Zhou Zuoren “A Personal View of Japan” (I–IV) (1935–1937)

Abstract

Zhou Zuoren was born in Zhejiang, China in 1885. His eldest brother was the writer Zhou Shuren (or Lu Xun) and his youngest brother was the politician Zhou Jianren. Following his brother, Lu Xun, he went to Japan in 1906 to study at Rikkyō University amongst others, and published a translation of foreign literature titled Stories from Abroad (1909) in collaboration with Lu Xun. During this period, he married a Japanese woman. After returning to China in 1911, he engaged in teaching and research activities, and from 1917 he served at Peking University. He participated in the literary revolutionary movement and vigorously published criticism and translations. As a prose writer, he published more than twenty collections of literary-style essays throughout his life, including Books of the Rainy Day (1925), Talks on Dragons (1927), Talks on Tigers (1929), Looking at Clouds Collection (1932), Jokes from the Bitter Tea Studio (1935), Talks on Wind and Rain (1936), Melons and Beans Collection (1937), Candlelight Chatter (1940), and Taste of Medicine Collection (1942). They include, among others, the essays “A Personal View of Japan,” “Letters on Japanese Culture,” “Reconsidering Japan.” In contrast, Lu Xun did not write a single essay on Japan. In his personal life, he and Lu had become estranged in 1923. After the Japanese occupation of Beijing in 1939, Zhou remained there, which put him in a difficult political situation, and after the war he was arrested and imprisoned by the Kuomintang government as a “hanjian” (collaborator with the enemy). Even after the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, this stigma was not removed, and he remained engrossed in literary activities in Beijing under home confinement. He died in 1967, leaving behind a series of writings on Lu Xun, translations of foreign literature, and an autobiography, Zhitang’s Memoirs (1970). Even today, Zhou Zuoren’s lack of reputation in China contrasts sharply with the high reputation of Lu Xun.