Hell Screen — Summary and Characters
A screen of hell, paid for in blood
- Author
- Akutagawa Ryūnosuke
- Published
- May 1918
- First appeared in
- Osaka Mainichi Shimbun
- Form
- Novel
- Genres
- Historical
- Psychological
- Setting
- Kyoto
- Length
- 26,343 characters
- Reading time
- About 53 min
- Orthography
- Modern script, historical kana
About this work
A leading example of Akutagawa's court-period stories, serialized in the Osaka Mainichi and Tokyo Nichinichi newspapers in May 1918. Based on a tale from the Uji Shūi Monogatari, it is narrated by a man who served the Lord of Horikawa for twenty years and recounts how the painter Yoshihide came to complete a folding screen depicting hell. Yoshihide can paint only what he has seen; possessed by his art even at the cost of his beloved daughter, he carries the doctrine of art for art's sake to its furthest and most terrible point.
Summary
Yoshihide, a painter in the service of the Great Lord of Horikawa, is arrogant and miserly and generally detested, but is reputed the finest painter of the day. He dotes on his one daughter, who serves as a young lady-in-waiting at the lord's mansion. Commanded to paint a folding screen of hell, Yoshihide — who can paint nothing he has not seen — makes one hideous study after another, chaining a pupil and setting a horned owl on him. But the eye of the screen, a noblewoman writhing to her death inside a burning carriage, is the one thing he cannot paint. He asks the lord to have a carriage burned before his eyes. On the appointed night, when the carriage is drawn out at the palace where the snow has melted, the woman chained inside it is Yoshihide's daughter. At the lord's command the carriage is fired, and before the burning carriage and his writhing child Yoshihide's agonized face turns all at once to a radiance of ecstasy, and he stands rooted there. The screen was soon finished and struck all who saw it with awe; but on the night after the painting was done Yoshihide put a rope over a beam and hanged himself.
Characters
- Yoshihide A painter in the service of the Great Lord of Horikawa. He sacrifices even his daughter for the sake of the screen of hell
- The daughter Yoshihide's only child, a kind-hearted young lady-in-waiting at the lord's mansion
- The Great Lord of Horikawa The man of power who commands Yoshihide to paint the screen of hell
- The narrator A servant of twenty years in the lord's household, who tells the whole of the affair
Chapter-by-chapter synopsis
The app covers this work chapter by chapter (full text in the app).
- 1. About This Work
- 2. Main Characters
- 3. Major Supporting Characters
- 4. The Great Lord of Horikawa and the Painter Yoshihide
- 5. The Daughter and the Little Monkey Named Yoshihide
- 6. The Painting Called the Screen of Hell
- 7. Studies from Life, Run Mad — The Ordeal of the Pupils
- 8. A Change in the Daughter, and the Petition to Burn a Carriage
- 9. The Flames at the Snowmelt Palace
- 10. The Screen Completed, and Yoshihide's Death
- 11. Key Motifs and Foreshadowing
The opening (original text)
There has surely never been, and will surely never again be, another such as the Great Lord of Horikawa. They say that before his birth the figure of Daiitoku Myōō appeared at his mother's pillow in a dream; and at all events, from the time of his birth he was unlike ordinary men.
Hell Screen by Akutagawa Ryūnosuke (Aozora Bunko)
The ending (original text)
But by the time that came about, Yoshihide was already numbered among those no longer in this world. On the night after the screen was finished he put a rope over the beam of his own room and hanged himself. Having sent his only daughter on before him, he could not, I suppose, have borne to go on living at his ease. His body lies buried to this day on the site of his house. Though the small marker stone, weathered by the wind and rain of the decades since, is certainly moss-grown long ago, so that no one can tell whose grave it is.
Hell Screen by Akutagawa Ryūnosuke (Aozora Bunko)
Famous passages
A lord such as His Excellency of Horikawa, I dare say, has never been seen before, and shall surely never be seen again in ages to come.
An opening narrated as the account of one who served the lord. It begins a story of art and karma, in which the painter Yoshihide fixes his gaze on his own daughter's death by fire in order to complete his screen.
Read the original
The original Japanese text is available at Aozora Bunko, and the app downloads the same text for its vertical-text reader.
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- Beyond the Pale of Vengeance January 1919
- Li Ling July 1943
- A Certain Woman March 1919
- The Priest and His Disciples November 1916
- Light and Darkness May 1916
- Sanshō the Steward January 1915