Lu Xun Complete Works/en/Tengye xiansheng
Mr. Fujino
Mr. Fujino
Tokyo, when all was said and done, was no different. In the season when the cherry blossoms in Ueno Park were in their full, glorious bloom, they did indeed look from afar like light crimson clouds; but beneath the blossoms there was never a lack of "students from the Qing Empire" in their crash courses, with their long queues coiled on top of their heads, pushing the caps up into towering peaks that formed a veritable Mount Fuji. Some had undone their queues and wound them flat; when they removed their caps, the hair gleamed mirror-bright, like the chignon of a little girl, and they would twist their necks this way and that. Truly a ravishing sight.
In the porter's lodge of the Chinese Students' Association there were a few books for sale, and it was sometimes worth dropping in; in the mornings, one could sit quite comfortably in the Western-style rooms inside. But toward evening, the floor of one room would inevitably begin to thud and boom, while the whole place filled with smoke and dust. If you asked someone well versed in current affairs, the answer was: "That's dance practice."
Why not go somewhere else and have a look?
So I went to the Sendai Medical College. Not long after leaving Tokyo, we reached a station with a sign reading: Nippori. I do not know why, but I still remember that name to this day. After that I recall only Mito, the place where the Ming loyalist Master Zhu Shunshui had died in exile. Sendai was a small town, not large; the winters were bitterly cold; and there were as yet no Chinese students.
Probably I was valued for my rarity. When Beijing cabbage is shipped to Zhejiang, it is tied by the root with a red cord and hung upside down in the fruit shops, reverently titled "seaweed cabbage"; the wild aloe of Fujian, once it arrives in Beijing, is ushered into the greenhouse and grandly christened "dragon-tongue orchid." I too received such preferential treatment in Sendai: not only did the school charge no tuition, but several staff members even concerned themselves with my food and lodging. At first I stayed in an inn next to the prison; it was already early winter and quite cold, yet the mosquitoes were still plentiful. In the end I covered my entire body with the quilt, wrapped my head and face in clothing, and left only my two nostrils to breathe through. In this place of unceasing respiration, the mosquitoes found no opening to attack, and I actually slept soundly. The food was not bad either. But one gentleman insisted that this inn also supplied meals to the prisoners and that it was not suitable for me to live there, saying so again and again. Although I felt that the inn's catering to prisoners had nothing to do with me, I could not refuse such well-meaning concern and had to look for other lodgings. So I moved to another place, well away from the prison—but unfortunately had to endure, every day, an almost undrinkable taro-stalk soup.
From then on I saw many unfamiliar professors and heard many new lectures. Anatomy was taught by two professors. The first subject was osteology. In walked a dark-skinned, thin gentleman with a bristle mustache and spectacles, carrying a stack of books of various sizes under his arm. No sooner had he set the books on the lectern than he introduced himself to the students in a slow, well-cadenced voice:
"I am the one called Fujino Genkuro…"
A few people in the back laughed. He went on to describe the history of anatomy in Japan; the books of all sizes were works on this discipline from its beginnings to the present. Some of the earliest were thread-bound; there were even reprints of Chinese translations—in translating and researching the new medicine, they had not been earlier than China.
Those who laughed in the back were students who had failed the previous year and had already been at the school for a year, thoroughly familiar with its lore. They would lecture newcomers on the life history of each professor. This Mr. Fujino, they said, dressed in the most slovenly fashion, sometimes even forgetting to wear his tie; in winter he wore an old coat and was visibly shivering. Once, boarding a train, his appearance so alarmed the conductor that the man suspected him of being a pickpocket and warned the passengers to take care.
What they said was probably true, for I myself once saw him come to class without a tie.
After a week, on what must have been a Saturday, he sent his assistant to fetch me. In his research room he sat surrounded by human bones and many individual skulls—he was at that time studying skulls, and later published a paper about it in the school's journal.
"My lecture notes—can you copy them down?" he asked.
"I can copy some of them."
"Let me see!"
I handed him my copy of the notes; he took them. Two or three days later he returned them, saying that from now on I should bring them to him once a week. When I opened them, I was startled and felt at once both unease and gratitude. From beginning to end, my notes had been corrected in red ink—not only were many omissions filled in, but grammatical errors too were corrected one by one. This continued until he had finished teaching all his courses: osteology, angiology, neurology.
Unfortunately, I was not very diligent in those days, and sometimes quite willful. I remember one occasion when Mr. Fujino called me to his research room, turned to a drawing in my notes—the blood vessels of the forearm—pointed to it, and said kindly:
"You see, you've shifted this blood vessel a little. —Of course, shifted this way it does look rather more attractive, but an anatomical drawing is not art. The actual specimen looks like this, and we cannot alter it. I've corrected it for you now; from now on, draw exactly as it appears on the blackboard."
But I was unconvinced. I agreed aloud, yet thought to myself:
"My drawing is actually quite correct; as for the actual appearance, I naturally have it in my mind."
After the year-end examinations, I went to Tokyo for the summer. When I returned in early autumn, the results had long been posted: among over a hundred classmates, I ranked in the middle—I had merely not failed. This semester Mr. Fujino's courses were dissection practicum and regional anatomy.
After about a week of dissection practice, he summoned me again and said with evident pleasure, in his characteristically well-modulated voice:
"I had heard that the Chinese greatly revere ghosts, and so I was very worried that you might refuse to dissect cadavers. Now I can rest easy—there is no such problem."
But occasionally he did put me in an awkward position. He had heard that Chinese women bound their feet but did not know the details, and so he wanted me to explain how the binding was done, how the foot bones became deformed. And he sighed: "One really ought to see it to know what it's all about."
One day, the student council officers of our class came to my lodgings, asking to see my lecture notes. I brought them out and handed them over, but they only leafed through them and did not take them away. The moment they left, the postman delivered a thick letter. I opened it and read the first line:
"Repent!"
This was a sentence from the New Testament, one that Tolstoy had recently cited. It was the time of the Russo-Japanese War, and old Tolstoy had written a letter to the emperors of Russia and Japan that began with this very sentence. The Japanese press had sharply condemned his impudence, and patriotic young men were indignant, yet in secret they had long been influenced by him. The rest of the letter stated, in substance, that the anatomy exam questions of the previous year had been ones that Mr. Fujino had marked in the lecture notes, and that I had known them in advance—hence my results. It was unsigned.
Only then did I recall something that had happened a few days earlier. Because a class meeting was to be held, one of the officers had written an announcement on the blackboard; the last sentence read "Please attend in full number without omission," and beside the character for "omission" a circle had been drawn. Though I had found the circle amusing at the time, I had thought nothing of it; only now did I realize that the character was also a jab at me—implying that I had received exam questions "leaked" by the instructor.
I reported the matter to Mr. Fujino; several classmates who knew me well were also indignant, and together they confronted the officers about the rudeness of their so-called inspection, demanding that they publish the results of their "investigation." The rumor eventually died, but the officers then energetically maneuvered to get the anonymous letter back. In the end, I returned the Tolstoyan letter to them.
China is a weak nation, and therefore the Chinese are naturally imbeciles; a score above sixty cannot be the product of one's own ability—small wonder they were suspicious. But soon afterward I was fated to watch the execution of Chinese on screen. In the second year, bacteriology was added; the shapes of bacteria were demonstrated entirely by film. When a section was finished and there was still time before class ended, a few newsreel clips were shown—all, naturally, scenes of Japan's victories over Russia. But among them appeared Chinese as well: working as spies for the Russians, captured by the Japanese, about to be shot, while the crowd looking on was also Chinese—and in the lecture hall sat one more Chinese: myself.
"Banzai!" they all clapped and cheered.
Such cheering accompanied every clip, but to me this particular cry rang especially harshly. Later, when I returned to China and saw those people who cheered at executions as if in a drunken stupor—alas, there was nothing to be done! But at that time and place, my views had changed.
Toward the end of the second academic year, I sought out Mr. Fujino and told him I would not continue studying medicine and would be leaving Sendai. His face seemed tinged with sadness; he appeared to want to say something, but in the end said nothing.
"I intend to study biology; the knowledge you have taught me will still be useful." In truth I had not resolved to study biology; seeing his distress, I told him a comforting lie.
"The anatomy taught for the purpose of medicine is, I'm afraid, of little help to biology," he sighed.
In the days before my departure, he invited me to his home and gave me a photograph, on the back of which he had written two characters: "Parting with sorrow." He asked me to give him one of mine as well. But at that moment I happened to have no photograph; he urged me to have one taken later and send it to him, and to write to him regularly about my circumstances.
After I left Sendai, I did not have my photograph taken for many years, and since my circumstances were bleak and any account of them could only disappoint him, I did not even dare to write. As the years accumulated, it became ever harder to begin; and so, though I sometimes wished to write, I could never bring myself to put pen to paper. To this day I have not sent him a single letter or a single photograph. From his perspective, I had simply gone and vanished without a trace.
Yet I do not know why—I still think of him from time to time. Among all those I regard as my teachers, he is the one who inspires in me the deepest gratitude and gives me the greatest encouragement. Sometimes I think: his warm hopes for me, his tireless instruction—in small terms, it was for China, that China might have a new medicine; in larger terms, it was for scholarship, that the new medicine might reach China. His character, in my eyes and in my heart, is great, even though his name is not known to many.
The lecture notes he had corrected I once had bound into three thick volumes and kept as a permanent memento. Unfortunately, seven years ago during a move, a crate of books was damaged in transit and half the books were lost; these notes happened to be among them. I charged the shipping company with finding them, but no reply ever came. Only his photograph still hangs to this day on the east wall of my Beijing lodgings, facing my desk. When at night I grow weary and am about to slack off, I look up and catch a glimpse in the lamplight of his dark, thin face, which seems about to speak in that well-cadenced voice, and suddenly my conscience stirs and my courage grows. I light a cigarette and continue writing those texts that the "upright gentlemen" so bitterly detest.
October twelfth.