Preface to "A China Travelogue"
Written in October 1925, this brief preface looks back on Akutagawa’s journey through China in 1921 and the newspaper dispatches that grew out of it. He explains how the different sections were composed: some in daily installments, one left unfinished, another written in only a couple of days, and others preserved from picture postcards. His closing comparison of journalistic brilliance to theatrical lightning gives the account a characteristic touch of self-mockery. The translation retains the preface’s single prose paragraph, followed by its date and signature. It also distinguishes the original journey from the later writing and publication of the collected volume.
The volume A China Travelogue is, after all, the product of the journalistic talent that Heaven bestowed upon me—or inflicted upon me. At the request of the Osaka Mainichi newspaper, I spent more than a hundred and twenty days, from late March to early July of 1921, traveling through Shanghai, Nanjing, Jiujiang, Hankou, Changsha, Luoyang, Beijing, Datong, Tianjin, and other places. After returning to Japan, I wrote Shanghai Travelogue and Jiangnan Travelogue in daily installments. Yangtze Travelogue is another unfinished work: I began writing it, likewise in daily installments, after Jiangnan Travelogue. I did not necessarily write Selections from a Beijing Diary in daily installments. Still, I seem to remember writing the whole thing in about two days. As for A Bundle of Miscellaneous Letters, I decided to include, for the most part just as they stood, what I had written on picture postcards. Yet it is certain that my journalistic talent flashes through these dispatches too, like lightning—at least like the lightning in a theater.
October 1925
Written by Ryunosuke Akutagawa