Akutagawa Ryunosuke's Chinese Image

Akutagawa Ryunosuke(1892-1927)is the writer of writers in Japanese Taisho literary circles.His works suck out all the marrow of Eastern and Western cultures,and have won the author himself worldwide prestige for the outstanding writing techniques.Despite his premature death,Akutagawa's lifelong writing contributes 148 novels and short stories to the world,among which the short stories manifest the most significant achievement of his writing artistry.Western critics once commented,probably the highest praise a writer could achieve,that it is not until Akutagawa Ryunosuke's rise in fame that the world started to accept that Japanese writers could also create brilliant short stories.Generally speaking,Rash?mon,The Nose,In a Bamboo Grove and Mandarin Oranges mark that Akutagawa's short fiction has attracted the attention of the whole world.The artistic techniques employed in as well as Japanese spirit expressed by these works secure a niche for Japanese literature among early modern world literatures.In this sense,Akutagawa's writing of Chinese theme – though an indispensable part of his fiction-writing career – plays the role of a sidekick in his overall literary legacy.However,the lively Chinese figures portrayed in these works have not only enriched the forms and contents of Akutagawa's literature,but,on the more important hand,also displayed the great influences that Chinese civilization has had on the writer and his writing.Therefore,this paper is a research on Akutagawa Ryunosuke's representative piece of Chinese theme,Shina Yuuki.It unscrambles the historical background of Japanese Taisho period and the “Chinese interest” of Akutagawa and his contemporaries,who adventured to China as Japanese writers.The paper also reveals the Orientalist inclination of these writers' portrayal of China and analyses the abundant “Chinese images” created by Akutagawa Ryunosuke.The “Chinese images” from Shina Yuuki,which this paper tries to analyse,fall into three categories: images of common people,of secular society,and of the intelligentsia.Those images are penetrating manifestation of Akutagawa's full attention on the societal and the mental realities of Chinese people in his time.His incisive observation shows that Feudalist China was declining with cumulative poverty and weakness,as well as ravaged by imperialist powers;and his words reflect his cultural insight into the conflicts between Eastern and Western civilisations.Shina Yuuki has strong connection with his other Chinese-theme novels.It does not merely profoundly influence Akutagawa's later story writing,but also touches the essence of his “Chinese image” and captures certain inevitability of the cultural exchanges between early modern Japan and China.As one of the most outstanding piece among numerous China-Quest Travel notes of modern Japanese literature,90 years after the publication of its first separate edition,Shina Yuuki deserves a new systematization of its producing process and of its influences in both China and Japan,which can provide discourse platform for the remodelling of Akutagawa's cognition of Chinese society,and can resettle its rank amongst all China-Quest Travel notes created by Japanese writers.Shina Yuuki has evoked particular attention and interest of Chinese literary world at all the peaking times during which modern and contemporary Chinese literature is absorbing nourishment from foreign literatures,especially in the 1920 s,the 1930 s and from the 1980 s on.Chinese literati's enthusiastic debates on this work have become a peculiar phenomenon in the mass research on Akutagawa Ryunosuke's literature.