Rainy Day Books

Author: Zhou Zuoren
Publisher:
Publication Date: 2002-01-01
Features: The Book of Rainy Days can well display the stylistic characteristics of Zhou Zuoren's early essays. This is appropriately described by his own words in the Second Preface as "I lately write essays, admiring the plain and natural style." Moreover, the saying "Beyond the daily necessities, we must have some useless play and enjoyment to make life interesting" (from Tea in Beijing) and "Accidental moments of leisure are also indispensable" (from Tea Drinking), reflect some new elements in the author's attitude toward life, differing somewhat from the image shown in books like Art and Life. In July 1925, Zhou Zuoren's diary records: "I compiled fifty-one old essays into The Book of Rainy Days and planned to publish it. Today, I finished it, but the preface is yet to be written." In the same year, in December, The Book of Rainy Days was first published by Beijing Xinchao Press. The title was originally the name of a column that Zhou Zuoren started in the Morning News Supplement in November 1923, "but it was discontinued after only six articles were written" (Second Preface). The first edition of the book actually contains fifty-three essays (Nostalgia, Jinan Road are listed under only one title in the table of contents), including two from 1921, five from 1922, four from 1923, twenty-six from 1924, and sixteen from January to June 1925, mostly works between the first two volumes of My Garden and the "Tea Talks." The Second Preface states: "Most of these are miscellaneous essays, not criticism or essays." This seems to emphasize a stylistic feature of the book. Connecting this to what is said in the Preface to My Garden that it "is not criticism," we can perceive some similarities in writing attitude between the two books. In The Book of Rainy Days, six essays (Nostalgia, etc.) (Second Preface mentions five, as it counts Nostalgia and Nostalgia II as one) were selected from My Garden (Morning News edition), originally classified as "miscellaneous essays," which further explains the slight differences between The Book of Rainy Days and the "My Garden" and "Oasis" sections of My Garden. It also says: "There are also some texts close to playfulness, like Letters from the Mountains, which are originally of the 'miscellaneous essay' type, but because they can also reveal my temperament, I included them in this collection." This can be seen as an interpretation of "miscellaneous essays." The last ten essays in The Book of Rainy Days and the first two volumes of My Garden (especially "My Garden") share a similar flavor. Overall, the two books primarily address life and works, with slight differences in emotional and rational inclinations. The Book of Rainy Days (perhaps it should also include "Tea Talks" from My Garden) can well display the stylistic characteristics of Zhou Zuoren's early essays. This is appropriately described by his own words in the Second Preface as "I lately write essays, admiring the plain and natural style." Moreover, the saying "Beyond the daily necessities, we must have some useless play and enjoyment to make life interesting" (from Tea in Beijing) and "Accidental moments of leisure are also indispensable" (from Tea Drinking), reflect some new elements in the author's attitude toward life, differing somewhat from the image shown in books like Art and Life. This primarily relates to the expansion of themes for essays. The most prominent examples are the writings like Wild Vegetables of My Hometown, Tea Drinking, and Flies. The two aspects involved here are the attitude the author adopts when writing and the specific content of certain essays, both seemingly encompassable by the term "leisurely," yet with significant differences. If considered from the perspective of attitude, almost all of Zhou Zuoren's subsequent essays followed this pattern, though the tone and flavor of the works varied across different periods. From the perspective of content, true leisurely essays only constitute a small part of his entire creation. The quoted text earlier describes "useless play and enjoyment" as "a little," and "leisure" as "accidental" and "brief." Many years later, in Past Work: The Articles of Two Ghosts, he wrote that leisurely essays "are merely for entertainment or, written occasionally," which conveys the same idea. Leisurely essays are works of temperament, forming part of Zhou Zuoren's overall prose but not the entirety. After The Book of Rainy Days, such essays continued to be written, but they generally accounted for a small proportion. However, the author had other important types of essays, such as those mourning the departed and reflecting on people, as well as the series on "plants, insects, and fish," all of which evolved from certain chapters in The Book of Rainy Days and were more noteworthy. Moreover, they represented new developments in thought and prose aesthetics. In fact, even The Book of Rainy Days was not entirely composed of leisurely essays; these essays were exceptionally clear and influential, leading some to mistakenly believe that all of Zhou Zuoren's prose was like this, which is not the case. In the Second Preface, he particularly emphasizes that "I was originally a moralist" and that "my Zhejiangese temperament has not completely faded," hinting that we should not overlook the overall ideological tendencies and the multifaceted and complex artistic style of The Book of Rainy Days. Many works in the collection, such as those from Our Enemies to Silence, are close in content to The Book of Tigers, but with a stronger sense of "art" and a more relaxed attitude, still classified as essays rather than miscellaneous essays. This edition is published based on the December 1925 first edition by Xinchao Press. The original book had five pages of the table of contents, 302 pages of text, and six pages of illustrations: Roku's Death (written in 1929), The Bishop of Hardeau (16th-century woodcut), The Three Clever Men of Godan (by Copeland), portraits of Aristotle and Rabelais, and The Sphinx (Ancient Greek pottery painting). Between pages 34 and 35, two sheets were inserted, labeled "1+1," "2+1," and "3+1," which were added to include the essay Roku's Death (written in 1929), which was not listed in the original table of contents; also, Nostalgia II, Jinan Road II, and Jinan Road III were not included. In the table of contents and text, the appendix Fifteen Years Ago was originally at the end of the book.