On Paths Unknown discussion

Thread for discussion of the story: Hellscreen.

This story knocked me out! I will try to get some thoughts together soon :)

I'll venture to say that: (view spoiler)[Obviously the narrator is a highly unreliable one, ( a bit like Benjy Compson in The Sound and the Fury both due to the fact that he is "stupid" as he himself proclaims, and he is clearly highly biased in favor of "our great Lord of Horikawa", which we can clearly see, between the lines, is an utter monster (at the beginning already, when the "Great Lord" offers a human sacrifice - we can also see the narrator's lack of judgement where he deems it an honor for a man to be impaled by his "Great Lord's" Ox. (EDIT: I see in the older translation, that he was only knocked over, not impaled, which makes more sense.) A bit like a blindly adoring Trump-supporter? )
His "Great Lord" also obviously takes pleasure in witnessing the suffering of a human being, so who knows what the hell has really been going on behind the scenes, since the sycophant narrator is obviously covering up since his saintly Great Lord surely can't do anything wrong.

One cannot be sure of the narrator's depiction of Yoshihide either, since he is clearly biased against Yoshihide.

From what I have picked up about Akutagawa, he was quite a strong social critic and a bit of a feminist, disgusted by men's ill-treatment of women, so it looks as if he is doing a bit of scorching satire there.

What he (the author, not the narrator) might be saying about Yoshihide, seems more complex - I'd have to chew over that myself for a while. (hide spoiler)]

Not sure why I'm using spoiler tags, since this thread is only for this story, probably habit, but anyway...

I'm afraid I don't have this story in my meagre Rashomon collection, so I can't comment.

If you look around on the internet, it should be available to read in your browser somewhere, but please be WARNED: It is a truly hellish, horrible story. Very disturbing.

Hmm, and speaking about translations, I found this translation by Takashi Kojima http://arteflora.org/wp-content/uploa...
to read online.
The Rubin translation seems to be a bit of a bowdlerized version of the story. He seems to leave certain details out, such as for example that Yoshihide's daughter was only 15 years old when she was taken in as a lady-in-waiting- oh wait, another source tells me this story is in The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories, which I have.

Confirmed that in the book I have, the t/lation is by Morinaka Akira, so not the same one that I linked to above.. ...so give me a sec and I'm going to do a few comparisons.

Traveller, I eagerly await your further research, but I must say, comparing the Takashi Kojima translation to the Rubin is unbelievably striking. Its almost hard to believe they are translating the same text, although they are basically saying the same things, its true. Also, I counted the words in the first paragraph of each, and Takashi used 147, Rubin 218, which seems like an absolutely huge difference (I counted myself, so those numbers probably aren't perfect).

Or compare just the first few sentences:

Takashi Kojima:

The Grand Lord of Horikawa is the greatest lord that Japan ever had. Her later generations will never see such a great lord again. Rumor has it that before his birth, Daitoku-Myo-O appeared to her ladyship, his mother, in a dream.

Jay Rubin:

I am certain there has never been anyone like our great Lord of Horikawa, and I doubt there will ever be another. In a dream before His Lordship was born, Her Maternal Ladyship saw the awesomely armed Guardian Deity of the West—or so people say.

The tone is completely different. In substance, the second sentences are actually not so different, since Daitoku-Myo-O gets a footnote in the Takashi. (That footnote, which describes Daitoku-Myo-O as “a three-faced and six-armed god that guards the west…”, at first suggested to me that Rubin had confusingly made it sound like the god in question was armed in a military sense, when actually she was armed in the sense of having six arms, but google suggests that both are true, making this perhaps a rather clever little joke on Rubin’s part!

But that first sentence! One of them must be a bad translation, no? Or is it possible that the references to “Japan” and “later generations” which give the Takashi such a different valence than the Rubin are actually somehow ambiguous in the original?

I found two more translations, this one by Howard Norman, and available to take out by the hour at archive.org https://archive.org/details/cogwheels...

Norman's translation of the first paragraph seems to be much closer to Takashi Kojima's than to Jay Rubin's. It only has 135 words, an astonishing 83 fewer words than Rubin used for the same part of the original text. However, the first two lines are closer to Rubin:

I doubt whether there will ever be another man like the Lord of Horikawa. Certainly there has been no one like him till now. Some say that a Guardian King appeared to her ladyship his mother in a dream before he was born; …

And then here’s Morinaka Akira’s translation, from the collected volume traveller linked above. The first few pages, though I assume not the whole thing, are available on google books:

Neither in the past nor in the time to come could one imagine a person comparable to the High Lord of Horikawa. I heard that, before his birth, Dai Ioku-Myo-o, the King of Magical Science, appeared at his mother’s bedside.

Akira takes 196 words, which is closer to Rubin’s word count. In my judgment, Akira’s tone is also closer to Rubin’s, which suggests that Rubin is not so much taking liberties as interpreting the original in a way that uses more words to suggest ambiguities in what in Japanese is perhaps more concise but also somewhat imprecise language??

If only I could read Japanese!

Also sorry for stealing your thunder, Traveller! Once I saw how different the pdf you linked was, I couldn't resist digging in a little!

BJ wrote: "Also sorry for stealing your thunder, Traveller! Once I saw how different the pdf you linked was, I couldn't resist digging in a little!..."

Hahaha, no I don't need thunder at all, BJ, I am only too happy when other people actually participate in these discussions and I don't have to listen to the monotonous droning of my own voice. After all, I know what's in my own head - it's finding out what's in yours that makes it fun and enriching. Well done on your excellent research, and thank you!
The wordplay on the 'armed' that you mention, was probably done by Rubin, but that is exactly the type of wordplay that the Japanese are known for, and which I was lamenting losing out on in translation.

In my translation comparisons, (I also found 3 or 4 of them) I will then focus on another aspect of this story, the painter and his art - but please do not let that deter you from posting your own thoughts! The artful depiction ( which you have to sort of read between the lines) of the narrator himself is also pretty interesting.

Right! Translations aside, I've just completed Hellscreen. Will need a while to collect my scrambled thoughts though, as this was graphically quite disturbing. I'm also more intrigued by human psychology and the ill disguised motives for aberrant behaviours. It seems that the author himself, was well versed in the latter.

Hello again. I was wondering if there is no longer an interest in this particular story, as very few have come back to discuss or raise further threads.
The only additional piece of relevant information I have that has specific bearing on this story - and most of his work, is gleaned from Wikipedia.
'The portrayal of women in Akutagawa's stories was shaped by the influence of three women who acted as a mother for Akutagawa. Most significantly his biological mother Fuku, from whom he worried about inheriting her mental illness. Though he did not spend much time with Fuku he identified strongly with her, believing that if at any moment he might go mad life was meaningless. His aunt Fuki played the most significant role in his upbringing. Fuki controlled much of Akutagawa's life, demanding much of his attention especially as she grew older. Women that appear in Akutagawa's stories, much like the women he identified as mothers, were mostly written as dominating, aggressive, deceitful, and selfish. Conversely, men were often represented as the victims of such women."

That quote is very interesting, Bonitaj. I feel like it applies, more or less, to the more autobiographical work in the back half of this collection, but perhaps less to Hell Screen. The daughter in Hell Screen occupies a kind of odd position. She's not quite a fully rounded character—in some respects, she seems to exist, like a buxom side character in a B-horror movie, merely to be dispatched. At the same time, though, there is the monkey, which though not exactly characterization in the traditional sense, emphasizes and obscures her position in the story. And then, I can’t stop thinking about those few lines, when she is biting her lip and crying, in the crucial scene in the hallway (the moment, at least in one version of the story’s reality, just after she had rejected "His Lordships" advances, and thus earned her fate). She comes across as very real, in that moment. As a victim, yes, but as more than a symbol, too. In a story like this, with an unreliable narrator relying on rumors and otherwise uncredited information to build a narrative that contains multiple versions of reality (and Hell Screen performs that particular trick much more subtly, but equally effectively, to In a Bamboo Grove, in my opinion), there are these moments of reality that feel convincing, anchor points around which various story lines and explanations pivot, and that moment was one of them, for me at least. The painter’s daughter really was in the hallway, the narrator really did encounter her there. Around this point of seeming reality, a variety of possible narratives hover uneasily.

In any case, this is a story about two undeniably sadistic men (three counting the narrator), and the innocent woman who is ultimately doomed by their love and attraction, not their hatred. The idea of lust as a destructive force is clearly alluded to in the later stories in the volume— rather disturbingly, to my sensibility—but here, it is tied up in a kind of twisted take on the Pygmalion myth, with an artist who creates a vision of hell so perfect that he falls in love with it, and so it is brought to life to punish him. It is very cold and very cruel, but at the same time it is not cynical; nor is it meant to evoke pathos. Nor is it only about ideas.

This group can move slowly, and we don’t always turn out, but I’m starting to see that there are much, much more active groups on this site that don’t achieve the kinds of involved conversations where you really get to see a book differently nearly so often! (Of course, Traveller deserves a lions share of the credit for that, I suspect :)

hello BJ. just wanted to thank you for coming back with your insightful comments..I suspect it's my academic pursuit on the subject of Narcissism that won't allow me to let the protagonist (the author!) off his ulterior motives (all be they subconscious!) too easily. My theory is that the pathology permeates the characters in all Akutagawa's work, none less so here. Your description of the two "undeniably sadistic men (three counting the narrator), suggests you have sensed the evil. I in turn tie that in with the pathology of malignant narcissism. One of the basic tenets in the discourse around narcissism are what is referred to as the 3 "e"'s
high entitlement
low empathy
envy
which all tie in with their behaviours. What strikes me profoundly is the last precept.
"Envy" - if seen in the light of the story's development, it it becomes clear that the painter, the father, is overcome with envy toward the "his Lordship". You speak of these men's "love" for the victim, but by its very sadistic enactment, this cannot be seen as "love" from any of the parties.
The father would rather see her dead than be with another man and to his "lordship" she's just another pawn in his repitoire of games. It's an enactment of Power from both sides and the aim, to crush the poor girl.
I will return with a relevant quote on the magnitude of Narcissistic envy and rage on my next entry, too late to go sifting through text books now.

Bonitaj wrote: "hello BJ. just wanted to thank you for coming back with your insightful comments..I suspect it's my academic pursuit on the subject of Narcissism that won't allow me to let the protagonist (the aut..."

I had not thought of Akutagawa (or his authorial voice, anyway) as being narcissistic, necessarily, but now that you say it... I did, however, feel that the whole book just gave me the chills. Whether writing fables about dragons or stories about young women working as waitresses or intense narratives about his own life, there was a coldness that I just found relentless. I could not help but feel that I was reading the work of a very unhappy man. Based solely on the stories in this collection, I might go so far to say that one of the shadow narratives I see playing out in this collection is of an author whose lack of respect and empathy, for women in particular, poisons his soul, and eventually he could not help but turn his cruelty on himself.

I think that this interpretation dovetails interestingly with yours. I would love to hear more of your insights on narcissism!

(Also just to clarify, I don't think that the men in Hell Screen actually loved the daughter in a real way, more that what passed for love or attraction for them was actually this other horrible thing. I should have put "love" in scare quotes, perhaps.)

Excuse my protracted absence- it's been a busy week. Have yet to come back with said evidence to defend my hypothesis but in the interim, please google a publication called
THE NEW LEAF JOURNAL of March 6 '21. There's a terrific article called "Reviewing Rashomon and other Stories".
Thanks.