The title of Akutagawa Ryunosuke’s novel “Jigokuhen” supposedly refers to the Jigokuhen screen which appears in the novel. The “hen” in the word “Jigokuhen” is derived from the word Hensō, a term for a kind of Buddhist painting based on the sutra, popular during the Tang Dynasty. In Akutagawa’s novel, the painter Yoshihide paints, on the Jigokuhen screen, a scene in which his daughter is burned to death in a cart, This screen, however, is seen to differ from the authentic Hensō, in that the sinners in hell are not painted naked, as was the usual practice, but dressed as they were when alive, and that small figures of Jūō are placed in the corners of the screen ― an anachronism when one considers that the Jigokuhen screen was a Buddhist painting of the Heian era, and that Jūō worship only began in the Kamakura period. We may detect, in this departure from tradition on the part of Akutagawa, an attempt to express his belief that “life is more hellish than hell itself” ― an important theme for Akutagawa the writer.
Although the screen painted by Yoshihide in the novel cannot thus be rightly defined as an authentic Jigokuhensō, the style of the novel itself, in which the narrator in the first person relates the story of the Jigokuhen screen, can be likened to the Hensō Henbun, the chanted narration accompanying a Hensō painting. It is therefore possible to view the novel as Jigokuhenbun, a kind of Hensō Henbun.
Akutagawa’s interest in the treatment of hell in literature may have been aroused by a series of tanka in Saito Mokichi’s Shakkō, as well as by Dante’s Divine Comedy, of which a copy of the English translation, with notes made in Akutagawa’s handwriting, has been found among his books.
Another possible influence on Akutagawa’s “Jigokuhen” is the boom in the study of Dunhuang art among Japanese academics at the time the novel was written. Akutagawa’s enthusiasm for Dunhuang painting and calligraphy, and his friendship with Matsuoka Yuzuru seem to attest to this fact, especially when we consider Akutagawa’s belief; “Art is like women. To appear at its most beautiful, the spiritual atmosphere of an age must be attired in the latest fashion.”
We can conclude, therefore, that Akutagawa gave his novel the eye-catching title of “Jigokuhen”, in order to give it an attire of classical style, Buddhist art, and aestheticism.
抄録全体を表示