Humans can't be honest with themselves. Whenever they talk about themselves, they are always colored. This movie is about such, That is, people who can't help but lie to make themselves seem better than they are. Egoism is a sin that humans are born with.
To what extent can we trust the word of others, or can we say that we do? In biblical studies, we are born with "original sin" and the origin of that sin is human desire. Selfish desires. We are weak because we can only think of ourselves, and so we create an idealized version of ourselves. They tell lies to fill the gap that they cannot reach. Reality is harsh, so we can't live without lying.
<Rashomon is a film directed by Akira Kurosawa based on the short stories "Rashomon" and "In the Bush" from the novelist Ryunosuke Akutagawa's short story collection ^aladin-book. The narrative is framed by the story of "The Woodcutter," one of three characters sheltering from the rain under the Nasamun Gate. However, the "hidden narrators" are a samurai, a bandit, and his wife. Finally, the events are thrown into chaos when the woodcutter's statements are conflicting. Their testimonies are inconsistent, and in the end, there can only be one truth. This is the moment when each person's desires create a lie. Their testimony, a cunning mixture of truth and lies, is powerful enough to deceive even themselves.
Meanwhile, the novel Nasangmun is narrated through a conversation between an old woman and her servant. When the servant sees the old woman mutilating a corpse, he asks her why, and she tells him that she was making a wig to sell. "This is the woman who sold the snake as dry," and the woman had sold the snake as dry so that she wouldn't starve to death. And the old man says that since that's the case, "what she's doing can't be wrong," so he can't call it bad. The novel ends with the servant, after hearing the story of the old man and the woman, stripping the old man of his clothes in order to "live". This is echoed in the movie in the final conversation between the servant and the woodcutter. When the woodcutter sees the servant about to take the child's silk robe, he stops him, but he himself commits perjury to steal the expensive dagger, representing the contradictory desires of a selfish human being.
Although the movie was made half a century ago, it still seems that there is no difference between the Heian era in the novel and the people living in the present. That's because we still live in relationships with people, and we spend our lives swimming in a world of heavy oil. The movie presents this to us through a physical space called Nashengmen (Rashomon). Originally used as a defensive gate, it was called Nasangmun in the late Heian period, meaning to dump dead bodies or illegitimate children, or to catch the living as thieves or traitors hide out. "In the bush" is the same as Nasangmun. The reason for this can be found in Nashengmun, the predecessor of Nashengmun, which originally meant "a fence surrounded by thorns." Therefore, everything that happens inside Nashengmun is "in the bushes." People get lost in the bushes without being able to see a single thing.
The director mixes these commonalities between the two short films to create a new dimension to the story. If the original "In the Bush" focused on the theme of "the authenticity of truth," the movie shifts the focus to "is there any truth that we can believe in? And by dragging the woodcutter out of hiding in the bushes and into the birth gate, or in other words, by going "into the bushes" through him. The movie doesn't leave the audience to decide, even to doubt the narrator who tells it. So whose word can we believe?
In a world where we can't trust anyone, we have to rely on ourselves to save us. But paradoxically, it comes from believing in ourselves, in others, in others. I deeply agree with the monk in the movie who said that when humans don't trust humans, it will be hell. Redemption, then, begins with acceptance, because we are, after all, only human beings, fragile creatures wandering through the bush.