First, what I knew about Rashomon before having seen it: The film was directed by Akira Kurosawa and is set in a historical Japan roughly concurrent with the era of Kurosawa’s other samurai epics. It tells and re-tells the story of a single event—each time from the perspective of a different character—in which a woman, accompanied by a man, is attacked by another man while traveling in the forest. This event is related a number of times, each time from the perspective of a different character in the story. The different versions of the event, as related, are incompatible to such an extent that it is clear that more than one of them is either lying, or possessed of a false remembrance of the event. The upshot of this inability to reconcile these distinctly different perspectives has been interpreted as questioning the very reliability of narrative itself, or put another way, Rashomon suggests that such a thing as objective truth is unknowable. In these terms, the legacy of Rashomon has been essentially philosophical.