The ending of Rashomon

When the woodcutter accepts the abandoned baby in the ending of "Rashomon", one suspects Kurosawa is making a false moral equivalency to pacify the audience. The justice required for the actions of the inimitable cast of sinners is complex, whereas the justice for a child is simple, because children are relatively innocent of sin.

But on closer inspection the sins depicted in the film have a specific character: they are all sins of weakness. Each person, regardless of their innocence, or whether they are dead, only commits their sin because they are unable to cope with the situation. The bandit Tajomaru succumbs to his lust and pretends to be a valiant, conquering warrior. The wife succumbs to her inability and pretends to be a victim. The ghost succumbs to his pride and pretends to be pure. The woodcutter succumbs to sloth and pretends to know nothing. When one thinks of rape and murder, one thinks there is a victor, overcoming or subjected to universal drama, but, as the monk notes, what is worse than the universal drama of cruelty and death is the pathetic appearance of our humanity as we suffer through it. Men are crawling over dirt and leaves to murder one another while a woman laughs. Demons balk at human cruelty because even demons have a greater sense of nobility.

When put into this context, the baby comes to represent human weakness in its ultimate form. The baby is helpless; even the thief acknowledges that, demonstrating how helpless it is to secure the expensive kimonos left for it. Even a magical amulet cannot help it. Yet the woodcutter accepts this helpless baby, crying because it needs someone else to even survive.

The only thing that can protect us from our own weakness, the one thing the participants of the murder did not conceive, is human compassion. Not one of them had any compassion for the other, not enough to stop the madness. The woodcutter is not pretending to be a better person by taking in the baby, nor is there atonement. At the end there is only the acknowledgement that human beings needs one another in our pitiful state.

When we conclude this, we think Kurosawa is quite a cunning man. For "Rashomon" refers to two other stories, Rashomon referring to a gate in Kyoto. The first is a legend of a samurai fighting a demon at the gate. The second is Ryunosuke Akutagawa's short story "Rashomon". Both invoke the concept of justice: in the former, the concept of good vs. evil, while in the latter Akutagawa explores the concept that survival only is moral. The thief, as he irreverently breaks apart the temple for fire wood, laughs heartily at the idea of moral equivalency, as the characters of Akutagawa's short story do. One can't help thinking that Kurosawa intended on this effect, so that we would turn to what the true meaning of the film is. But I prefer to think for many great stories there is a magic of coincidence.