Hell Screen

by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa

  Presently he spoke: ‘That will not happen,’ he said, all but spitting out the words, and he abruptly withdrew.

  This was not the first nor the last such incident: I think there might have been four or five in all. And with each repetition, it seemed to me, His Lordship gazed on Yoshihide with increasing coldness. The girl, for her part, seemed to fear for her father’s welfare. Often she could be seen sobbing quietly to herself in her room, teeth clamped on her sleeve. All this only reinforced the rumor that His Lordship was enamored of the girl. People also said that the command to paint the screen had something to do with her rejection of His Lordship’s advances, but that, of course, could not be so.

  As I see it, it was entirely out of pity for the girl’s situation that His Lordship refused to let her go. I am certain he believed, with great generosity, that she would be far better off if he were to keep her in his mansion and enable her to live in comfort than if he sent her back to her hardheaded old father. That he was partial to her, of course, there could be no doubt: she was such a sweet-tempered young thing. But to assert that he took his lustful pleasure with her is a view that springs from twisted reasoning. No, I would have to call it a groundless falsehood.

  At any rate, owing to these matters regarding his daughter, this was a period when Yoshihide was in great disfavor with His Lordship. Suddenly one day, for whatever reason, His Lordship summoned Yoshihide and ordered him to paint a folding screen portraying scenes from the eight Buddhist hells.

  6

  Oh, that screen! I can almost see its terrifying images of hell before me now!

  Other artists painted what they called images of hell, but their compositions were nothing like Yoshihide’s. He had the Ten Kings of Hell and their minions over in one small corner, and everything else – the entire screen – was enveloped in a firestorm so terrible you thought the swirling flames were going to melt the Mountain of Sabers and the Forest of Swords. Aside from the vaguely Chinese costumes of the Judges of the Dark, with their swatches of yellow and indigo, all you saw was the searing color of flames and, dancing wildly among them, black smoke clouds of hurled India ink and flying sparks of blown-on gold dust.

  These alone were enough to shock and amaze any viewer, but the sinners writhing in the hellfire of Yoshihide’s powerful brush had nothing in common with those to be seen in ordinary pictures of hell. For Yoshihide had included sinners from all stations in life, from the most brilliant luminary of His Majesty’s exalted circle to the basest beggar and outcast. A courtier in magnificent ceremonial vestments, a nubile lady-in-waiting in five-layered robes, a rosary-clutching priest intoning the holy name of Amida, a samurai student on high wooden clogs, an aristocratic little girl in a simple shift, a Yin-Yang diviner swishing his paper wand through the air: I could never name them all. But there they were, human beings of every kind, inundated by smoke and flame, tormented by wardens of hell with their heads of bulls and horses, and driven in all directions like autumn leaves scattering before a great wind. ‘Oh, look at that one,’ you would say, ‘the one with her hair all tangled up in a forked lance and her arms and legs drawn in tighter than a spider’s: could she be one of those shrine maidens who perform for the gods? And, oh, that fellow there, hanging upside-down like a bat, his breast pierced by a short lance: surely he is supposed to be a greenhorn provincial governor.’ And the kinds of torture were as numberless as the sinners themselves – flogging with an iron scourge, crushing under a gigantic rock, pecking by a monstrous bird, grinding in the jaws of a poisonous serpent …

  But surely the single most horrifying image of all was that of a carriage plummeting through space. As it fell, it grazed the upper boughs of a sword tree, where clumps of corpses were skewered on fang-like branches. Blasts of hell wind swept up the carriage curtains to reveal a court lady so gorgeously appareled she might have been one of His Imperial Majesty’s own Consorts or Intimates, her straight black hip-length hair flying upward in the flames, the full whiteness of her throat laid bare as she writhed in agony. Every detail of the woman’s form and the blazing carriage filled the viewer with an agonizing sense of the hideous torments to be found in the Hell of Searing Heat. The sheer horror of the entire screen – might I say? – seemed to be concentrated in this one figure. It had been executed with such inspired workmanship, you’d think that all who saw it could hear the woman’s dreadful screams.

  Oh yes, this was it: for the sake of painting this one image, the terrible event occurred. Otherwise, how could even the great Yoshihide have painted hell’s torments so vividly? It was his cruel fate to lose his life in exchange for completing the screen. In a sense, the hell in his painting was the hell into which Yoshihide himself, the greatest painter in the realm, was doomed one day to fall.

  I am afraid that, in my haste to speak of the screen with its unusual images of hell, I may have reversed the order of my story. Now let me continue with the part about Yoshihide when he received His Lordship’s command to do a painting of hell.

  7

  For nearly six months after the commission, Yoshihide poured all his energy into the screen, never once calling at His Lordship’s residence. Don’t you find it strange that such a doting father should abandon all thought of seeing his daughter once he had started on a painting? According to the apprentice I mentioned earlier, Yoshihide always approached his work like a man possessed by a fox spirit. In fact, people used to say that the only reason Yoshihide was able to make such a name for himself in art was that he had pledged his soul to one of the great gods of fortune; what proved it was that if you peeked in on him when he was painting, you could always see shadowy fox spirits swarming all around him. What this means, I suspect, is that, once he picked up his brush, Yoshihide thought of nothing else but completing the painting before him. He would spend all day and night shut up in his studio out of sight. His concentration seems to have been especially intense when he was working on this particular screen with its images of hell.

  This is not merely to say that he would keep the latticed shutters pulled down and spend all day by the tripod oil lamp, mixing secret combinations of paint or posing his apprentices in various costumes for him to sketch. No, that was normal behavior for the working Yoshihide, even before this screen. Remember, this was the man who, when he was painting his Five Levels of Rebirth on the Ryūgaiji temple gate, went out specially to inspect a corpse lying on the roadside – the kind of sight from which any ordinary person would recoil – and spent hours sitting before it, sketching its rotting face and limbs without missing a hair. I don’t blame you, then, if you are among those who cannot imagine what I mean when I say that his concentration during his work on the hell screen was especially intense. I haven’t time now to explain this in detail, but I can at least tell you the most important things.

  One day an apprentice of Yoshihide’s (the one I’ve mentioned a few times already) was busy dissolving pigments when the master suddenly said to him, ‘I’m planning to take a nap but, I don’t know, I’ve been having bad dreams lately.’

  There was nothing strange about this, so the apprentice merely answered, ‘I see, Sir,’ and continued with his work.

  Yoshihide, however, was not his usual self. Somewhat hesitantly, and with a doleful look on his face, he made a surprising request: ‘I want you to sit and work beside me while I sleep.’

  The apprentice thought it rather odd that his master should be worrying about dreams, but it was a simple enough request and he promptly agreed to it.

  ‘All right, then,’ Yoshihide said, still looking worried, ‘come inside right away.’ He hesitated. ‘And when the other apprentices arrive,’ he added, ‘don’t let any of them in where I am sleeping.’

  ‘Inside’ meant the room where the master actually did his painting, and as usual on this day, the apprentice told me, its doors and windows were shut as tightly as at night. In the dull glow of an oil lamp stood the large folding screen, its panels arranged in a semi-circle and still only sketched out in c
harcoal. Yoshihide lay down with his head pillowed on his forearm and slipped into the deep sleep of an utterly exhausted man. Hardly any time had gone by, however, when the apprentice began to hear a sound that he had no way of describing. It was a voice, he told me, but a strange and eerie one.

  8

  At first, it was just a sound, but soon, in snatches, the voice began to form words that came to him as if from under water, like the muffled cries of a drowning man. ‘Wha-a-a-t?’ the voice said. ‘You want me to come with you? … Where? Where are you taking me? To hell, you say. To the Hell of Searing Heat, you say. Who … who are you, damn you? Who can you be but –’

  The apprentice, dissolving pigments, felt his hands stop of their own accord. He peered fearfully through the gloom at his master’s face. Not only had the furrowed skin gone stark white, but fat beads of sweat oozed from it, and the dry-lipped, snaggle-toothed mouth strained wide open as if gasping for breath. The youth saw something moving in his master’s mouth with dizzying speed, like an object being yanked by a cord, but then – imagine! – he realized the thing was Yoshihide’s tongue. The fragmented speech had been coming from that tongue of his.

  ‘Who could it be but – you, damn you. It is you! I thought so! What’s that? You’ve come to show me the way there? You want me to follow you. To hell! My daughter is waiting for me in hell!’

  The apprentice told me that an uncanny feeling overcame him at that point – his eyes seemed to make out vague, misshapen shadows that slid over the surface of the screen and flooded down upon the two of them. Naturally, he immediately reached over and shook Yoshihide as hard as he could; but rather than waking, the master, in a dreamlike state, went on talking to himself and showed no sign of regaining consciousness. Desperate now, the apprentice grabbed the jar for washing brushes and splashed all the water into Yoshihide’s face.

  ‘I’m waiting for you,’ Yoshihide was saying, ‘so hurry and get into the cart. Come along to hell!’ But the moment the water hit him his words turned to a strangled moan. At last he opened his eyes, and he sprang up more wildly than if he had been jabbed with a needle. But the misshapen creatures must have been with him still, for he stared into space, with mouth agape and with terrified eyes. At length he returned to himself and, without a hint of gratitude, barked at the poor apprentice, ‘I’m all right now. Get out of here.’

  The apprentice knew he would be scolded if he resisted his master at a time like this, so he hurried out of the room, but he told me that when he saw the sunlight again he felt as relieved as if he were waking from his own nightmare.

  This was by no means Yoshihide at his worst, however. A month later he called yet another apprentice into the inner room. The young man found Yoshihide standing in the gloom of the oil lamps biting the end of his paintbrush. Without a moment’s hesitation, Yoshihide turned to him and said, ‘Sorry, but I need you naked again.’ The master had ordered such things in the past, so the apprentice quickly stripped off his clothes, but now Yoshihide said with a strange scowl, ‘I want to see a person in chains, so do what I tell you. Sorry about this, but it will just take a little while.’ Yoshihide could mouth apologetic phrases, but he issued his cold commands without the least show of sympathy. This particular apprentice was a well-built lad who looked more suited to wielding a sword than a paintbrush, but even he must have been shocked by what happened. ‘I figured the Master had gone crazy and was going to kill me,’ he told people again and again long afterward. Yoshihide was apparently annoyed by the young man’s slow preparations. Instead of waiting, he dragged out a narrow iron chain from heaven knows where and all but pounced on the apprentice’s back, wrenching the man’s arms behind him and winding him in the chain. Then he gave the end of the chain a cruel yank and sent the young man crashing down on the floor.

  9

  The apprentice lay there like – what? – like a keg of saké that someone had knocked over. Legs and arms mercilessly contorted, he could move only his head. And with the chain cutting off the circulation of his blood, you know, his skin swelled red – face, torso, everywhere. Yoshihide, though, was apparently not the least bit concerned to see him like this; he circled this saké-keg of a body, observing it from every angle and drawing sketch after sketch. I am certain that, without my spelling it out, you can imagine what torture this must have been for the poor apprentice.

  If nothing had interrupted it, the young man’s ordeal would almost surely have lasted even longer, but fortunately (or perhaps unfortunately) a narrow, winding streak like black oil began to flow from behind a large jar in the corner of the room. At first it moved slowly, like a thick liquid, but then it began to slide along the floor more smoothly, glinting in the darkness until it was almost touching the apprentice’s nose. He took a good look at it, gasped and screamed, ‘A snake! A snake!’ The way he described the moment to me, he felt as if every drop of blood in his body would freeze, which I can well understand, for in fact the snake’s cold tongue was just about to touch the flesh of his neck where the chain was biting. Even Yoshihide, for all his perversity, must have felt a rush of horror at this unforeseeable occurrence. Flinging his brush down, he bent and gripped the snake by the tail, dangling it upside-down. The snake raised its head and began to coil upward around its own body, but it could not reach Yoshihide’s hand.

  ‘You cost me a good brush stroke, damn you,’ he growled at the snake, flinging it into the jar in the corner. Then, with obvious reluctance, he loosened the chains that bound the apprentice’s body. In fact, loosening the chains was as far as he was willing to go: for the youth himself he spared not a word of sympathy. I suspect he was more enraged at having botched a single brush stroke than concerned that his apprentice might have been bitten by a snake. I heard afterward that he had been keeping the snake to sketch from.

  I imagine that what little you have heard is enough for you to grasp the fanatic intensity with which Yoshihide approached his work. But let me give you one last terrible example concerning a young apprentice – no more than thirteen or fourteen – who could have lost his life for the hell screen. It happened one night when the boy, whose skin was fair as a girl’s, was called into the master’s studio. There he found Yoshihide by the tripod lamp balancing a piece of raw meat on his palm and feeding it to a bird the likes of which he had never seen before. The bird was the size of a cat, and in fact, with its two feather tufts sticking out from its head like ears and its big, round amber-colored eyes, it did look very much like a cat.

  10

  Yoshihide was a man who simply hated to have anyone pry into his business, and – the snake I told you about was one such case – he would never let his apprentices know what kinds of things he had in his studio. Depending on the subject he happened to be painting at the time, he might have a human skull perched on his table, or rows of silver bowls and gold-lacquered stands – you never knew. And his helpers told me they had no idea where he kept such things when he was not using them. This was surely one reason for the rumor that Yoshihide was the beneficiary of miraculous aid from a god of fortune.

  Well then, the young apprentice, assuming for himself that the strange bird on the table was a model Yoshihide needed for the hell screen, knelt before the painter and asked in all humility, ‘How can I help you, Master?’

  Almost as if he had not heard the boy speak, Yoshihide licked his red lips and jerked his chin toward the bird. ‘Not bad, eh? Look how tame it is.’

  ‘Please tell me, Master, what is it? I have never seen anything like it before,’ the boy said, keeping his wary gaze fixed on the cat-like bird with ears.

  ‘What? Never seen anything like it?’ Yoshihide responded with his familiar scornful laugh. ‘That’s what you get for growing up in the Capital! It’s a bird. A horned owl. A hunter brought it to me a few days ago from Mount Kurama. Only, you don’t usually find them so tame.’

  As he spoke, Yoshihide slowly raised his hand and gave a soft upward stroke to the feathers of the owl’s back just as the bir
d finished swallowing the chunk of meat. Instantly the bird emitted a shriek and leaped from the table top, aiming its outstretched talons at the apprentice’s face. Had the boy not shot his arm out to protect himself, I have no doubt that he would have ended up with more than a gash or two on his face. He cried out and shook his sleeve in an attempt to sweep the bird away, which only added to the fury of the attack. Beak clattering, the owl lunged at him again. Disregarding Yoshihide’s presence, the apprentice ran wildly around the cramped room, now standing to defend himself, now crouching to drive the bird away. The monster, of course, stuck with him, flying up when he stood up and down when he crouched down, and using any opening to go straight for his eyes. With each lunge came a tremendous flapping of wings that filled the boy with dread. He felt so lost, he said later, that the familiar studio felt like a haunted valley deep in the mountains, with the smell of rotting leaves, the spray of a waterfall, the sour fumes of fruit stashed away by a monkey; even the dim glow of the master’s oil lamp on its tripod looked to him like misty moonlight in the hills.

  Being attacked by the owl, however, was not what most frightened the lad. What really made his flesh crawl was the way the master Yoshihide followed the commotion with his cold stare, taking his time to spread out a piece of paper, lick his brush, and then set about capturing the terrible image of a delicate boy being tormented by a hideous bird. At the sight, the apprentice was overcome by an inexpressible terror. For a time, he says, he even thought his master might kill him.