Diary of a Madman (Lu Xun)

Diary of a Madman, also translated as A Madman's Diary, is a short story by the Chinese writer Lu Xun, published in 1918. It was an early work written in vernacular Chinese in Republican-era China and became associated with the New Culture Movement; the diary form and the idea of a madman who sees reality more clearly than those around him were inspired by Nikolai Gogol's short story of the same title. Lu Xun's madman sees cannibalism both in his family and the village around him, and then finds it in the Confucian classics long credited with a humanistic concern for the mutual obligations of society, so the story can be read as a sardonic attack on traditional Chinese culture and a call for a new cultural direction. It is the opening story in Lu Xun's first collection and has often been referred to as China's first modern short story, and it was selected as one of the 100 best books in history by the Bokklubben World Library and listed among the ten best Asian novels of all time by The Telegraph in 2014.