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them inconsolable agony before they die?’
    ‘But even if we succeed in waking only the few, there is still hope – hope that the iron house may one day be destroyed.’
    He was right: however hard I tried, I couldn’t quite obliterate my own sense of hope. Because hope is a thing of the future: my denial of it failed to convince him. In the end I agreed to write something for him: my first short story, ‘Diary of a Madman’. And once I had started, I found it impossible to stop, rattling off poor imitations of fiction to keep my earnest friends quiet, until in time I found myself the author of some dozen pieces.
    I thought I had changed: that I was no longer the kind of person who felt the imperative to speak out. Yet neither could I forget the lonely sorrows of my youth. And so I found myself issuing a few battle-cries of my own, if only to offer comfort or sympathy to those still fighting through their loneliness, and toalleviate their fear of the struggles ahead. I have no interest in passing judgement on these things of mine: on whether they are brave, despondent, contemptible or ridiculous. But since they are battle-cries, I naturally had to follow my generals’ orders. So I often stooped to distortions and untruths: adding a fictitious wreath of flowers to Yu’er’s grave in ‘Medicine’; forbearing to write that Mrs Shan never dreams of her son in ‘Tomorrow’, because my generalissimos did not approve of pessimism. And I didn’t want to infect younger generations – dreaming the glorious dreams that I too had dreamed when I was young – with the loneliness that came to torment me.
    These attempts of mine are no works of art; that I understand perfectly well. And yet I now enjoy the great good fortune of seeing them collected together and passed off as a volume of fiction. Though I feel some unease at this undeserved stroke of luck, it also brings me some happiness – that they might, at least fleetingly, find a readership.
    And so I have dispatched my pieces to the printer and, for the reasons given above, named them
Outcry
.
    Lu Xun
    3 December 1922, Beijing

DIARY OF A MADMAN
     
    At school I had been close friends with two brothers whose names I will omit to mention here. As the years went by after we graduated, however, we gradually lost touch. Not long ago, I happened to hear that one of them had been seriously ill and, while on a visit home, I broke my journey to call on them. I found only one of them at home, who told me it was his younger brother who had been afflicted. Thanking me for my concern, he informed me that his brother had long since made a full recovery and had left home to wait for an appropriate official post to fall vacant. Smiling broadly, he showed me two volumes of a diary his brother had written at the time, explaining that they would give me an idea of the sickness that had taken hold of him and that he saw no harm in showing them to an old friend. Reading them back home, I discovered his brother had suffered from what is known as a ‘persecution complex’. The text was fantastically confused, and entirely undated; it was only differences in ink and styles of handwriting that enabled me to surmise parts of the text were written at different times. Below, I have extracted occasional flashes of coherence, in the hope they may be of use to medical research. While I have not altered a single one of the author’s errors, I have changed all the local names used in the original, despite the personal obscurity of the individuals involved. Finally, I have made use of the title chosen by the invalid himself following his full recovery.
    2 April 1918

I
     
    The moon is bright tonight.
    I had not seen it for thirty years; the sight of it today was extraordinarily refreshing. Tonight, I realized I have spent the past thirty years or more in a state of dream; but I must still be careful. Why did the Zhaos’ dog look twice at me?
    I have reason to be afraid.

II
     
    No moon tonight;