felt when he first faced this rain-soaked ruin). These serial shots of the gate, each from a different camera setup, further break the whole into pieces. This monument of the Heian era, this relic from Japan’s once golden age, seems to be transforming itself before our eyes. A hypnotic force seeps into Kurosawa’s wordless, shifting visions, as if passing through them we were being led back to the silent era he so loved, when people still believed that cinematic images could take possession of them.
TOP: Tokyo after the earthquake. BOTTOM: Tokyo after the fire-bombing.
And so with every repositioned camera setup, from each different vantage, Kurosawa’s Rashomon morphs and changes: into a still shot resembling the ruins of Tokyo after the earthquake of 1923; then another still, looking like the ruins of Tokyo after the firebombings that ended the war. This is the wreckage Kurosawa lived through, which gives a personal, almost documentary edge to Rashomon. But the manner of the cinematic storytelling, its allegorical dimensions, opens wide to admit yet other stills, of ruins yet to be seen but known to Kurosawa, like the incineration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki: a skeletal dome here, a molten bridge there, to break the flat line of nothingness all around.
As we face Rashomon today, through the prism of our own experience, the gate may open still further. Eyeing it through that veil of driving rain, we may dimly make out the broken contours of Nepal or of Aleppo, or of other calamities streaming through our media, and be reminded how randomly or ruthlessly the world around us has been, is being, torn apart. Distantly separated from Japan or the film’s twelfth century setting, our reckonings with such destruction may yet lead us to Rashomon, for its ever-widening imaginative capacity and embrace.
Through this sequence of shots at Rashomon’s beginning, the Heian period we thought we had entered, and the Japanese genre film we expected to see, opens on to something we may not easily grasp. Indeed, we may feel like the woodcutter, sitting out the rain under the overhang of the gate, gazing dumbfounded across the mud and desolation, and shaking his head as he mouths the film’s first words: “I don’t understand it. I don’t understand it at all . . .”
We feel that way, because Kurosawa likely did, too. It wasn’t that he lacked confidence as a director, or couldn’t control most every aspect of his craft, or bend the crew and the actors often enough to his will (by the time he made Seven Samurai in 1954, they took to calling him tenno—“the emperor”). But he couldn’t command the storms of life and didn’t possess sufficient belief in any science, religious doctrine, or secular ideology that sought to definitively order or explain them. Deleuze rightly describes how Kurosawa’s scenes don’t move toward answers so much as to the question latent inside them, Dostoevsky-like in this maneuvering. It was his honesty as an artist to reveal not how much but how little of life he really understood or how much mystery it contained.
No doubt his 1930s apprenticeship at the film company Photo Chemical Laboratories (PCL) and at Toho Studios helped to both hone his craft and trouble his conscience. So, too, did the Japanese military and civilian censors, for whom even trivial issues of form and content—requiring storytellers to prevaricate, exaggerate, or lie—determined what got made and what did not during wartime. One point of origin for the lies and the self-deceptions in Rashomon no doubt derives from Kurosawa’s mindfulness of what he said, or did not say, over those troubled years.
Before he turned to film, however, Kurosawa studied art and exhibited his work at proletarian-sponsored exhibitions in the late 1920s. This period was vibrant with experimental forays in every sector of Japanese culture, heralding one or another transformation of civil society and artistic practice. Manifestos poured forth at a prodigious rate. Against the political odds and at growing personal risk, many joined movements to instigate change away from a capital-driven, militarist, or fascist modernity. Kurosawa was one of them.
Even before that, and throughout his life, Kurosawa was an avid reader. He once described himself as an eien bungaku seinen, or “eternal literary youth.” He admitted to feelings of nostalgia, not for the old Japan but for that “wide world” that literature opens up. He clung to a belief that literature could be mined for “some element I can bring to my next work, something new I haven’t yet tried,” attributing whatever gifts studio people thought he had as a scriptwriter to what literature taught him about the human drama. He declared repeatedly that the script was the “banner” of the film. And he insisted that a good script must contain dramatic characters, because a good film was character-driven and couldn’t be salvaged by the most original director’s so-called montage.
Much is made of Kurosawa’s attachment to Shakespeare, especially the aggressive manipulations of Macbeth (Throne of Blood) and of King Lear (Ran) to fit his filmmaking style. Kurosawa showed an abiding interest in Noh theatre, too, for a dramaturgy he could deploy to restage an Elizabethan play, even more significantly for a repertoire that features ghosts—a living past that haunts the present. But his connections to the Russians are easily as profound. “I grew up with Dostoevsky, not just the Japanese classics,” Kurosawa insisted. He identified, too, with modern Japanese writers of both serious and popular literature, perhaps especially with Akutagawa Ryunosuke (1889–1927), whose stories form the literary scaffolding for Kurosawa’s construction of Rashomon.
In other words, there are connections, even fraternal entanglements, that bind Kurosawa’s films to the literary and art worlds of Japan, from the beginning of the twentieth century through to the period of his greatest achievement. We rightly understand that he labored longest and most identifiably in the cinematic medium. But it is off-screen, in his cultural or familial prehistory, or in the backstory of his brother’s life and death, that we might trace the inner boundaries of Kurosawa’s artistic horizons and those elements of his world that most fundamentally shaped his vision.
Of these, none seem more basic than a few verifiable events that will become for him ineradicable memories. First, the city of his birth disappeared, in the earthquake of 1923, and again after the firebombings in the spring of 1945. Second, between these two traumas that turned Tokyo into a charred wasteland, there is an interval during which Japan lost a war and Kurosawa lost a brother. This would be the same brother who took him to silent films when he was a youth, encouraged his reading of Russian literature, and was the first Kurosawa to enter the movie business.
Each of these factors contributes in telling ways to the most charged stories Kurosawa would create. Like a gate, they frame the entry point to Kurosawa’s world. Here we encounter the defining materials of his labor, including a reliance on black-and-white as his chosen medium, and a voice for his most unforgettable characters.