Ryunosuke Akutagawa · 1918

地獄變

The finest painter in Heian Japan is ordered to paint hell, and he can only paint what he has seen.

Yoshihide, a proud and disliked master painter, serves the Lord of Horikawa, who commands a screen of hell. A servant in the household tells what followed, in a narration that is courteous, admiring and not to be trusted.

First published
1918
Literary form
Short story
Original language
日本語
Published text languages
日本語 · Vietnamese
Reading time
≈ 52 min read

No translation is published in this interface language yet. You can read the original or another available edition.

Read · 日本語
Detail of a Japanese hell handscroll: giant wasps hover over sufferers submerged to the neck in a pale pool, with blood on their heads.
Image from the period. The Hell of Pus and Blood, one of the lesser hells in a 12th-century Japanese hell handscroll (jigoku zōshi), detail. A medieval hell painting from the world of the story; it is not the screen Akutagawa imagines and does not illustrate the text.Unknown artist, Hell of Pus and Blood, from a hell handscroll (Jigoku zōshi), 12th century (detail). Public domain (anonymous, 12th century). Wikimedia Commons. Source

Why it matters

Hell Screen is a story about art and what it may cost, told by a narrator who admires a powerful man and keeps defending him. The painter Yoshihide cannot draw what he has not witnessed, and the Lord of Horikawa wants a screen of hell. The story is alive now because it will not let the reader settle into one verdict. The narrator is a household servant, mostly uninvolved, and his deference is part of what he gives away. A century later the questions are still live: what do we owe a work that is magnificent, and who pays for it?

Akutagawa serialized it in the Osaka Mainichi and Tokyo Nichinichi newspapers in May 1918, and it was collected in the 1919 volume Kugutsushi. He reworked a short tale in the medieval Uji Shūi Monogatari about a painter who looks on happily as his own house burns, and turned it into a full psychological study. The story has been adapted often: a kabuki version by Mishima Yukio premiered in 1953, a 1962 NHK dance drama followed, and the Toho film of 1969, Portrait of Hell, was directed by Toyoda Shirō.

Watch the narrator. Notice what he praises, what he excuses, and the small details he reports without comment. Watch the way Yoshihide is described as both repellent and gifted, and the way the household treats him. Read the long description of the screen with care: Akutagawa wants you to see it, and the images do more than the plot. Note that two manuscript pages thought lost were found in Kurashiki in 2007. The story has English versions by W. H. H. Norman (1948) and by Jay Rubin.

Introduction written for LitMundi with AI assistance and checked against the sources listed below.

All editions

Original · source checked

地獄變

日本語

地獄變 · 日本語, 『傀儡師』1919（復刻版、青空文庫）

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Translation · AI reviewed

Địa ngục biến

Tiếng Việt

Bản dịch tiếng Việt bằng AI · đánh giá AI v2

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Translation availability is still being researched. A draft is not evidence that no translation exists.

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