Kuroiwa Ruikō's Suteobune

Chen traces how Mary Elizabeth Braddon&s;s Victorian thriller Diavola (1866–1868) was transformed first by Kuroiwa Ruikō&s;s Japanese adaptation Suteobune (1894–1895) and then by Bao Tianxiao&s;s Chinese re-translation Meihualuo (1910). Centring Kuroiwa&s;s radical reshaping—streamlining plots and engineering a ‘happy ending’ that rewards virtue—Chen shows how Bao further localized the story through classical imagery (the ‘plum blossom’) and overt social commentary on love, marriage, and modern individuality. Framing this English→Japanese→Chinese pathway as a case of ‘re-translation via Japanese’, Chen argues that such mediations were pivotal conduits for Western popular fiction in East Asia and helped contour early twentieth-century Chinese literary modernity.