Liú Dōng Wàishǐ 留東外史
An Unofficial History of Sojourners in Japan (Parts 1–2) by 不肖生 (撰)
About the work
Liú Dōng Wàishǐ 留東外史 is one of the most important early Republican-era novels about Chinese students studying in Japan (“liúdōng” 留東, “staying in the East”). The text in KR4k0296 comprises the first two parts (章 1–90) of the full work. It was authored by 不肖生 (Bù Xiào Shēng, “The Unworthy Scholar”), the pen name of Xiàng Kǎirán 向愷然 (1889–1957), a Hunan-born novelist who later became the founding figure of modern Chinese martial-arts (wǔxiá 武俠) fiction. The novel was begun in Tokyo in December 1914 (Mínguó sān nián shí’èr yuè shíwǔ rì 民國三年十二月十五日, as the author states in the opening chapter) and published by the Shìjiè Shūjú 世界書局 (World Book Company, Shanghai) from 1916 onward.
About the work
The author’s self-introduction in chapter 1 is remarkably candid: Xiàng Kǎirán describes sitting alone in a Tokyo hotel room in December 1914, composing the novel as a record of the scandals, debauchery, and moral failures of his fellow Chinese sojourners in Japan. He identifies four categories of Chinese residents in Japan — conscientious students, legitimate merchants, dissolute parasites living off government stipends, and political exiles — and announces his intention to focus on the latter two. The narrative proceeds through a loose episodic structure centered on recurring characters: the scholar Zhū Chīshēng 朱癡生, the buffoon Luó Dāizi 羅呆子, the schemer Zhāng Quán 張全, and various Japanese courtesans (yìjì 藝妓) and predatory landlords. The milieu is vividly rendered — Tokyo neighborhoods (Asakusa 淺草, Ueno 上野, Shinjuku 新橋 [Shinbashi], Kanda 神田), Japanese restaurant culture, the Yoshiwara pleasure quarters, and the social dynamics of the expatriate Chinese community of the Meiji and early Taishō eras.
The novel is notable for its mixture of social satire, exposé fiction (hēimù xiǎoshuō 黑幕小說), romantic comedy, and martial-arts vignettes (Xiàng Kǎirán was an accomplished martial artist and wove episodes of wǔshù 武術 into the narrative). The prose is energetic colloquial Mandarin with an edge of sardonic humor.
Tiyao
No tiyao found in source.
Abstract
Liú Dōng Wàishǐ was drafted by Xiàng Kǎirán during his second sojourn in Japan, which began around 1912 when he enrolled in the Department of Political Economy at Tōkyō Chūō University (東京中央大學). He had first gone to Japan in 1905 after being expelled from his Hunanese school for participating in the public memorial for the activist Chén Tiānhuá 陳天華, who drowned himself in Japan in protest. Back in China for a period, Xiàng returned to Japan around 1912. The novel was thus composed from direct personal experience of the Japanese sojourner community during 1912–1914.
The first edition was serialized and published in Shanghai from 1916 by the Shìjiè Shūjú. The work ran in multiple “parts” (bù 部): the Kanripo text KR4k0296 covers parts 1–2 (chapters 1–90), while the sequel text KR4k0297 covers part 3 (chapters 61–70, the Kanripo file being an excerpt of additional material). The novel was a commercial success and established Xiàng Kǎirán as a professional fiction writer in Shanghai.
John Christopher Hamm’s monograph The Unworthy Scholar from Pingjiang: Republican-Era Martial Arts Fiction (Columbia University Press, 2019) is the first book-length study of Xiàng Kǎirán’s fiction in any language. Hamm argues that Liú Dōng Wàishǐ, far from being the culturally regressive entertainment its May Fourth critics dismissed it as, represents a sophisticated engagement with contemporary social currents and the emerging literary marketplace.
The pen name 不肖生 (“The Unworthy Scholar”) was explained by Xiàng Kǎirán as a philosophical allusion to Laozi’s Dàodé Jīng 道德經: “天下皆謂道大，夫惟其大，故似不肖” — “All under heaven say the Way is great and resembles nothing [bù xiào].” The “Píngjiāng” (平江) prefix, used in his later pen name 平江不肖生, refers to his ancestral county in Hunan.
Translations and research
- Hamm, John Christopher. 2019. The Unworthy Scholar from Pingjiang: Republican-Era Martial Arts Fiction. Columbia University Press. The first monograph on Xiàng Kǎirán’s career, covering Liú Dōng Wàishǐ and his subsequent martial-arts novels.
- MCLC Resource Center review of Hamm’s monograph
- Xiang Kairan at the Science Fiction Encyclopedia
Other points of interest
Liú Dōng Wàishǐ is often identified as China’s first “overseas student novel” (liúxuéshēng xiǎoshuō 留學生小說) and is placed at the origin of a genre that became important throughout the twentieth century. Xiàng Kǎirán’s detailed rendering of early twentieth-century Tokyo — its neighborhoods, pleasure districts, restaurant culture, and expatriate social dynamics — gives the novel considerable value as a historical document of the Chinese experience in Meiji/Taishō Japan.