“I look up at the sky, wondering if I’ll catch a glimpse of kindness there, but I don’t. All I see are indifferent summer clouds drifting over the Pacific. And they have nothing to say to me. …all I see is my own nature… I’ve carried this character around like an old suitcase, down a long, dusty path. I’m not carrying it because I like it. The contents are too heavy, and it looks crummy, fraying in spots. I’ve carried it with me because there was nothing else I was supposed to carry.”
– Haruki Murakami (translated by: Philip Gabriel), What I Talk About When I Talk About Running (2007).

The Akira Kurosawa film, Rashomon, is a Japanese period-drama set in late Heian-era (1185) Kyoto. The story follows the accounts of four witnesses to the mysterious death of a traveling samurai. As each witness tells seemingly contradictory versions of events, questions arise about the meaning of evidence, subjective versus objective experience, and biases in perceptions.

As in the parable of the blind men and the elephant, each of the story’s characters is confined to discerning an overall meaning from his or her own limited perspective. But conceptualizing the whole by interacting with only a part ends up leaving no one with an entirely accurate representation. Though each knows an objective truth with the certainty of personal experience, none can agree to an overall interpretation.

Rashomon is about how personal circumstance affects an individual’s experiences, value judgments, and understandings. Even the most sincere attempts at discerning an objective reality become a subjective process whenever humans are involved. “Rashomon effect”, is commonly used in reference to the unreliability of eyewitnesses in courtrooms.

The takeaway is that a belief in absolute truth based in the limits of human experience leaves an individual ignorant of others’ experiences, which may be equally true. But the limitations of personal perspective also speaks to the cognitive tools we use to interact with the world. “When your only tool is a hammer, every problem becomes a nail.”
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For several years during my undergraduate college days, I played mostly percussion in a down-tuned, Japanese-American “power-trio”. We called ourselves “Byōki”, meaning “Sickness”… three Asian-American women responding to the nauseous corporate saccharin of 80’s Americana.

Our sound was hosted in garages or at the college bar, and at a couple of Japanese-American cultural events where I’m not so sure how welcome we were after sponsors actually heard our music. We were slow, loud, dark, and scrappy.

Listening to an old recording, I could barely hold a note; but it didn’t really matter. Hammering out lyrics like nails, the words to a piece inspired by the experience of a friend betrayed in a moment of weakness started, “I know God is dead. I will bury him.”

Still, I have long-time friends who talk to Angels, to the Universe, and even to God personally. I’m not sure whether I should envy, or pity them. Most seem pretty happy; and I don’t have any better ideas for making life work. Regardless, God has never taken much interest in speaking with me.

If I’m honest with myself, and I try to be, my perspective would probably keep me from hearing anything anyway. Pathologically unable to take Kierkegaard’s “leap” into faith, it is simply my own voice in the silence, saying what I want to hear. And if those who try to communicate the depths of their faiths to such as myself could understand, I don’t know whether they would feel pity or despair.
–

Living in northern Thailand for a couple of years at least put a lot of my first-world problems into a better perspective. And there was a kindness, an understanding allowing the forgiveness that I’m not omniscient. We can’t know the depths of others’ experiences; and we can’t look back. And especially when the people we love die suddenly and unexpectedly.

It’s a circumstance of enduring. And it becomes numbing after awhile, brushed off like snow at the door, left outside. A photo from decades ago, young friends, healthy, ambitious… It reminds me of a scene at the end of some old war film where the recollected dead outnumber the living, each representing some different lost promise.

Friends, family, mentors and heroes leave in ways that hit closer to home. Unexpected, discouraging… not lost to adventure, life’s risks, or simply poor judgment… but at home. For some, it was time. But for others, there was no goodbye, no word. Just a phone call… they’re gone.

A mentor and a friend, cursed with integrity and a kind heart, a beautiful mind and generous soul. Giving, simply that he could. But never taking enough. One of those rare people found on the path taken because of wanting to be more like them. To dare to be invested in life. Not a God-like man to proclaim how he lived. Just a humble man who claimed no special status with God at all. In the words of Krishnamurti,
“Love is not aware of itself as love, for the word is not the thing.”

Seeing the self-serving limits to each witness’s story, the Buddhist priest in Rashomon finds that he has lost his faith in humanity. There is no honor among any… thieves, opportunists, the unfaithful, the samurai’s self-inflicted death. But in a humble woodcutter’s appeal to spare the life of a child, the priest finds at least some promise.