Lu Xun: Short Stories, Style and What to Learn
1881 to 1936
Quick answer: Lu Xun craft file: the implicated narrator, the preface as frame, "A Madman's Diary", "Kong Yiji", "The New Year's Sacrifice", and what the first modern Chinese stories teach.
Quick facts
- Born: 1881, Shaoxing, Zhejiang, as Zhou Shuren
- Died: 1936, Shanghai, aged 55
- Wrote in: Chinese, in the modern vernacular he helped create
- Known for: "A Madman's Diary", "Kong Yiji", "The True Story of Ah Q"
- Signature move: An educated narrator who fails the person he is describing, and knows it
- Start with: "Kong Yiji" (1919), five pages
Lu Xun wrote about twenty-five short stories, all between 1918 and 1925, and they are the foundation of modern Chinese fiction. He quit medical school in Japan, he later said, after a lantern slide of Chinese onlookers at an execution convinced him the sickness was not medical. The stories diagnose it: a village that will not let a widow into its temple, a tavern that laughs at a broken scholar, a friend who now calls you Master.
What he actually does on the page
He puts the narrator on trial with the town. "Kong Yiji" (1919) is told by a man remembering his boyhood as a waiter in a Shaoxing tavern, where a failed scholar who still speaks in classical phrases comes to drink and is mocked by the regulars. Kong steals books, is beaten, has his legs broken, and crawls in one last time on his hands. The narrator laughed with the rest. The final line, that he probably died, carries the indifference the boy learned behind the counter.
He uses a frame to contain the madness and indict the frame. "A Madman's Diary" (1918) opens with a preface in classical Chinese from a friend who reports that the diarist has recovered and taken a government post, then gives the diary in the new vernacular: a man's growing conviction that his village, his brother and his doctor eat people, and that he has too. The cure the preface reports is the horror the diary describes. The story's last words ask someone to save the children.
He builds a scene around a threshold. In "The New Year's Sacrifice" (1924) Xianglin's Wife, twice widowed, her child taken by a wolf, buys a threshold for the temple to be trodden on in her place, and is still refused the sacrificial dishes. The narrator, an educated visitor home for the festival, meets her begging and she asks him whether there is a soul after death. He says he is not sure, and she is dead the next day. The fireworks of the New Year end the story.
The signature move
The implicated narrator is dissected best in "My Old Home" (1921). The narrator returns to Shaoxing to sell the family house and is visited by Runtu, the peasant boy who was his closest friend one winter thirty years before. Runtu now stands in the doorway, worn out, with a child of his own, and greets the narrator as Master. A wall goes up; the narrator cannot say what he had wanted to say. Lu Xun gives the narrator no way through and no excuse; he leaves on the boat thinking about hope, and about how a road is made only by people walking it. A narrator's failure can be the whole plot, if he records it honestly and the writer refuses to redeem him.
Stories to read first
Seven stories, from the two collections.
What to steal for your own stories
Exercises drawn from the stories.
What not to copy
The diagnosis can swallow the people. In the weaker pieces the characters exist to be symptoms; Ah Q is a type more than a man. The classical allusions need notes now. Take the implicated narrator, the frame and the threshold; write your own town's sickness, not his.
Life at a glance
- 1881: Born in Shaoxing to a scholar family in decline
- 1904: Begins medical studies in Sendai, Japan, and abandons them within two years for literature
- 1918: "A Madman's Diary" appears in the journal New Youth, the first major story written in modern vernacular Chinese
- 1919: "Kong Yiji" and "Medicine"
- 1921: "My Old Home"; "The True Story of Ah Q" begins serialisation in December
- 1923: Call to Arms collects the first stories
- 1926: Wandering, including "The New Year's Sacrifice"
- 1936: Dies in Shanghai in October
What writers can take from this
- Put the narrator inside the crowd that did the harm.
- Let a formal frame contradict the informal truth inside it.
- Give the excluded character one object they hope will buy entry.
- Let one word of address change a whole relationship.
- Refuse the narrator any redemption the story has not earned.
Try it yourself
Someone returns to the town they left twenty years ago to close up a family house. A person who was their equal as a child comes to the door and addresses them with a title. Write the visit in under 1,000 words from the returner's point of view. They must record their own failure to speak honestly, and the story may not forgive them for it.
Questions
What is Lu Xun's best short story?
"The True Story of Ah Q" (1921 to 1922) is the most famous and "A Madman's Diary" (1918) the most historically important. Many readers rank "Kong Yiji" (1919) and "The New Year's Sacrifice" (1924) as his finest as stories.
How did Lu Xun influence the short story?
"A Madman's Diary" was the first major work of fiction in modern vernacular Chinese, and his two collections set the terms for Chinese realism for the rest of the century. Every Chinese writer since has had to answer him.
Is Lu Xun hard to read?
The stories are short and plain in translation; Julia Lovell's Penguin edition is the standard in English. Some knowledge of early twentieth-century China helps, and her notes supply it.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working writers. Updated September 2026.
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