The Hell Screen (61 page)

The two state
religions,
Shinto and Buddhism, coexisted peacefully, sometimes in the same temple complex and during the same religious festival. Shinto, the native faith, is tied to Japanese gods and agricultural observances. Buddhism, which entered Japan from China via Korea, exerted enormous influence over the aristocracy and the government through numerous monasteries. Most emperors and many powerful nobles ended their careers by taking the tonsure. The Buddhist hell inflicts on sinners a variety of physical sufferings: in addition to the fiery torment associated with the Christian hell, it offers slashing with swords and knives, freezing, starvation, and other unpleasant fates. Paintings of such scenes were common in Buddhist monasteries in China and Japan. The story of the demented artist of the hell screen in the present novel was inspired by Akutagawa’s short story “The Hell Screen,” in which a painter immolates his own daughter in order to achieve verisimilitude.

Japanese customs in connection with
death
partook of both faiths. Taboos prohibiting contact with the dead were based on Shinto beliefs, while funeral ceremonies (cremations) were in the hands of Buddhist monks. It was thought that the spirit of the deceased resided for forty-nine days in its home and that angry spirits could haunt the living.

As far as eleventh-century
popular entertainment
(later known as the “floating world”) is concerned, historical evidence is skimpy. Prostitution was certainly known, but as far as we know Kyoto’s two famous pleasure quarters did not exist until two centuries later. However, in the centuries before the shoguns, there was no prohibition against female entertainers who earned a living by dancing, singing, and playing instruments. The great age of Noh and Kabuki theater came later, but the precursors were the bards who recited famous tales, the sacred dances of
bugaku
which mimed stories, short farces called
kyogen,
and acrobatics. All of these are well attested to before and during the eleventh century.

Finally, the plot of the Nagaoka case is based on case 64A of the twelfth-century Chinese collection of criminal cases
Tang~ yin~pi~ski
(translated by Robert Van Gulik), a text which was imported to Japan during the Ming dynasty.