The King in Yellow

Summary

The King in Yellow, or the Yellow Mythos, as depicted in the original work, is a rather mysterious figure. He doesn’t get elaborated on, but one simple fact is consistent, anyone who reads the play will go insane.

The book consists of ten short stories, but only the first four stories revolve around the play itself. The rest seem like, rather, Chambers’s attempts at writing his favorite love stories, so, the translated copy I bought did not translate the other six stories and I also did not continue to read past the fourth. Let’s go through the journey of the book, and what I have noticed in both the translated copy and the original copy.

…

…

…

are we good?

The Stories

In total, the book took me roughly 27 days to translate it (and the translation isn’t even at the highest caliber), with the resulting document just south of 80 pages, which was surprisingly close to the EBook copy (around 75 pages until the end of story 4). I could say for sure, that this translator did a marvelous job of capturing Chambers’s writing in Japanese, really close, and sometimes, even surpassing the author himself.

The Repairer of Reputations

This is, by far, the most difficult chapter for me to read, partly because it was the first story that needed to do all the world-building for later chapters to build atop, partly because it was so dense in old English military vocabulary that completely break down across two translations.

The story is set in a dystopian America where lethal chambers made in marble are constructed by the government to aid those who “suffer in life” to “depart peacefully”. In front of the lethal chambers, stood the statues of Fates (the goddesses of fate). It revolves around Hildred Castaigne, a man who has read through “The King in Yellow”, his eccentric friend, Mr.Wilde, who had a job of the titular Repairer of Reputations, and the pair of Louis Castaigne and Miss Constance.

The story is very odd, because the job “repairer of reputations” is as exactly as said, a man who repairs others’ reputation as an occupation. Though, we have two parallel world views in this story, Hildred and Wilde, and Louis and Constance:

• Hildred marvelled at an old tin and brass crown as his own golden crown bejeweled with diamonds. Louis called this out by speaking it of a “dirty old thing”. Hildred was always unbelievably near raging at everything Louis said.
• Hildred only thought of Wilde as an eccentric man, while Louis, Constance and Constance’s father all thought of him as a crazy maniac. Only Hildred believed that Wilde held the key to some knowledge in the world, and took great pride in it.
• Hildred wrote and signed off his own Execution Order, and lived in ecstasy thinking of being the king. Though, this order did not go through, thankfully.
• Vance, who was ordered to execute the Execution Order, had also gone crazy from The King in Yellow, and dove headfirst into one of the lethal chambers, screaming like a madman.

This story is a slow-build then into a high-adrenaline thriller of a man going insane from the influence of the King. Even in the later half of the story, he believed he was a King out right, but still always a servant to the King in Yellow.

At the end, none of the delusional side lived. Hildred was detained by Louis & Co, and died in an asylum for the criminally insane, Vance died in a lethal chamber, and Mr Wilde died rolling on his floor, completely bled out.

The Mask

Camilla: Please take off your mask, sir.
Stranger: Indeed?
Casillda: Indeed it is time. We have all laid disguise but you.
Stranger: I wear no mask.
Camilla: No mask? No mask!

- The King in Yellow, Act 2, Scene 1.

The story started with a short scene from the play itself (I wrote it from memory, I didn’t bother to check against the book). The short, but eerie dialogues signify something about the pallid mask, something that seems like it’s wearing a mask, but it isn’t.

The second story revolves around four main characters, a painter named Alec who was deeply in love with Genevieve, his sculptor friend named Boris who was married to Genevieve, and just a random dude named Jack Scott. Alec always described Genevieve very gracefully, how she moved throughout the scene and the world majestically, that you could tell this man was hopelessly in love. It was the three of them living together in Boris’s residence. Boris was a sculptor, in the middle of sculpting the statues of the Fates, using marble. He also had a magical chemical solution that can preserve the beauty of a living object in marble, as stated in the story, he tested it on white lilies, goldfish, and rabbits. Alec believed this was more destroying the living thing, than preserving it.

The story played out like normal. Until when Alec woke up in an unlit room, hearing “the saddest music” he had ever heard, and saw Genevieve playing by the old keyboard, he called out for her and she fell. Afterwards, she was gravely ill and always in bed with maids hustling in and out. Here, the story took a turn. Genevieve, who was always happy and cheerful, suddenly was begging for death. The crash then also happened to Alec when Genevieve finally spoke it out right that she always loved Alec, but she was devoted to her husband more. Despite knowing that subconsciously, Alec couldn’t take this, and fell ill afterwards. Here, we also came to learn that in the day, they lived together happily (Alec’s mask), but at night, a wave of feelings akin to raging storm raged on in Alec’s mind (Alec’s unmasking).

When Alec eventually recovered and woke up, the heavy news was delivered by Jack that both Boris and Genevieve had died. Genevieve had jumped in the bathtub of Boris’s chemical solution and turned herself into marble, seemingly forever preserving her beauty before the ages. Boris, thinking he had killed his wife, shot himself. Jack had to deal with the fallout, cleaning up, destroying the evidence of Boris’s solution, and finally bringing Genevieve out into the marble room, where she would lie there, under the protection of the Madonna statue.

The story took another turn, when two years later, Jack seemingly went insane. He kept begging Alec not to leave the residence, and he was always complaining of a feeling of having to wait for something, but did not know what. Alec came back to Boris’s home, and after a short few days, one of the maids remarked that a live goldfish replaced the marble fish. Then a live rabbit appeared in place of the marble rabbit. Alec thought of it as a terrible prank, but as he picked up the marble white lily, it turned back into a living lily. With sudden realization, Alec sprinted to the marble room, and found Genevieve sitting up, bathing in the sunlight, with her cheeks tinted red.

In the Court of the Dragon

The third story is the shortest of all. It revolves around an unnamed man, who was revealed early to be disturbed by the text of the King in Yellow, and seeked out a church to sooth his soul. But it was all in vain, as the King had warped his mind:

• He started to make fun of the religious figures, though he noted that that had never happened before.
• He zoned out during the sermon, and didn’t take in anything. And knowing that he was extremely disrespectful, he stood up and walked out during a sermon.

The story then followed the man as he returned to his home in the court of the dragon, but a strange, devilish presence of an evil organist kept crossing by him with such a level of hatred that he instinctively knew his end was drawing near. He saw the organist in the church twice, and showed that he was losing his sense of time. Then, he saw the organist pass by in the crowd as he headed home. Then, finally at the court, he got approached and cornered by the evergrowing darkness as the blade, and tip of it was the organist.

Snap! The story revealed that it was the narrator dreaming of being cornered by the organist as he still sat in church. He sluggishly moved to the exit, but heard a blare of organs sounded out. He turned back and saw the church being enveloped by a blinding white light. He saw the black stars, the tower of Carcosa, the lake of Hali, and the tatters of the King. Implicitly, the man had died. The chapter ended with:

It is fearful to fall into the hands of a living God!

The Yellow Sign

Probably understandable why this was the best story by far after the build-up, thus proving that the build-up was 100% worth it.

The story took place in America, with Tessie and Jack Scott. Tessie was a model who posed for Jack Scott, who was an artist (whether he had the same name in The Mask or the same person, was ambiguous). Jack was troubled by the sight of the churchyard watchman that had a soft and plumpy face that resembled a coffin worm.

Tessie confided in Jack that she had been having recurring dreams of a hearse driver passing by her house, but she somehow knew that the one in the coffin was Jack and that the hearse driver was that watchman. She remarked that every time in the dream she stood by the window to see the hearse, when she woke up, she would also end up by the window, sometimes drenched wet because of the rain. Jack, at first, mocked this and pretended not to understand, until he himself also had that dream, but from the perspective of the one inside the coffin.

Tessie then revealed that the dreams started when she found a strange brooch carved with a curious golden sign that was not in any human scripture. She gave it to Jack as a gift as she didn’t have anything else that she deemed worthy to be given.

One day, Jack injured both his hands, and wandered about his apartment for a book to read to pass the time. His eyes landed on a strange book at the top in the corner, with a “poisonous-snake-like” cover. He asked Tessie to take it for him, and was bewildered to learn that a copy of “The King in Yellow” had found its way into his studio. The next few scenes were heart-wrenching, like watching Adam and Eve play about the forbidden fruit. Jack searched frantically for Tessie as she playfully ran and hid away, only to find her thirty minutes later, completely pale with the book open at her feet. He dragged her back onto a sofa and let her rest. But he, himself, took the book, “as heavy as lead”, and read through it from start to finish. When she woke up, they kept on going on discussing Hastur, Carcosa, lake of Hali, and the subjects of the book as there was something squirming about in the darkness surrounding them. They finally learned that the symbol on the brooch was none other than the Yellow Sign.

Then, it was already the midnight bell. The sounds of a carriage wheels rolling on the stone roads drew near. It was a hearse with black feather decorations. The hearse driver unlocked the door to his apartment building. No matter how locked a door was, it didn’t matter as it seemed like hinges and locks melted and rotted away under the driver’s touch. Jack knew he was coming for the Yellow Sign, but there was nothing either of them could do. As the driver entered his room, the book cut to a scene where Jack was incurably ill on a death bed. The doctor later remarked it was found that there were one dead and two alive found in the room, and the so-called driver was a corpse that should have been dead for months.

At the end of the book, it was revealed that Tessie had died. And in the last few words of the story, the soul also left Jack’s body as he begged the priest for confidentiality on this matter.

Retrospective

For each story, the King seemed to destroy different things. In TROR, the King destroyed a man’s sanity and drove him into madness, proclaiming as the king. In The Mask, the King destroyed arts and artists, without even being present. In In the Court of the Dragon, The King destroyed faith. And in the last story, it was all of it all at once.

It was thrilling for sure, as reading in Japanese and re-translating meant that I had to dissect each word usage, and why it was used this way. I didn’t have the comfortability of just skipping over a word because “it wasn’t that necessary”. I was actually translating The Mask at 3AM, and kept looking over my shoulders.

I wonder what I should read next?