Right after the rape, the wife seemed to display most of the short-term effects of rape trauma syndrome, both in the text and the film. For instance, she was extremely terrified of the hateful look her husband gave her, and throughout the event she constantly was crying and laughing hysterically. Also, in the text, she gives her testimony in a temple and not in the magistrate’s court, implying that she is unwilling to be in the same location as Tajomaru, her rapist. Showing many symptoms of rape trauma syndrome, the wife proves to be a candidate of this mental impairment.
The rape trauma syndrome can even explain her sudden and seemingly inconsiderate wish to have her husband killed, for many candidates of the syndrome have “problems with romantic relationships” (Bliss 1) after a rape. Although the wife confesses that she killed her husband, in her testimony she shares that she lost conscious many times, so whether or not she truly killed her husband is questionable and her testimony is not the most reliable. Because the wife is a victim of the rape trauma syndrome, her actions cannot determine whether or not she is truly selfish.
Although the text leaves room for interpretation of the cause of the samurai’s death, the film reveals what truly happened through the woodcutter’s narrative, in which the samurai is in fact killed in a fight and with a sword. In this narrative, the bandit oddly seemed to be good-natured at times. He was willing to work to support the samurai’s wife and when the wife turns on her own husband, the bandit knew to respect the husband’s relationship with his wife and ask the husband what he wanted to happen to his wife.
The samurai, on the other hand, seemed like an unloyal husband when he neglected his wife after hearing that she wanted him dead. However, the nature of the bandit and the samurai cannot be determined solely on the woodcutter’s perspective. Regarding the samurai husband, he may have seemed self-centered and unloyal when he said he wanted nothing to do with his wife, but based on samurai practices, the husband can rightfully betray his wife.
A samurai warrior’s “master who was dishonest or unable to appreciate his vassals’ loyal service could bring suffering on his samurai followers even though he was a strong and capable warrior. It followed that betrayal on the part of vassals could be legitimated if their master failed to recognize their true worth” (Ikegami 1373). The husband reacted the same way to his wife as he would have to a dishonest master. Wanting her own husband dead before leaving with the bandit, the wife revealed that her husband was worthless to her.
Consequently, in accordance to the samurai ethic, the husband abandoned his wife, for he realized that she failed to see his true worth. Again, the samurai cannot be judged for being an unloving husband, because he merely was obeying the samurai code. Regarding Tajomaru, even though he was willing to sacrifice his life as a bandit to support the samurai’s wife, he ultimately brought up the offer out of selfish desires.
According to University of Wisconsin-Madison philosophy research professor Elliott Sober, altruists and egoists can perform the same actions, but what distinguishes them apart is their motive. If the choice is to help others and receive pleasure, or to not help and not receive pleasure, Extreme Egoists will help. In this case, however, helping others is a correlate, not a cause” (Sober 92). “Extreme Altruists” will make the same decision, “but they do not make this selection because they take an interest in their own pleasure. For Extreme Altruists, the pleasure that results from this choice is an artifact, not a cause” (Sober 91). In other words, egoists can help others if doing so aligns with their own intentions and satisfies their desires.
Tajomaru’s seemingly self-sacrificing offers to the wife is truly egoistic because his offers were aimed at fulfilling his own selfish desires of getting the wife to leave with him. Also, when he kicked down the wife and asked the husband what he should do with her, he seemed respectful of the husband’s opinions and marriage, but he does so only because he himself no longer wants the unloyal wife. Also, in the samurai’s testimony, Tajomaru sparing the samurai’s life in the end seems altruistic, but may just be an egoistic action in disguise.
This action can be seen as a selfish one if the bandit set the samurai free primarily to fulfill his intentions. To the public, Tajomaru claims that “killing a man is not as big a thing as people like you seem to think” (Akutagawa 13), but he “wasn’t planning to kill [the samurai] on top of everything else” (Akutagawa 14). If he truly is not a fearless as he claims to be—which he is not, as revealed in the woodcutter’s testimony in the film—then Tajomaru set the samurai free and avoided battling against the samurai, in which he had a possibility of losing, to protect his own persona.
Even if releasing the husband appears to be a selfless action to an outsider, because Tajomaru considers his own plans before the husband’s needs, he is egoist. Clearly, many factors must be considered before coming to firm judgements about the characters in “In the Bamboo Grove. ” Not only do background information like samurais’ morals and the wife’s rape trauma syndrome condition need to be fully understood, but the individual character’s internal motives must be acknowledged as well. These considerations make distinguishing selfless and selfish people apart from one another highly complicated.
Sober explains the complexity of labeling an action selfless and selfish and the uncertainty of the nature of the actions with an example involving a self-sacrificing soldier: “Harman (1977) describes the case of a soldier who throws himself on a grenade to save the his comrades. The soldier never gets to experience the pleasure of knowing himself to have acted heroically, although he does avoid the guilt feelings that would have haunted him if he had saved himself and let the others die. This possibility raises the suspicion that the soldier’s action was not altruistic, even though his preference structure was.
However, … suppose the soldier knows himself to have an imperfect memory, one which represses the unpleasant. If so, the soldier’s action cannot be explained by appealing to his selfdirected desire to not suffer the torments” (Sober 97). In the end of the film “Rashomon,” even the woodcutter’s action of taking in the baby is ambiguous, because just like how the soldier’s actions in the example cannot be understood clearly, the morality of the woodcutter’s decision to take care of the abandoned baby cannot be determined either.
His action can be either a selfish or selfless action, depending on his genuine motives, which remain unknown to the audience. If the woodcutter chose to take in the baby from considering the baby’s needs before his, then his decision is selfless. However, if he believed that taking in the baby could make up for his crime, and he felt satisfied for counterbalancing his crime with a good deed, then his decision is selfish, for he was primarily thinking about his own personal feelings and public appearance.
The latter case may seem correct, for the woodcutter in the film says “taking in another one will not make a difference for him” (Rashomon), implying that he had considered his situation and needs before deciding, but philosophy professor Lawrence A. Lengbeyer shows that people can still be considered altruists even if they have considered all consequences. He specifically notes that two types of selflessness exist: spontaneous selflessness-acting immediately without considering the personal consequences, and deliberate selflessness-acting after “selecting acts in which, in