The landmark film that first drew international attention to the Japanese cinema-and, as David Owens has noted, initiated the "mistaken notion that the national cinema of Japan was born with Rashomon and grew to maturity in the golden age of the 1950s." The screenplay is based on two unconnected stories by Ryunosuki Akutagawa with major additions by Kurosawa. Set in the twelfth century, it concerns a samurai and his wife traveling through the woods near Kyoto. They are stopped by a bandit, the wife raped and the husband killed. Different versions of the story told to the camera by the participants and by a woodcutter who witnessed the incident make a striking comment on the nature of reality and illusion. Kurosawa allows the film a larger and more social context by placing the retellings within the framework of dialogues between the woodcutter, a priest, and a cynical commoner who take refuge beneath the Rashomon Gate.