Fumio Hayasaka (Rashomon) Rashomon

Fumio Hayasaka was thirty-five when he scored Rashomon. He had been Kurosawa's composer since Drunken Angel (1948), and their collaboration would continue through Seven Samurai (1954) before tuberculosis killed Hayasaka at forty-one. Rashomon's score -- a Bolero-inspired structure that provoked plagiarism accusations and a letter of protest from Ravel's publisher -- remains one of the most analyzed and debated film scores in Japanese cinema.

Kurosawa specifically requested a Bolero-like melody to unify four contradictory stories

The problem Hayasaka faced was structural: how to hold together a film in which four narrators tell four irreconcilable versions of the same event. Kurosawa's solution was musical. He asked Hayasaka for a recurring rhythmic pattern modeled on Ravel's Bolero -- a single melody that builds through repetition and orchestral variation.

Kurosawa requested "a Bolero like melody" to connect the film's four contradictory vignettes. — Movie Music UK (2022)

The result uses the same background rhythm and a similar orchestral build-up as Ravel's piece, but with distinct melodic lines and a different harmonic language.

Hayasaka differentiated each testimony through instrumentation

Rather than simply repeating the melody, Hayasaka assigned different solo instruments to carry it in each narrative strand:

• The woodcutter's story: English horn over steady drums
• Tajomaru's story: Clarinet with French horn reinforcement, emphasizing the bandit's inflated self-importance
• Masago's story: Solo flute delicato with pizzicato cellos replacing taiko drums -- the version most closely resembling Ravel's original

The instrumental variation works as characterization. The English horn's plaintive quality suits the woodcutter's quiet testimony; the clarinet-and-horn combination gives Tajomaru's account a bravado it does not deserve; the delicate flute scoring for the wife's testimony presents her as fragile and victimized. (moviemusicuk)

He incorporated Japanese musical elements into the Western-inspired structure

Hayasaka did not simply transpose Ravel into a Japanese setting. He employed Japanese instruments -- sho, koto, taiko, gongs -- alongside the Western orchestral palette, and introduced elements drawn from Japanese musical traditions. For the medium scene, where the dead samurai testifies through a spirit channeler, Hayasaka used chanting of the Namu Myoho Renge Kyo -- a Buddhist invocation that grounds the supernatural sequence in Japanese religious practice. (moviemusicuk)

Where Ravel's Bolero uses a diatonic C major scale followed by C Phrygian, Hayasaka employed E Phrygian with a raised third (E Phrygian dominant scale), incorporating Japanese modal elements into the Western-inspired structure. The distinction is musicologically significant: Hayasaka was not imitating Ravel but adapting his structural principle to a different harmonic language. (moviemusicuk)

The resemblance to Bolero provoked a plagiarism controversy

The score's relationship to Ravel's Bolero became a problem after the film's international release. Ravel's publisher sent a letter of protest to Hayasaka after the French release. In late 1950, the Motion Picture Producers Association of Japan vetoed Rashomon from its selection list for the 4th Cannes Film Festival over copyright concerns -- though the film went to Venice instead, where it won the Golden Lion. (wikipedia)

The controversy has since been resolved by musicological analysis that distinguishes Hayasaka's composition from Ravel's on harmonic, melodic, and instrumental grounds. The structural debt to Bolero is real -- both pieces use repetition and orchestral accumulation as their organizing principle -- but the musical content is Hayasaka's own.

The score succeeded in its primary purpose: holding the film together

"Hayasaka succeeded on all counts, masterfully unifying Kurosawa's masterpiece with a well-conceived and executed musical narrative." — Movie Music UK (2022)

The Bolero structure does exactly what Kurosawa intended: it provides a musical thread that connects four stories that share no other common ground. The recurring rhythm tells the audience that despite the contradictions, these accounts describe the same event. The instrumental variations tell the audience that each narrator experiences that event differently.

Hayasaka's early death ended one of Japanese cinema's most important collaborations

Hayasaka died of tuberculosis on October 15, 1955, at age forty-one. He had scored Kurosawa's Drunken Angel (1948), Rashomon (1950), Ikiru (1952), and Seven Samurai (1954), and was working on I Live in Fear when he died -- the score was completed by his protege Masaru Sato. He also scored Mizoguchi's Ugetsu (1953), Sansho the Bailiff (1954), and The Crucified Lovers (1954). Kurosawa credited Hayasaka with transforming his understanding of film music, shifting it from accompaniment to counterpoint. Hayasaka mentored both Sato and Toru Takemitsu, who would become Japan's most internationally celebrated composer. (wikipedia)