For Friday: Akutagawa, "Hell Screen"

Only ONE story for Friday, but it's a doozy: the 'horror' story, "Hell Screen," which is equally weird and disturbing. But I think you'll see many of the same themes from "Rashomon" in this story, too.

Answer two of the following:

Q1: "Hell Screen" is a horror story in the vein of Edgar Allen Poe or even Steven King, and is certainly like many of the horror movies we watch today. It's also based on a very old Japanese folk-story that Akutagawa re-told and transformed through his own imagination. In general, why are we drawn to stories of murder, monsters, and hellish torments? What makes them so popular, and why might Akutagawa be tapping in to these very qualities in this story? 

Q2: The painter, Yoshihide, claims that he can only paint what he has personally observed with his own eyes—and nothing else. This often leads him to observe rather gruesome spectacles, such as rotting corpses and chained prisoners (and at the end of the story, something even worse). Responding to criticisms of this practice, he responds, “Other painters are such mediocrities, they cannot appreciate the beauty of ugliness” (48). Does this strike you as a very Tao-like sentiment, that true beauty is also to be found in ugliness? Or is this a misinterpretation of the Tao te Ching?

Q3: Why is it significant that both the painter and the monkey share the same name: Yoshihide? While many claim that each one looks like the other, even the daughter protects the monkey because "I can't just stand by and watch my father being punished." Besides this grotesque comparison, what else does Akutagawa make with this curious reflection? 

Q4: Each of these stories is told by a Narrator, who, like the characters from “In a Bamboo Grove” doesn’t have complete knowledge of the story. For most of them, this is a story they have only heard second-hand, that happened long ago, and might never have happened at all. How does the storyteller in one of these stories color the narrative and influence what we see and how we read it? How might we also read it against their interpretation?