‘A Woman Only Loves a Real Man’: Metaphysical Desire and the Crisis of Undifferentiation in Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo and Rashomon

This chapter continues the discussion of the themes dealt with in Chap. 4 but in relation to two classic ‘Eastern’ or samurai films, Yojimbo (1961) and Rashomon (1950), both directed by Akira Kurosawa. Both films are concerned with the relationship between the mimetic crisis of undifferentiation (‘the war of all against all’) and legal reasoning as a variant of the scapegoat mechanism. Yojimbo examines the ways in which the restoration of justice cannot be successfully achieved in the absence of the use of armed force, but in a manner that spectacularly parodies the Girardian and Schmittean themes of the Westerns: here it is the lone swordsman who must scapegoat the community in order to expel the Enemy which turns out to be everybody, necessitating the apocalypse. Rashomon, a much more complex film, draws our attention to the centrality of existential envy and metaphysical desire to violence. Superficially a ‘hybrid’ of the samurai and legal thriller film, Rashomon is a meditation on the tension between external and internal mediations, which Girard identifies as latently inhabiting every relationship between the model and his or her imitator. External mediation, which is a by-product of social hierarchy, works to reduce mimetic rivalry by establishing the ‘correct’ social spaces between model and imitator; internal mediation, in contrast, is the unstable bourgeois counterpart of ‘the ego and its own’. Few societies were as hierarchical as pre-modern Japan; there, external mediation was invested with the status of a categorical imperative. And it is precisely here that Kurosawa stages his two homicidal dramas of mimetic rivalry. The key to solving the mystery of what really happened in the grove of bamboo lies with correctly situating all four protagonists within their respective internal or ‘private’ mimetic crisis. Frequently, and absurdly, mis-read as a post-modern meditation on the relativity of truth, Rashomon is much better understood as a Japanese social drama about mimesis. All of the witnesses must lie because to tell the truth would be to admit the truly unbearable which is their failure to convincingly imitate their respective models that are the entirety of their being: an honest woodcutter who robs the dead, a noblewoman who wants to kill her husband, a samurai who is afraid to die, and a bandit who is afraid to kill. Each witness is not merely a failure in the emulation of their respective model, and they are the exact opposite of it, meaning that they are devoid of a true existence.