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).

• Takeuchi Yoshimi, Author

• Joshua A. Fogel, Translator

  Joshua A. Fogel is professor of history at York University in Toronto.

• Jon Eugene von Kowallis, Translator

  Jon Eugene von Kowallis is professor of Chinese Studies at University of New South Wales in Sydney.

• Lu Xun by Takeuchi Yoshimi, translated by Joshua A. Fogel and Jon Eugene von Kowallis, comprises two introductory essays followed by the first complete English translation of Takeuchi’s seminal study of Lu Xun. The introductions, dense with detail, are themselves important contributions to the field of Lu Xun Studies, contextualizing Takeuchi’s interpretations of Lu Xun’s works, life, and philosophy, as well as Takeuchi’s position within Japanese intellectual culture. Takeuchi’s Ro Jin (Lu Xun) is a deeply informed intellectual history, drawing on philosophy, history (including literary history), literary criticism, aesthetics, and politics to situate Lu Xun and his writings. As one of the most important studies of Lu Xun to appear in the decades following his death, it deserves recognition as a foundational text in the field of Lu Xun studies.
  —Nicholas A. Kaldis, Binghamton University (S.U.N.Y.)
• Takeuchi Yoshimi’s Ro Jin embodies a singular moment in modern Sino-Japanese literary exchanges. First published at the height of Japan’s desperate war efforts in 1944, this criticism not only contrived to leave a decisive mark on postwar Japan’s self-reflective engagement with Lu Xun’s life and work. It also managed to see a potent revival amid postsocialist China’s pertinacious revaluations of the origins of its modern literature that Lu Xun had established. Informed by unparalleled philological precision and rich contextualization, Fogel’s and Kowallis’s bold translation challenges scholars and students of Chinese, Japanese, and comparative literature to untangle its tortuous, living, and indispensable legacy in transregional East Asia.
  —Satoru Hashimoto, Johns Hopkins University