Liu Bang Image Written By Ryoutarou Shiba

Ryotarou Shiba, originally named Teiichi Fukuda, was a famous contemporaryhistorical novelist in Japan. He wrote in an easy and fluent style in different genresand with many works to his credit. He was awarded almost all the famous literaryawards in Japan and obtained the medal of culture representing the most highly honoramong Japanese. He had a great many of readers from different social strata, rangingfrom litterateurs,critics,statesmen,businessmen,staffs to the ordinary people. Moreover,his thought about history influenced the common Japanese’s view of history. RyotarouShiba was one of the most popular and most influential historical novelists, therefore,he was given the honor of "writer of the nation".Ryotarou Shiba was profoundly related to China and he had great interest inChinese history and culture all over his lifetime. He adored Sima Qian, chose"Ryotarou Shiba" as his pen name and created the novel Xiang Yu and Liu Bang basedon Historical Records during his artistic maturity. In the novel, Ryotarou Shibashowed overwhelming respect to Sima Qian and Historical Records, integrating hisperception about traveling in China at the same time. He expressed his owninterpretations of the magnificent history of the battle between Chu and Han and ofthe historical characters emerging from the changes of times on the basis of historicalnarrative and literary fiction, and injected fresh theme into the ancient subject XiangYu and Liu Bang.For the reason stated above, firstly this thesis analyzed how Xiang Yu and LiuBang absorbed and reformed Historical Records from the point of intellectual history;then narrowed the macroscopic absorption specifically to the character Liu Bang.Through generalizing the images of Liu Bang in the two works, it pointed out that, inspite of the cognitive similarities on Liu Bang between the two authors, RyotarouShiba had his own distinctiveness in his view of interpretation such as analysis ofreasonability, stress on regionalism and emphasis on group. The last part of this thesisanalyzed the value of Ryotarou Shiba’s interpretation of Liu Bang from three aspects:the meaning in Shiba’s historical novel, the meaning in Shiba’s view of China, and theinspiration towards research of Liu Bang in China.