A retired country doctor, pressed by a newspaper man hunting for a heartwarming Sino-Japanese story, recalls his Sendai classmate Zhou Shuren, the future Lu Xun. Through nights at an inn in Matsushima and talk of science, literature and China, he pieces together the young Zhou's idealism and the day he abruptly left medical school.
Books mentioned in Farewell (8)
Mr. Fujino by Lu Xun: “Well, you see, when I read Lu Xun's essay titled Mr. Fujino, it says that around 1904 and 1905, during the Russo-Japanese War, Lu Xun was at the Sendai medical school and was greatly looked after by a teacher named Genkuro Fujino. [auto-translated]”
Mozi by Mozi: “In the Chinese book Mozi it is written that the inventor Gongshu showed Mozi a magpie made of bamboo and boasted that, once released into the sky, this toy would fly about for three days; Mozi frowned, said it still could not match a carpenter making a wheel, and had the dangerous toy thrown away. [auto-translated]”
Evolution and Ethics by Thomas Henry Huxley: “Among the students too it was the fashion to read new books, and above all Yan Fu's Chinese translation, the Tianyan Lun, won overwhelming popularity. It was a translation into classical Chinese of the naturalist Thomas Huxley's Evolution and Ethics, and one Sunday I went out to the south of the city to buy it myself. [auto-translated]”
Exhortation to Learn by Zhang Zhidong: “A couple of years earlier, even the famous Exhortation to Learn that Zhang Zhidong had written strongly stressed the need to study in Japan, and the government had begun sending a few Chinese students to Japan each year. [auto-translated]”
Kaitai Shinsho by Sugita Genpaku: “That first lecture was a history of the development of anatomy in Japan, and the large and small books the teacher brought were all Japanese works on anatomy from ancient times to the present. Sugita Genpaku's Kaitai Shinsho and Rangaku Koto Hajime were among them. [auto-translated]”
Rangaku Koto Hajime by Sugita Genpaku: “The large and small books the teacher brought were all Japanese works on anatomy, from ancient times to the present. Sugita Genpaku's Kaitai Shinsho and Rangaku Koto Hajime were among them, and he described in his slow, distinctive way the tension of Genpaku and his friends as they dissected a criminal's corpse at the Kozukappara… [auto-translated]”
Quanti Xinlun by Benjamin Hobson: “Physiology was not taught at school, but reading the woodblock-printed Quanti Xinlun and Huaxue Weisheng Lun, we learned ever more clearly that Chinese medicine was nothing but conscious or unconscious deception. [auto-translated]”
Huaxue Weisheng Lun by John Fryer: “Physiology was not taught at school, but reading the woodblock-printed Quanti Xinlun and Huaxue Weisheng Lun, we learned ever more clearly that Chinese medicine was nothing but conscious or unconscious deception. [auto-translated]”