In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Rashomon Effects: Kurosawa, Rashomon and Their Legacies ed. by Blair Davis, Robert Anderson, Jan Walls
  • Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto (bio)
Rashomon Effects: Kurosawa, Rashomon and Their Legacies. Edited by Blair Davis, Robert Anderson, and Jan Walls. Routledge, London, 2016. xx, 178 pages. $148.00, cloth; $54.95, E-book.

Rashomon Effects: Kurosawa, Rashomon and Their Legacies is an anthology of essays by specialists with diverse scholarly and professional backgrounds, who discuss Kurosawa’s film Rashomon from a variety of critical perspectives. To understand this book, we need to pay attention to the overall conceptualization of and the fundamental rationale behind the anthology as a research project, the individual chapters as integral components of the book, and each chapter as an independent contribution to the scholarship on Kurosawa, the field of Japanese film studies, or other relevant disciplinary practices. Although these three structural layers are closely related, we should not automatically assume that they necessarily constitute a coherent totality. We can imagine many hypothetical cases of mismatch and contradiction between these different layers, such as an innovative [End Page 138] analysis of the use of a particular formal device in Rashomon not fitting well with the basic objectives of the book, a disparate collection of chapters obscuring the perfectly coherent aim and structure of the book, high-quality essays assembled as a book with no clear purpose, and so on. These and other types of inconsistency are not necessarily unique to a book by multiple authors. However, it is still important to keep them in mind to avoid any reductive evaluation of a multiauthored anthology conceived with a unified objective.

Kurosawa made Rashomon in 1950. Do we really need a new book on a Japanese film almost 70 years after its original release? It is probably not a bad idea to start this review with this obviously rhetorical question because producing a book focused exclusively on a single film, no matter how “important” that film may be, is a very tricky assignment. First of all, by what criteria do we choose a film worth examining so closely? Numerous films deserve similar critical attention because of their aesthetic value, popularity, or social impact. It is therefore extremely difficult to come up with a compelling reason for the selection of one particular film among so many. Second, what intellectual concerns or critical approach would demand a book-length study focused on a single film? Even if the distinctive significance of a film is more or less established, there must still be a compelling reason to devote an entire book to that particular film.

If people are asked to name their favorite Kurosawa film, they would probably mention titles such as Seven Samurai, Yojimbo, Ikiru, and Dersu Uzala. Compared to these masterpieces, Rashomon may be less popular but still remains a special film. It was arguably the first “non-Western” film widely seen and critically acclaimed around the world; moreover, along with Italian neorealist and other European films, it was also one of the key films that gave rise to so-called art cinema after World War II. Thus, Rashomon occupies a privileged position not only in Kurosawa’s oeuvre and the history of Japanese cinema but also in the history of world cinema. Yet this does not necessarily mean it is easy to produce a book on Rashomon. Perhaps contrary to the common image, Rashomon is in many ways a simple work. Throughout the film, the reliability of narration is constantly problematized, and even at the end the central mystery remains unsolved. However, the manner in which the power of narration is simultaneously put into question and celebrated is straightforward. Unlike more complex films produced by Hollywood (e.g., Déjà Vu [2005], Inception [2010], and Source Code [2011]), Rashomon does not splinter a main character’s self into multiple—sometimes mutually contradictory—identities. Nor does it systematically blur boundaries between the past and the present, reality and virtual reality, or this world and an alternate world. Rashomon does not confuse the audience with a series of overdetermined ambiguities but overwhelms them with the completeness of its aesthetic beauty. The film’s geometric [End Page 139] simplicity and careful exclusion of concrete historical...

pdf