The Transformation of the Gaze and Gender Structure in Chinese Translations of Ryūnosuke Akutagawa’s In a Bamboo Grove ：On the Reconfiguration of the Relationship between Seeing and Being Seen

This paper examines Chinese translations of Ryūnosuke Akutagawa’s In a Bamboo Grove in order to explore how the text has been read and reinterpreted across different historical periods. Comparing the translations of Zhang Kebiao (1927), Lou Shiyi (1980), Ai Lian (1999), and Zou Bo (2024), it analyzes how the structure of “seeing” and “being seen,” or the violence embedded in the gaze, has been transformed in the Chinese language. Earlier translations tend to recast passive or reciprocal perception as active, male-centered acts of seeing, thereby obscuring the violence of the gaze. Lou Shiyi’s translation is particularly significant：while it partly reconstructs Masago as a judging and self-articulating subject, it also weakens gaze-based domination by downplaying the husband’s violent gaze. By contrast, Zou Bo’s 2024 “research-oriented” translation more closely reproduces the original’s visual structure and gendered power relations. This case demonstrates that translation is not simply a vehicle of transmission, but an interpretive practice that reshapes literary meaning, and that world literature is formed through repeated acts of differentiation and reinterpretation in translation.