Rashomon Postscript: Wasn’t That “Multiple Identity” Interpretation Arbitrary and Silly?

Since Rashoman, the movie, there have been many derivative works for cinema and television, and the whole idea is well known. See Wikipedia, the “Rashomon Effect.” And these derivative works may have been written with the conscious plan of doing a Rashomon plot.

As for the original Japanese tale from the 12^th century, I have no information about its author or how it was written. So, as long as any interpretation of the original story is just speculation, why not think of something more likely, such as that it was based on a real event or that the author, a keen observer, had noted that people sometimes don’t tell the truth?

You are right. I have no real basis for my interpretation. It was pure speculation. Except that, based on my discussions of other writers in this blog, I think that that is the way that many original works of fiction are written.

As Mark Twain said, he never created a character in his whole life. His characters started from someone he had known or read about, and then they took on a life of their own. For Toni Morrison, they come from a magical place in her mind, with stories and minds of their own, and then she may or may not control them. And Charles Dickens, as described in the June 2013 post, would watch and listen to his characters tell their tales, and he would write it down (subject, of course, to revision).

So I think it’s reasonable to speculate that the author of the original Rashomon tale got his or her characters the way that Twain, Morrison, and Dickens have, but decided, instead of controlling or pruning them, to let them have their own say, even if it stretched credulity to believe that witnesses would ever differ as much as they did in that story.