Lu Xun

Lu Xun (1881-1936), generally considered modern China’s most important writer of fiction, social commentary, and literary criticism, had considerable contact with Japanese of all stripes and was himself a major consumer of Japanese writings. His short stories were translated numerous times by various hands in Japan and have circulated widely there, beginning in his lifetime and ever since. The first major work by a Japanese scholar and public intellectual on Lu Xun’s life and work was that of Takeuchi Yoshimi (1910-1977), which he titled simply Ro Jin (Lu Xun). The late professor Maruyama Noboru of Tokyo University, a critic of Takeuchi, writes that it "exerted a decisive impact on the study of Lu Xun in Japan. Every succeeding student of Lu Xun has been influenced by this pioneering work in one way or another; it has provided the starting point of even those whose viewpoints and conclusions differed from his." The book has attracted keen interest in China as well, where Takeuchi is considered to have played a major role as Lu Xun’s foremost exponent in East Asia, in some ways surpassing the accomplishments of Chinese scholars in terms of situating Lu Xun at the center of postcolonial intellectual discourse.

Despite the plethora of writing about Lu Xun published in the Western world, the conclusions and, indeed, the viewpoints raised by Takeuchi in Ro Jin have yet to be read or addressed by Western scholars in the nearly eighty years since the book’s initial appearance. That is attributable primarily to the fact that it has never been translated, mainly due to the difficulty of its language. With this volume, that has finally been accomplished. Fogel is a scholar of Sino-Japanese relations, specializing in the impact of Japan and the Japanese on modern Chinese history and culture; Kowallis has been acclaimed the leading Western authority on Lu Xun and his place in Chinese literature. Throughout the years of the Covid pandemic, they engaged together by email on an almost daily basis with this fascinating, challenging, and legendary text, now often referred to simply as The "Takeuchi Ro Jin" 竹内魯迅).