Urban Scenes

By Liu Na’ou

Translated by Yaohua Shi and Judith Amory

(1920s, translated 2023)

Cambria Press

Cambria Sinoist Translation Series
Liu Na’ou was born in Taiwan in 1905 during the Japanese occupation. He spent his formative years at high school and college in Tokyo, where he majored in literature and fell in love with the Modernist New Sensationalism championed by  Riichi Yokomitsu and Yasunari Kawabata. This style emphasized realism, a focus on the experiences of the proletarian, and Marxist viewpoints. The practitioners of Japanese New Sensationalism took inspiration from European films; some even went on to write successful scripts  After college, Liu decided to begin his professional life in Shanghai. He founded several literary magazines, published short stories, and produced scripts for films. He was assassinated in 1940; it is believed he was targeted for his political views as well as the decadent lifestyles of the characters he portrayed in his stories. Urban Scenes contains eleven stories. Many are set in gaudy hotels, bars, and dance halls. The men are often rakish or gleefully addicted to idleness and pleasure. Everyone seems to be on the make, including the modern, unbound, and grasping young women; these are the bobbed, sexual provocateurs and powerbrokers readers might recognize from Tanizaki’s Naomi or Lee Hyo-seok’s Endless Blue Skies. The best in the collection are told through the eyes of European men–French– who are hyperfocused on seducing Chinese beauties. Liu effectively reveals the stereotypes and fantasies that drive these men as they chase their delusions through the Shanghai nights. Standouts in the collection are the comic “Two Men Insensible to Time,” the scandalous studio of an artist in the French Concession in “Etiquette and Hygiene,” and the touching “Cotton Quilt,” which is one of the few tales that abandon the flashing lights of Shanghai’s pleasure domes for the back streets and shanties of the poor. Most stunning in exposing the curse of the modern is “Below the Equator,” where a loveless couple tries to rekindle their faltering relationship on the shores of a tropical island.

Below is a moment from “Scenery.”

“She seemed to have just come from the dining car, still carrying the strong aroma of Brazilian coffee… for Ranqing neither the scenery nor the news (about disarmament, Hu Hanmin’s view on the current political situation, the horrific death of a Belgian millionaire, and the revolutionary talkies) mattered any more. Naturally, his eyes went to the tangible reality before him and the human temptation there. 

With her boyish bob and European-style short dress, anyone could tell she was a product of the modern metropolis. But that straight, sensible nose and those lively, nonchalant eyes would be rare even in a metropolis. Although her frame was small and delicate, the generous lines of her bosom and waist elicited thoughts of supple flesh. Looking from that neck down to the small, round shoulders and the curves of her upper arms, you would think she had just jumped off a canvas by Derain.

But most remarkable was that nervous pair of lips, like a small, overripe pomegranate that had split in two. She wasn’t a matron and certainly not a concubine. A student? She didn’t seem the right age… As Ranqing pondered, he suddenly saw the pomegranate open and a clear crystal sound struck his ear. ‘What’s so interesting, sir?’”