LAUSR

This essay is the first study from a racial perspective of Travels in China (1925), the travelogue by the renowned Taisho Japanese short-story writer Akutagawa Ryūnosuke. The essay draws attention to the colourized body in a multiracial environment under semicolonialism and discusses how Akutagawa’s travelogue demonstrates the destruction of racial identities, including the conceptual white. Unlike other studies of Travels in China, which usually discuss Akutagawa’s trip as a whole, I divide his route into four zones – each corresponding to a chapter in the travelogue – and analyze them individually (with the understanding that none of the four zones should be considered isolated, homogeneous spaces). Tracking his route from Shanghai to the lower and middle Yangtze River, then to the northern part of the continent, and even back to Japan, we see how he, as well as those around him, ceaselessly examines his own skin colour in response to the power struggles across national, ethnic, and cultural boundaries. With ample evidence from a detailed reading of the text, this essay demonstrates the vagueness, fluidity, and instability of racial categories. For the traveller Akutagawa, in his experiences of everyday semicolonialism, race functions as a cognitive mechanism through which he absorbs and processes the social significance of each skin colour. In this way, skin colour becomes an open-ended concept (or a living metaphor) for Akutagawa rather than an inherited essence, the meaning and signification of which change depending on the different social contexts that he encounters.