Diary of a Madman 狂人日记 (1981) #

Diary of a Madman 狂人日记, based on a short story by Lu Xun 鲁迅，written and drawn by Ye Guoding 叶国定, translated by Lena Henningsen, published in Fuchunjiang huabao 富春江画报 09/1981 (343), pp. 12-13.¹

translation and introduction: 1 August 2026

Translator’s note #

Lena Henningsen

Lu Xun’s “Diary of a Madman” is one of, if not THE foundational text of modern Chinese literature, first published in 1918 in the journal La Jeunesse 新青年. The “Diary” is an ambiguous story challenging notions of normalcy and madness, and conventionally it is read as a criticism of the inhuman premodern Chinese society with the cannibalism of the refered to in story read literally and metaphorically. It is impossible to do justice to this text and its reception in Chinese literature and society or to its impact within academia in a brief translator’s note. Therefore, I will delineate here how the story was turned into a lianhuanhua.

To begin with, this is a story of how the “Diary of a Madman” was NOT turned into lianhuanhua: While numerous of Lu Xun’s fictional and non-fictional texts were rendered as lianhuanhua across the decades, this story was only adapted into lianhuanhua more than 60 years after its first publication. Up until 1981, “The True Story of Ah Q” or “The New Year’s Sacrifice” had been adapted at least six and seven times respectively. Across the decades, famous lianhuanhua artists including Ding Cong, Feng Zikai or He Youzhi had adapted Lu Xun’s fiction. And many of his (autobiographical) essays had also been adapted, but not the “Diary”. This may, of course, be sheer coincidence – but I would conjecture that the drastic metaphor of cannibalism posed a challenge for lianhuanhua artists operating within the socialis realist framework of the Mao era. The cannibalistic nature of the scriptures, seen through the eyes of the madman and in his writing, is immediately and viscerally understandable. Yet, I argue, it would be difficult to find a realistic way to represent this visually without losing the ambiguity of the metaphor: Is it “real” or “only” metaphorical cannibalism? How trustworthy is the writing of the madman? And, if the notion of madness is ambiguous, then what is cannibalistic after all?

It is therefore not coincidental that the “Diary of a Madman” would be transformed into lianhuanhua after the end of the Cultural Revolution when the art form saw an expansion into a range of topics and aesthetic styles that would have been unacceptable only a few years before. It is also not coincidental that the early post-Mao years saw three lianhuanhua adaptations of the story: the one by Ye Guoding published in the 1981 edition of Fuchunjiang Huabao commemorating the centenary of Lu Xun provided here; and two woodcut adaptations published in lianhuanhua booklets by Zhang Huaijiang (completed in 1980 and first published in 1981) and by Zhao Yannian (first published in 1985).

What unites the three adaptations is their high degree of expressiveness, with the woodcut versions allowing, in particular, for extreme facial expressions mirroring the fear of the madman, or panel compositions foregrounding his sense of being lost. Ye Guoding’s drawings, in turn, are likewise defying all sense of realism, using distorted facial expressions, body-postures and intertwisted figures to transport a sense of gloominess across the story. All three adaptations are faithful to Lu Xun’s text, though to a different degree. The adaptations by Zhao and Zhang closely follow the entire text, only deleting or simplifying minimal amounts of text. Ye’s adaptation reduces the text significantly, devoting one panel to each of the 13 chapters of the story and its introductory note. With the exception of the introductory note which is rewritten more significantly, the other passages are compiled from small text units from the original, with likewise brief transitional text chunks as connections.

As mentioned, Ye Guoding’s adaptation forms part of a multi-page spread in Fuchunjiang Huabao published to commemorate Lu Xun’s hundredth birthday. The one-pager “A Pair of Tweezers” also translated for ChinaComx and available here, is another contribution to it. The “Diary” makes up just one and a half pages of the magazine, so we also provide the lower half of page 2, the very brief story “Kicking a Ghost”, narrating a straight-forward anecdote about Lu Xun as a young man renouncing superstition. This anecdote would have taken place a few years before he published the “Diary” and makes for an interesting counterpoint to the “Diary”: Passing a graveyard, Lu Xun recognizes a figure that seems ghostly – yet, as a modern person knowing there exist no such things as ghosts he steps forward, kicks the figure who turns out to be a tomb-rider.

Published in 1981, contemporaneous to numerous debates revisiting the past and the atrocities of the Cultural Revolution, this version of the “Diary of a Madman” could also be read allegorically as a reflection of the inhumanness of this recent past: Maybe, not only the premodern classics are cannibalistic? Maybe, the writings of Mao, taken up as guides to the correct (communist) morals were just as cannibalistic in how they turned some people into outcasts?

Read the translated lianhuanhua #

Page 01 / Panels 01-07

Page 02 / Panels 08-13 + 01-06