Readings in Contemporary Chinese Literature

Harvard University Press Belknap Press

Chapter Title: Professor Fujino

Book Title: Wild Grass and Morning Blossoms Gathered at Dusk Book Author(s): LU XUN Book Editor(s): THEODORE HUTERS Published by: Harvard University Press, Belknap Press. (2022) Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv2vr9cj4.40

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201

Professor Fujino

藤野先生

So this was all there was to Tokyo.71 Cherry blossoms radiating at the peak of the season in Ueno, seen from afar, resembled light pufs of crimson- colored clouds. But under the blossoms, there was no shortage of clusters of cram- course students from the Qing empire.72 The long queues coiled on top of their heads made the crown of their caps rise majestically like Mount Fuji. Some others undid their queues and coiled the hair flat on top of their heads; when they removed their caps, the hair gleamed like a young lady’s chignon, which they would toss about with a few twists of the neck. Truly an exquisite sight.

The gate house of the Chinese student hostel sold some books, so it was still worth going there from time to time. In the mornings, a few Western- style rooms there were also fine for resting. Come eve- ning, however, the floorboard of a par tic u lar room would invariably reverberate with earthshaking pounds “dong, dong, dong!” and the whole room would fill with smoke and dust. Ask those in the know and they would reply: “They are learning to dance.”

This essay was originally published in volume 1, issue 23, of the journal Wilderness (Mangyuan) on December 25, 1926. Lu Xun, Lu Xun quanji (Complete works of Lu Xun), 18 vols. (Beijing: Renmin wenxue, 2005), 2:313–320.

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202 Morning Blossoms Gathered at Dusk

Why not go elsewhere for a look? So I made my way to the Sendai Medical Acad emy. Not long after

departing from Tokyo, we arrived at a transit station with “Nippori” written on it. Somehow, I still remember the name to this day. I re- member only one other stop, Mito, the place where the Ming loyalist Zhu Shunshui died in exile. Sendai was a mid- sized market- town, ex- tremely cold in the winter, and at the time no Chinese students were studying there yet.73

It’s prob ably the case that the scarcer the good, the more it is prized. When sent to fruit stands in Zhejiang, cabbages from Beijing are hung upside down with a red string tied around their roots and referred to respectfully as “Shandong vegetables.” When wild aloe from Fujian arrives in Beijing, it is immediately escorted into a green- house and addressed by the beautiful name “Dragon Tongue Or- chid.” When I arrived in Sendai, I, too, received such preferential treatment: not only did the acad emy not charge tuition, a few of its staf even expressed concern over my room and board. At first I lived in a guest house next to the prison. It was already quite cold in early winter, but there were still many mosquitoes. So I resorted to cov- ering my whole body in a quilt and wrapping my clothes around my head and face, leaving only two nostrils exposed for breathing. The mosquitoes had nowhere to insert their beaks into this space of continuous breathing, so I was able to sleep peacefully. The food wasn’t bad either. But there was one teacher who felt that the guest house, which also prepared meals for the prisoners, wasn’t a suitable place for me to live and repeated this to me over and over again. Though I felt that the guest house preparing the prisoners’ meals had no bearing on me, it was difficult to rebuf good inten- tions, so I ended up having to look for another more suitable place to live. And so I moved to another guest house far from the prison,

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Professor Fujino 203

but the pity of it was that I had to drink unpalatable taro- root soup— every day.

From this time on, I encountered many new teachers and heard many novel lectures. The anatomy course was co- taught by two pro- fessors. First was osteology. A thin, dark gentleman with a mustache the shape of the character “eight” (八), wearing spectacles and carry ing a pile of books of vari ous sizes, entered. After setting his books on the lectern, he introduced himself to the students, speaking in a drawn- out voice with a distinct cadence:

“I am called Fujino Genkurō . . .” A few people in the rear of the classroom started snickering. He

then lectured on the history of the development of anatomical sci- ences in Japan. His stack of large and small books included the ear- liest works to the most recent publications in this field of study. Among the earliest were a few books bound with thread and reprints of Chi- nese translations. Their translations and study of modern medicine, it turns out, did not precede the Chinese.

The snickering students sitting at the rear had been held back after failing the class the previous academic year; having already been at the school for a year, they were well- versed in vari ous anecdotes. They regaled the new students with the history of each professor. This Professor Fujino was said to be rather careless when it came to his attire—at times he would even forget to wear a tie. In the winter he would be cold and shivering in his old overcoat; one time on the train he was mistaken for a pickpocket by the conductor, who warned all the passengers to be vigilant.

There was prob ably some truth to what they said— I saw him once, with my own eyes, enter the lecture hall without a tie.

After a week had elapsed, likely on a Saturday, he had his assis- tant summon me. When I arrived, he was seated in the center of the

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204 Morning Blossoms Gathered at Dusk

lab, surrounded by human bones and a good many detached skulls. He was doing research on skulls then, the results of which were later published in the school journal.

“Are you able to copy down my lectures?” he asked. “I can take down parts of them.” “Let me have a look!” I handed him my lecture notes, which he took and returned to

me two or three days later, telling me to hand in my notes for him to look over once a week from then on. When I retrieved my note- book and flipped it open for a look, I was taken by surprise and felt, at the same time, a sense of both unease and gratitude, for it turned out that my notes had been supplemented and corrected with red ink from beginning to end. Not only were there additions of things I had missed, but every grammar error had also been corrected. This went on until he finished teaching all the subjects he was responsible for: osteology, angiology, neurology.

It was a pity that I was not very diligent then and at times even rather headstrong. I still recall an instance when Professor Fujino summoned me into his lab and flipped to a par tic u lar diagram in my lecture notes. Pointing to a blood vessel below the arm, he said to me amiably:

“See here, you moved the position of this blood vessel slightly. Of course, the alteration does indeed make it more pleasing to the eye, but anatomical illustrations aren’t works of art, and we can’t just change how things actually look. I’ve corrected it for you this time, but in the future, you have to copy every thing as it looks on the blackboard.”

Yet, I still wasn’t convinced. While I agreed in reply, in my mind I thought to myself:

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Professor Fujino 205

“I still drew a fine diagram. As for how things actually look, of course I remember it in my mind.”

After the final exams of the academic year were over, I vacationed in Tokyo the whole summer and returned in the early fall. Grades had long been posted— I was in the middle of the pack of over a hun- dred students, but I hadn’t failed. This time Professor Fujino was responsible for teaching practical anatomy and topographic anatomy.

After about a week of practical anatomy, he summoned me again, looking very pleased, and said to me in his cadenced voice:

“I’d heard that the Chinese revere ghosts, so I was worried— I was afraid that you would be reluctant to dissect corpses. Now I can fi nally rest at ease since this isn’t the case.”

But there were also times when he made me feel embarrassed. He’d heard that Chinese women had bound feet but didn’t know the specifics, so he wanted to ask me how feet were bound and what shape the deformed bones assumed. He even heaved a sigh as he said: “I need to actually see it for myself to understand. How, exactly, is it done?”

One day, the student union representatives for my class came to my dorm asking to borrow my lecture notes. I took out and handed over the notes, but they simply flipped through them once without taking them away. But as soon as they left, the mailman delivered a thick envelope. When I opened it, the first line read:

“You must repent!” This is prob ably a sentence from the New Testament but had re-

cently been cited by Tolstoy. This happened to be the time of the Russo- Japanese War, and Old Mr. Tolstoy had written a letter to both the tsar of Rus sia and the emperor of Japan which started out with this sentence. The Japa nese newspapers reprimanded him for his

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206 Morning Blossoms Gathered at Dusk

irreverence, and the young patriots were also outraged, but they had unknowingly come under his influence a long time ago. The rest of the letter said in efect that I was able to attain my grade because I knew the questions on last year’s anatomy exam ahead of time, as Professor Fujino had marked them on my lecture notes. It was an anonymous letter.

It was only then that I recalled the matter from a few days be- fore. A meeting was to be held among students in my class, and the student representatives had written an announcement on the black- board, the last sentence of which read: “Every one please attend— it’s impor tant not to leak this,” with a circle added beside the character “leak” for emphasis. Although I thought the circle was ridicu lous at the time, I didn’t take it to heart in the least, and it was only after- ward that I realized the character was a jab directed at me, as if to say that I was the recipient of questions leaked by the instructor.

I then reported the matter to Professor Fujino. A few classmates who knew me well shared my sense of injustice, so they went together to reprimand the student representatives for their lack of courtesy in checking my notes under false pretenses and also asked that the re- sults of their investigation be published. The rumor was ultimately quashed, but the student representatives agitated for the retrieval of their anonymous letter. In the end I returned to them the letter written à la Tolstoy.

China is a weak country, so naturally the Chinese must be intel- lectually deficient; left to their own devices, they couldn’t possibly attain marks above sixty. No won der they were suspicious. But after that, I sufered the fate of having to witness the scene of a Chinese man executed by firing- squad.74 In my second year, there was an added class in bacteriology. The forms of all the bacteria were shown on slides. When we completed one section of the lesson before the class

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Professor Fujino 207

period was over, some slides on current events would be shown, which naturally all depicted Japan’s victories over Rus sia. Perversely enough, however, there just had to be a few Chinese squeezed into the scene: a Chinese spy for the Rus sians had been captured by the Japa nese and was about to be executed by firing squad; the flock of people who surrounded to witness the scene was also Chinese, and in the lecture hall, there was me.

“Banzai!” they all clapped and cheered. This cheering occurred regularly after each slide was shown, but

to me the sound this time was especially grating. After I returned to China, I saw idle onlookers cheering drunkenly as they watched criminals being executed by firing squad. Alas, nothing can be done! But at that par tic u lar place and time, my thinking underwent a transformation.

At the end of my second year, I sought out Professor Fujino to tell him that I would no longer study medicine and that I would be leaving Sendai. A pained expression appeared on his face, and it seemed as if he were about to speak, but in the end, he said nothing.

“I’d like to go study biology. All the knowledge you have taught me will still come in handy.” The truth is, I hadn’t de cided to study biology, but seeing how dejected he looked, I told a lie in hopes of comforting him.

“I’m afraid that the anatomy and other classes taught as part of medical studies won’t be of any great help in studying biology,” he said with a sigh.

A couple of days before my departure, he summoned me to his house, handed me a photo graph of himself, on the back of which had written two characters: “惜别 xibie” (regret at our parting). He also said he hoped that I, too, would give him a photo. But I hadn’t had any photos taken at the time, so he asked me to send him one in the

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208 Morning Blossoms Gathered at Dusk

future and to correspond with him regularly and inform him of my circumstances thereafter.

After I left Sendai, I didn’t have any photos taken for many years. And because I was at sixes and sevens for some time, to tell him of my situation would no doubt just have brought him disappointment, so I didn’t even have the courage to write a letter. As the months and years went by, it became even harder to know where to begin, so while the thought of writing occurred to me from time to time, I found it difficult to take up my pen— which remains the case even now, as I have actually never sent him a letter or a photo graph. From his perspective, there was basically no news of me whatsoever after my departure.

Figure 7. Photo of Fujino Genkurō , which he gave to Lu Xun as a parting gift. “Regret at our parting” is inscribed on the back. Reproduced from Lu Xun wenxian tu zhuan (Illustrated biography and documents of Lu Xun) (Zhengzhou: Daxiang chubanshe, 1998), 36.

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Professor Fujino 209

But for some unknown reason, I often think of him. Among those whom I consider my teachers, he is the one who gave me the most encouragement and the one I feel most grateful to. I often think of how his ardent hopes for me, his tireless teaching, were, on a smaller scale, for China, in hopes that China would develop a modern med- ical science; on a larger scale, it was for scientific research, that is, in hopes that modern medical science would be transmitted to China. In my mind and in my heart, his character is a great one, even though his name isn’t known to many people.

I had the lecture notes he corrected bound into three thick vol- umes, planning to keep them as lifelong mementos. Unfortunately, when I was moving seven years ago, a box was damaged in transit and I lost half the books in it, which, by happenstance, included the lecture notes.75 When I instructed the transport com pany to look for them, I received no response. All I have left is the photo graph, which remains to this day hanging on the eastern wall across from my desk in my residence in Beijing. Whenever I feel tired in the eve ning, right when I want to slack of, I look up and in the lamplight catch a glimpse of his thin, dark face, as if on the verge of saying something in that cadenced voice. This immediately arouses my conscience and em- boldens my courage, and I then light a cigarette and resume writing a few more things bitterly despised by the “estimable gentlemen” and their ilk.76

October 1277

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