'Hell Screen': The Story of Akutagawa's Century-Old Faust

Very few people who regularly read Japanese literature are unfamiliar with Ryūnosuke Akutagawa. The father of the Japanese short story lends his name to Japan’s highest literary honour: the Akutagawa Prize. His work is largely immortal, with his most famous works (Rashomon and In a Grove) lending their plots to Akira Kurosawa’s iconic 1950 drama starring, you guessed it, Toshiro Mifune.

In spite of this, when I first read through my recently acquired collection of Akutagawa short stories, it wasn’t In a Grove that struck me the most. Nor was it any of the semi-autobiographical, paranoia-filled stories like The Life of a Stupid Man, despite their ability to display his intense brilliance. Instead, it was a piece simply titled Hell Screen, based on a story from the Uji Shūi Monogatari, and reworked psychologically to dazzling extremes.

Hell Screen is, in many ways, an exemplary update to a classic story. Akutagawa fills the plot with rich characters whose motivations and weaknesses are laid out in an almost medically precise manner. The story is centred around a painter named Yoshihide, renowned for his fascination with ugliness. His work is grotesque, focusing on death, blood, corpses. He seems to revel in these familiar gothic themes, even spending time with a corpse baking in the sun simply to impress upon his memory, every element that gives the scene its irregularity and repulsion.

Yoshihide has been commissioned by the Great Lord of Horikawa to paint a screen depicting scenes from the Buddhist Hell. This is work that he is well-suited for: his ability to convey human pain is unparalleled. As we explore the story through the eyes of Akutagawa’s narrator, an old servant in the Horikawa house, we become familiar with his cruelty in achieving his art. His apprentices are forced into chains, attacked by snakes and pecked at by wild owls, all so that Yoshihide can obtain the perfect expression of a man under torture.

These instances serve, along with the introduction to Yoshihide that the narrator provides, to paint (if you’ll excuse the pun) him as a man, devoid of emotion, willing to sacrifice anything in the pursuit of his art. There are those who believe he has sold his soul to evil - he even dreams of being dragged down to Hell. In this, I’m reminded of Faust, the legendary German philosopher who sold his soul to the devil for the sake of unlimited knowledge. Faust’s story is exotic. It has, through its many iterations presented by Goethe and Marlowe, become a staple of gothic literature and spurred the growth of many similar legends, including the stories associated with violinists Giuseppe Tartini and Niccolo Paganini, and blues guitarist Robert Johnson.

And yet, even if Yoshihide has sacrificed everything for his art, he still holds on obsessively to his daughter, Yuzuki. The narrator describes this relationship as a ‘weakness’. Anton Chekhov once posited that if a gun is introduced in Act 1 of a play, it will be fired in Act 3. From the first mention of Yoshihide’s daughter, there is an immediate and similar sense of a gun being introduced. It must amount to something in this story.

Yuzuki is employed as a lady-in-waiting at Horikawa’s court. Although the word on the street is that the Great Lord quite fancies her, our ancient narrator, with his unflinching devotion to the Horikawa house, assures us that the Lord has no such designs. He assures us of this over and over again: or perhaps he is simply trying to assure himself. Even when he comes face-to-face with Horikawa in the middle of assaulting Yuzuki, the narrator makes no real comment - he does not even acknowledge that he has recognized Horikawa. Instead, over and over, he tries to delude himself. Horikawa is pure and wise. It must be the narrator who is mistaken.

It is in the middle of all these themes that Akutagawa threads his story to a very logical end. Unlike Western legends, where demons are outwitted and pacts often contain loopholes that can be exploited to lead the hero out of danger, The Hell Screen intends to follow through with its Faustian bargain. Early on, the narrator provides us with a description of the screen itself: a magnificent assemblage of the various tortures of hell. The Ten Kings of Hell, the Mountain of Sabers and the Forest of Swords, and the Judges of the Dark, all placed amidst a firestorm painted with vibrant ink, watching over every kind of sinner in the world. And in the centre of the piece, there was only a carriage, falling through space. Its wooden body was burning, and with it burned the body of an aristocratic woman whose face was contorted into an expression of unspeakable pain and torture.

That image is the whole point. Yoshihide has dreamed it and now he must go to any lengths to paint it. He seeks out an audience with Horikawa, asking him to burn a carriage. He needs to see how a carriage burns before he can paint it - and Horikawa offers to burn a woman inside it for him to observe, too. Naturally, this surprises Yoshihide and yet he accepts. We know that he feels the guilt of killing a woman for the sake of his art upon his conscience, but his curiosity and his desire to observe torture are insatiable. This is the classic Faustian desire for knowledge in action, and as always, it must come at a price.

In this case, the price is that Yoshihide’s request allows Horikawa to not only punish the painter’s pride, but also to punish his daughter for continually rejecting his advances. And therefore, the Great Lord of Horikawa, famed throughout Japan for his magnanimity, places Yuzuki in his own carriage and burns her alive in front of her father. The transaction has been completed: Yoshihide, working through his exotic pain, can now complete the hell screen with all its details true to real-life horror.

He carries the guilt with him. The day the screen is completed and the final work presented to Horikawa, Yoshihide returns home and hangs himself. When Goethe wrote Faust, he ended it with God himself saving Faust from the Devil. Akutagawa will make no such compromise. Yoshihide’s suicide is not a climax - it is simply a reaction to the circumstances. It is inevitable.

Among this eclectic cast of characters, the true tragedy is Yuzuki’s. Her role is similar to Gretchen’s in Goethe’s version of Faust - just as Faust’s love for her doomed her, Yuzuki is doomed for no other reason apart from Yoshihide’s obsessive love for her. And yet, where Goethe allowed Gretchen salvation by the hand of God, Akutagawa has no similar empathy toward Yuzuki. She was always meant to be waiting for her father when he was dragged down to hell.

Through Hell Screen, Akutagawa presents us with a very early self-portrait. The terror and paranoia, and the mad desire that Yoshihide possesses toward his art is reflected in Akutagawa’s autobiographical The Life of a Fool. He talks about writing Hell Screen in Spinning Gears too. All the tumult we see is Akutagawa’s own: that, in the end, is what makes this a rewarding read. That, and Yoshihide’s desperate need to paint only from reality. Outside what does happen, there is nothing else for our hero. Maybe there is nothing else for us, either.