Whether Lu Xun imitated Ryunosuke Wasagawa

Lu Xun's short story "A Small Thing" tells readers a "trivial" story. "I" went out and hired a rickshaw, on the way, the driver accidentally knocked down a toiling Volkswagen, "I" thought that the toiling Volkswagen was pretending to be injured, wanted to blackmail people, and ordered the driver to leave quickly, not to cause trouble. But the coachman ignored it and instead picked up the injured person and asked her if she was injured. "I" thought to myself: The coachman is troublesome, but he is begging for food, let him think of his own way.

The Japanese writer Kenta Nishimura said in "The Train of Hard Labor": "When intellectuals see people with lower education than them, they often mistakenly think that their abilities are equally inferior in all aspects, so when they face 'inferior' people, they will embrace a kind of inferiority of 'I am absolutely not wrong'." In fact, this inferiority of "I am absolutely not wrong" does not only exist among intellectuals, but also exists in people of all walks of life and in all groups. And look at how Lu Xun deeply reflected:

When the coachman helped the injured man to the patrol station, "I suddenly felt a strange feeling, that his dusty rear shadow was tall when braking, and it was getting bigger and bigger, and I had to look up to see it." And gradually he almost became a kind of coercion against me, even to squeeze out the 'small' hidden under the leather robe." When the patrolman said to "me" and asked "me" to hire a car by himself, "without thinking, I grabbed a large handful of copper dollars from my coat bag, handed it to the patrolman, and said, 'Please give it to him..."'

Japanese Lu Xun research expert Fujii Saidao said that Lu Xun's novel is modeled on Ryunosuke Wasagawa's "Honey Orange". "Honey Orange" is about "I" seeing a country girl on the train, and the country girl desperately wants to open the window of the train, just to give the orange in her hand to the brothers who sent her off--this scene is deeply engraved in my heart, making me almost breathless. I realized that I had developed an inexplicable wave of joy from my heart. I lifted my head high and fixed my eyes on the girl as if I were looking at another person."

Fujii said that the narrative structure of the two novels is the same, and Lu Xun has studied the works of Ryunosuke Wasagawa, so he believes that Lu Xun's "A Small Thing" was influenced by Ryunosuke Wasagawa. I think this view is far-fetched. Zhu Ziqing's essays "Back Shadow" and "Honey Orange" also have similarities in plot, is it true that Zhu Ziqing is also imitating Ryunosuke Wasagawa?

I can't help but think of a slap on The Story of Zhang Ailing. At a "gathering of women writers" held by the magazine, someone asked Zhang Ailing whether her works were influenced by "Dream of the Red Chamber" in syntax. Zhang Ailing replied: "Yes, I am familiar with "Dream of the Red Chamber", but I will also be familiar with "The Journey of the Old Remnant", "The Legend of the Awakening Marriage", "The Golden Plum Bottle", "The Legend of the Flowers on the Sea", "Xiepu Chao", "Erma", "Divorce", and "Sunrise". Sometimes I use the syntax of "Dream of the Red Chamber" to borrow a little bit of the atmosphere of the old era, but that also depends on whether it is applicable or not. This answer, somewhat, has some emotion in it.

In the history of literature, the influence between writers and the connection between texts are very common. But the commonness of this phenomenon does not mean that researchers can arbitrarily tie two writers and two texts together, and such a connection and comparison is meaningless, not only is it not a serious study, sometimes even gossip.