Hell Screen

Hell Screen is one of the representative works of the Japanese writer Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, first published in 1918. This book is a Chinese translation in the Dook Three Circles Classics Library, translated by Xu Jianxiong. Opening with Hell Screen, it selects 18 short stories of the weird and allegorical kind by Akutagawa. The title story tells of the painter Yoshihide, who is ordered by Lord Horikawa to paint a Hell Screen folding screen. In pursuit of artistic truth, he asks to witness a noblewoman being burned alive in a carriage, and the lord ultimately has Yoshihide's daughter locked in an ox cart and burned to death. Having watched his beloved daughter die horribly, Yoshihide passes from extreme agony into an artistic epiphany, completes that breathtaking screen, and then takes his own life. Told in the first person and centered on Yoshihide, his daughter and the lord, the story explores the sharp conflict between art for art's sake and moral human feeling, and between the individual and power. Besides the title story, the volume also includes eight rarely translated pieces such as The Black-robed Holy Mother, A Strange Tale and Two Letters, most of them dealing with ghosts and monsters and using uncanny stories to lay bare the selfishness, greed, arrogance and obsessiveness in human nature. This translation includes nearly three hundred notes, an introduction, Akutagawa's testament and notes, and illustrations for Hell Gallery, balancing readability with documentary value.