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| Lu Xun and Natsume Soseki in the Perspective of Comparative Literature |
| Song Haocheng |
| School of Humanities, Shaoxing University, Shaoxing 312000, China |
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Abstract The literary connection between the Shaoxing-born Chinese writer and social critic Lu Xun and the Japanese novelist Natsume Soseki has been well established in Chinese and Japanese scholarship in comparative literature. The connection itself is evident not only through Lu Xun’s translations of Soseki’s works, but also through multiple writings by his contemporaries, later scholars, and Lu Xun himself. His younger brother and early comparativist Zhou Zuoren also frequently acknowledged Lu Xun’s admiration of Soseki’s novels, and indeed the Zhou brothers’ commentaries on the relationship between Lu Xun and Soseki led scholars of later generations to continue deeper exploration and interpretation, constituting the foundation and accumulation of this thesis. However, existing scholarship on the relationship is often a comparative interpretation of single works, or a comparison of the inheritance and influence of the two writers. Such research is important for constructing the literary connection between Lu Xun and Soseki, but there is still much room for further comparative interpretations of their texts.This article intends to extend the literary discussion of Lu Xun and Soseki’s work in terms of their conformity and innovation across various genres—novels, prose and prose poetry, and demonstrate in these, a visionary and transitive discourse system.The paper compares three texts by each author within three interpretive frameworks:1. Spatial narrative or space construction in Lu Xun’s Call to Arms and Soseki’s I Am a Cat. Space is an important element in the construction of the two texts and assumes the corresponding narrative functions such as viewpoint and aggregation. It affects the direction of characters and events, participates in the construction of the text’s main theme.2. The space of “surplus words”. Another aspect of narrative spatiality is the leisurely excess of quotidian expression, characterized by Soseki as “Yu Yu”. This is demonstrated in Lu Xun’s Zhaohua Xishi and Soseki’s Eijitsu Syohin. Soseki describes the trivialities of daily life in a calm tone, overflowing with the plunge into and submersion into life itself. When Lu Xun wrote Zhaohua Xishi, he tried to use the warm characters in his memory to illuminate the lonely heart in a similarly realistic context, so as to obtain the effect of tranquility in the turbulence. Lu Xun and Soseki launch differing social themes from a similar spatial threshold of leisureliness.3. The space of internal monologue and projection of the psyche. Wild Grass and Dreams of Ten Nights are both expressions of the monologue of life, showing the prose poems composed by the authors as explorations and meditations of the soul, projecting an inner psychic space. In these works, the twists and turns of psychological reality are intertwined with surreal images and dreams, and a text space unique to each of Lu Xun and Soseki is constructed with their personalized meditations.These comparisons demonstrate Lu Xun’s tacit understanding of Soseki’s concepts and techniques. It is intended that this textual analysis of the discourse systems of these two writers can contribute both to the literary discussion of Lu Xun and Soseki, and to the growing field of Chinese/Japanese comparative literature.
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Received: 30 December 2019
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2022, Vol. 52 
