The Rape of Nanking

Directed by Akira Kurosawa in 1950, Rashomon is a Japanese film concerning an attack on an 8th-century samurai and his wife. The samurai is murdered, while the wife is raped. The film is most famous for its unique structure, in which the same story is told to a detective by four different individuals, with the details of each account differing in significant ways. The so-called “Rashomon effect” illustrates the unreliability of eyewitness narrators and has been employed in numerous books, films, and television shows, including Gone Girl and the Showtime series The Affair.

For the author’s purposes, Rashomon serves as both a structural roadmap and an epistemological document that is instructive in helping historians like herself reconstruct events from the reports of various individuals involved. Like Rashomon, the author tells the story of the Nanking massacre from the perspective of the perpetrator, the victim, and the observer. Speaking of both the film and of her own book, the author writes:

It is for the reader to pull all the recollections together, to credit or discredit parts or all of each account, and through this process to create out of subjective and often self-serving perceptions a more objective picture of what might have occurred (14).