Over the last decade of Akutagawa Ryûnosuke's brief literary life (1892-1927), his fiction exhibited signs of the writer's growing distrust toward the value of the literary form. The culmination of this disillusionment is reflected in both the disintegration of his writing form into a collection of fragmentary episodes in "A Fool's Life" (1927), and in the writer's own suicide that same year. Earlier works in Akutagawa's career point to the writer's growing anxiety about the literary form, particularly the possibility of objective narration. One of his most well known stories, "In a Grove" (1922), is based on a 12th century Japanese tale in which a couple is attacked by a bandit on the side of the road. Akutagawa incorporated the main event of the story but adapted the plotline to engage the problem of objective narration. The story is separated into several contradictory accounts of the same event-the rape of a woman and the murder of her husband. This epistemological inquiry has been adapted by filmmaker Akira Kurosawa in Rashômon (1950). Ostensibly, the film, like its literary predecessor, appears to assert the impossibility of objective truth. Yet, Rashômon, as I will argue, ultimately reveals a desire for objectivity in its presentation of the narration. This move toward objectivity demonstrates the filmmaker's attempt to transcend Akutagawa's exhausted modern project and search for a rebirth of the value of artistic representation.

Produced in the postwar period that ushered in the end of modern and the beginnings of postmodern thought, Rashômon has been read (mainly by international critics) as a challenge to universal systems of knowledge. Many have made connections between the film's epistemological inquires and the definition of postmodernism proposed by Jean-Francois Lyotard in his now famous "The Postmodern Condition," written years after the film's release in 1979. In the essay, Lyotard describes postmodernism as an "incredulity toward metanarratives" in the modern discursive space. No longer, according to Lyotard, can we rely on the social plots of Hegel, Freud, Christianity and others, to give meaning to the modern universal condition. Only through local forms of "customary knowledge" can we confirm any claims to truth.

This incredulity toward master narratives reveals itself in literature and film as a general distrust toward overarching systems of knowledge. The third-person narrator of both fiction and film has largely come under attack by postmodern artists, who associate its omniscient aspirations with the universalizing tendency of the master narratives from the past. Critics of Rashômon have read the film in accordance with the epistemological projects of contemporary theory. Donald Richie sees Rashômon as "a vast distorting mirror or a collection of prisms that reflect and refract reality. By showing us its various interpretations, Kurosawa has shown first that human beings are incapable of judging reality, much less truth, and, second, that they must continually deceive themselves if they are to remain true to themselves." (1) Is this assessment of Rashômon's artistic objective, however, in harmony with the overall effect of the film? Before I discuss this question, I will briefly describe how the film initially adopts Akutagawa's challenge to objective narration only to reveal a overall structural force bringing meaning to the film as a whole.

On the surface, Rashômon presents itself as a challenge to objective truth. The story involves the discussion of three individuals taking refuge under a gate during a fierce rainstorm: a woodcutter, a priest, and a commoner. The woodcutter and the priest have just concluded testifying at a murder trial, and relay their experience to the curious commoner. In their discussion of the trial, they retell t