"The Spider's Thread" is a retelling of a very short fable from the novel known as the Fable of the Onion, where an evil woman who had done no good at all in her life is sent to hell, but her guardian angel points out to God that she had in fact done one good deed in her life: she once gave an onion to a beggar. So God told the angel to take that onion and use it to pull her out of hell. The angel very nearly managed to pull her out, but when other sinners began to hold on to her so they could also be pulled out, she kicked at them, saying that the onion was hers and she was the one getting pulled out, not them. At that moment, the onion broke and the woman fell back into hell, where she remains. Another inspiration for Akutagawa appears to be from a story of the same name found in Karma: A Story of Early Buddhism, an anthology of five Buddhist parables published in Tokyo in 1895. He took from here the character of Kandata, who is also an evil robber reborn in a Buddhist hell until his bad karma expires. Here, however, Kandata does not have a path to immediately leave hell but instead is told that any good deeds he may have done such as sparing the spider, would return to help him rise again. See also Cultural depictions of spiders References External links "Kumo no Ito" (with modern kanji forms and kana spellings) at Aozora Bunko by Timothy M. Kelly 1918 short stories Short stories by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa Works originally published in Japanese magazines Works originally published in children's magazines Japanese children's literature Buddhist novels Japanese Buddhist texts 1918 novels Japanese drama films Spiders in popular culture