The Spring 2025 Manga Guide

Ryunosuke Akutagawa's Hell Screen

What's It About? 

Hell Screen follows Yoshihide, a renowned but tormented artist who, despite his talent, is rude, lazy, and avaricious. Known for his abrasive demeanor, Yoshihide's one light is the deep affection he harbors for his daughter, Yuzuki. When she enters the service of the powerful Lord Horikawa, tensions rise between the artist and the lord's court, especially after disturbing rumors of Yuzuki's treatment emerge.

Tasked with painting a monumental screen depicting the torments of hell, Yoshihide's dedication takes a dark turn as he pushes the boundaries of morality in his quest for authenticity. As his obsession with capturing human suffering intensifies, the line between creation and cruelty blurs, leading to devastating consequences.

Ryūnosuke Akutagawa's Hell Screen has a story and art by Mihiro, based on the work by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa. English translation by Periplus Editions (HK) Ltd. Published by Tuttle (March 25, 2025). Rated T+.

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Is It Worth Reading?

Rebecca Silverman
Rating:

I am almost certainly biased about these Tuttle editions of manga adaptations, not because of the publisher, but rather because I'm a fan of several of the original stories. Reading them in a new format is a lot of fun. Hell Screen may not be quite as well known as Ryūnosuke Akutagawa's Rashomon, but it's still a vital and formative work in modern Japanese horror, and Mihiro's manga version does a good job of both showing that and using Akutagawa's techniques to make it clear that without him, elements of the genre wouldn't be the same.

The original story dates to 1918, when it was serialized in two separate newspapers. Its nominal plot is about a great painter named Yoshihide with a taste for the macabre who a courtier hires, the Grand Lord of Horikawa, to paint a screen with a depiction of (Buddhist) hell. As Yoshihide feels he can only draw from real life, he immediately begins tormenting his servants and roaming the streets of Kyoto to find corpses to sketch in situ, culminating in his request to Horikawa to burn a woman alive in a carriage. Ultimately, Yoshihide dies by his own hand after the screen is finished, and the story lives on as an endlessly repeated urban legend, narrated by one of his servants who witnessed the entire debacle. Themes of the work have been broadly examined, with scholar Makoto Ueda saying that, “For Akutagawa the dilemma was insoluble: if the artist chooses to place his art ahead of his life, in the end he must suffer the destruction of his life.”

This adaptation feels like it works with Ueda's interpretation of the tale, taking gleeful delight in depicting the depths to which Yoshihide will sink to create his masterpiece and his disregard for life, even his own and that of his beloved daughter Yuzuki. Mihiro's art does exceptionally well at showing us the difference between the virtuous and innocent (Yuzuki and the narrator) and the vicious and vile (Yoshihide and Horikawa) in their depictions of faces and bodies, with a continuing motif of corpses and bones to remind the reader of where all of them will end up. Yoshihide's art costs him everything, because he put everything into it, even going so far as to destroy his gentler emotions.

As with A Night on the Galaxy Railway, the original prose is still the best way to experience the story, at least in my opinion. But this is an excellent adaptation, and as with Tuttle's literary manga, its translation is better than their other manga. Hell Screen is a seminal work of Japanese horror fiction, and genre fans definitely should take this opportunity to see why.

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Kevin Cormack
Rating:

Sometimes I find it challenging to review manga adaptations of prose stories where I've never read the original. Before this, I was unfamiliar with Taisho period short story author Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, but during his sadly short life (he died from suicide at the age of 35), he produced enough high-quality short fiction that he became a significant influence on later, similarly tortured author Osamu Dazai.

Tuttle Publishing seems to be making a name for itself recently, with its localizations of manga versions of Japanese literature, including works by the aforementioned Dazai and more modern authors like Haruki Murakami. Their output, then, is a little different from the reams of more typical shonen and seinen manga that line bookstore shelves. I can't seem to find anything online about artist Mihiro, who adapted and illustrated Akutagawa's story. However, their art is clean, detailed, and reasonably expressive, although not as dark and oppressive as perhaps the story demands. Heian-era artist Yoshihide works in the service of his patron, the Lord of Horikawa. Yoshihide is viewed by those around him as either an unhinged genius or a distasteful nuisance, spending his time furiously drawing mangled corpses and other unsettling scenes. Almost everyone unkindly mocks his monkey-like appearance.

Conversely, Yoshihide's polite, refined, beautiful daughter Yuzuki charms the lord's heart, and his unwanted attention towards her (there's an implied attempted sexual assault) leads Yoshihide to bargain for his daughter's freedom, much to his patron's anger. When Yoshihide is contracted to depict a multi-screen painting of Buddhist hell, so begins his descent into madness, culminating in a horrifying and cruel final twist.

Yoshihide's research practices are questionable at best, torturing his proteges to commit their suffering to canvas. Mihiro's art satisfactorily depicts some reasonably unsettling situations, though sadly no images as deeply disturbing as anything flowing from the pens of Junji Ito or Hideshi Hino. From a visual horror perspective, this volume is extremely tame, though the dark conclusion to the story will likely linger in my mind for a while. I can't help but wonder if I'd read the prose version first, whether the horrors conjured by my imagination could have been more potent, however.