 Yu Dafu was born
on December 7,1896 in Zhejiang Province. He made his debut as
a young poet in 1911. In the folowing year, he entered the precollege
class at Zhijiang University in Hangzhou, where he was later
suspended for participating in campus upheavals. He sailed with
his brother for Japan and entered Tokyo Number One High School's
pre-college class in 1914 and was admitted in 1919 to the Imperial
University, where he majored in economics. During his stay in
Japan he joined others in establishing the Creation Society for
the the advocacy of Chinese vernacular literature in 1921. Well-read
in Chinese classical literature and Western novels, he also became
fluent in Japanese, English and German. He wrote in a very subjective
mode, bringing to light the secrets and innermost feelings of
his characters, a style much influenced by the modern Japanese
watakushi shosetsu (I novel), a prose style he read while in
Japan between 1912 and 1922. His major short story, "Sinking",
is an autobiographical account of the loneliness and sexual frustration
experienced by its neurotic hero, a young Chinese student in
Japan. Like Lu Xin, he also joined the League of Left-Wing Writers
in 1930. in 1938 he fled to Singapore where he worked as a journalist.
When the city fell to the Japanese in 1942, he went underground
in Sumatra, working ostensibly as an interpreter for the Japanese
military police, who killed him in 1945. |
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