And that’s pretty much the only important detail that the woodcutter’s story and the samurai’s story agree on. So it’s not really much of a stretch that the woodcutter is simply repeating detail from the story the samurai told, is it?
I didn’t say they weren’t accurate representations of the stories. I said that the character’s stories, by necessity, could not include all the incidental details conveyed by the filming of those stories. It’s not at all incredible that the bandit could have told a story ending with, “And then I killed him by throwing my sword at him,” and for the woodcutter to remember that part of the story (which is, after all, the most important part of the whole story) and say, “And then the samurai was killed when the bandit threw his sword at him.” In other words, the similarity of incidental detail in the filming of the two scenes does not necessarily indicate that the two characters used identical language to describe the events.
I don’t think we are meant to do this at all, partially for the reason I already described and partially because the framing device of this story is not the trial itself, it’s the priest’s story about the trial. The first three versions of the story are coming to us secondhand via the priest. What we see on camera could be what he imagined when he heard the testimonies of the wife, bandit, and medium, or it could even be what the commoner who’s listening is imagining as he hears the priest’s and woodcutter’s tales.