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The “Rashômon Effect” Effect: Post-Orientalism in the Era of #MeToo

ABSTRACT In Akira Kurasawa’s classic 1950 film Rashômon, three participants testify to a tribunal about a rape/murder. The rape itself has been elided into the crime of murder in most of the literature—a symptom of patriarchal frames, both Eastern and Western, and both within the film and in the scholarship. Two characters represent female archetypes: the woman Masako is—even in the same tellings—a lady and a seductress; the Medium who channels the testimony of the samurai—a crone figure, androgynous, powerful, and terrifying. Music is at its most manipulative in relationship to these two characters, functioning like narrative magic: a glamor that conceals beneath an appealing surface, or an incantation that summons a ghost. Fumio Hayasaka’s score borrows heavily from an exoticist Franco-Russian depiction of Spanishness from the dance repertoire of the 1910–20s, emphasizing the startling physicality of the two women that may challenge the tale’s misogyny. The unmarked male gaze is perhaps irreparably shattered to modern viewers, particularly in an era sensitized by scandals of powerful men abusing their power over women.