Rashomon Goes to Rwanda
4
coming to a violent end, she faints and when she awakes, she finds her husband
dead, lying with a dagger in his chest.
i
The dead husband’s version of what took place appears through a
medium. In the dead Samurai’s accounting, after Tajomaru rapes the wife, the
thief begs her to marry him. Parrying the request, the wife replies that first he
must kill her husband. The thief is shocked by this unexpected twist, and asks the
Samurai what he, the rapist, should do with the despoiled wife. Believing the
two men to be conspiring against her, the wife runs off, and the thief chases her.
The disgraced samurai then takes his wife's dagger and commits suicide.
With some prodding by his companions at the gate, the woodcutter, who
had found the body, delivers a fourth version of the story. The woodcutter
acknowledges the rape of the wife, but he claims that after the attack, the wife
baits both men into fighting a duel over her. In the fight that ensues, the
Samurai trips, then falls into the thief's sword. The film closes with none of the
protagonists (and the audience) any closer to the “truth”, no more certain of
the objective reality as compared to the subjective and distorted versions that
each character constructs to suit their own needs and desires.
In 1994, a mass murder and large-scale torture occurred on an epic scale
in the Central African Republic of Rwanda. Of that much we are certain. The
corpses and skeletons that remain in plain view across much of the country to
this day can attest to at least that much. As the ten-year anniversary of the
Rwandan genocide approaches, there are essentially four general conclusions
Convention