The famous (or infamous) anecdote by Lu Xun in his 1923 Preface to Nahan (Call to Arms) describes seeing a lantern slide in Sendai of the execution of a Chinese spy by Japanese troops surrounded by indifferent Chinese spectators during the Russo-Japanese War. Lu Xun used this to explain his epiphanic shift from the study of Western-style medicine to writing in order to cure the Chinese mind rather than body. In this same preface Lu Xun points to the centrality of literature and art in the project of modernity in which he and others are engaged. While Lu Xun's writing has been endlessly discussed, his interest in the power of visual images, so compellingly revealed in the Sendai example, has been less thoroughly explored. Eva Shan Chou's recent biographically oriented study of Lu Xun continues the focus on his writings but brings in explicitly visual material in the framing of her discussion – from early images of the young Zhou Shuren (before he was the public figure “Lu Xun”) in Japanese student uniform and short hair to a particular photo in that vein with his significant “queue-cutting” poem attached and on to the last years of his life with his active sponsorship of Leftist woodcut artists in a dangerous political environment. Chou's book combines a traditional Sinological approach to Lu Xun studies – adding minutiae to build up a more complete biographical context for his creative works through a discussion of vignettes and overarching themes across time and space – and a new appreciation for the role of the visual in Lu Xun's life, works, and reception.

Chou's study is meticulous, richly informed, idiosyncratic and warmly intimate in its portrait of her complex subject (Lu Xun, like her earlier focus the Tang poet Du Fu, being someone whose life and works are constantly conflated and reinterpreted for political “patriotic” motives. The two writers, both living in turbulent times, also seem to share a similar acerbic pessimism.) The book's subtitle, Lu Xun Interprets China, expects the reader to be familiar with standard readings of Lu Xun's works as manifestations of what the late scholar C.T. Hsia called an “obsession with China.” Lu Xun's “interpretations” are implicitly rather than explicitly outlined and a distinction between political and cultural critiques over-stressed.

Chou's approach is thematic: “Memory,” “Violence” and “Queues” – two large topics and one much smaller in scope (and less universal) but given more specificity than the other two. “Memory” – so central to Lu Xun's writing – is not given the full purchase it needs until the conclusion. “Violence,” again central to Lu Xun and Lu Xun studies, is given a very narrow focus here but one close to Lu Xun's heart – specific acts of political violence that destroy the young. “Queues” – the presence and cutting thereof – provide one linking thread across time. Her tracing of the queue's various afterlives, particularly in visual contexts, is of interest but its significance might not be fully appreciated by non-specialists. These three themes do not easily cohere, and while Chou stresses it is not her intention to provide a synthesis, the combination of the grand and the small can be disconcerting.

Chou's methodology is that of the “core sample” – drilling in deep at certain significant spots to uncover the outlines of a particular pattern at a particular time and place and to extrapolate from that pattern. This method has its uses and problems, particularly when large claims are made on the basis of sometimes narrow or speculative evidence. It is thanks to Chou's careful scholarship, thoughtful analyses and deep familiarity with her subject that those claims, despite their sometimes tentative or sweeping nature or the underlying assumptions and expectations she has of an initiated readership (general readers need not apply), are usually persuasive. However, this is not always the case. In drilling down into Lu Xun's political and personal choices as a young man abroad expressed through the 1903 poem made public only after his death, considerable weight is given to this enigmatic poem's significance. Chou argues convincingly that Lu Xun chose to return to the poem as a form of silent commemoration for the Five Martyrs he mourned in 1931, but his decision to give the same poem to a Japanese doctor seems strange in this particular context and the possibility of its link to Qu Qiubai speculative. These details serve to undermine rather than shore up Chou's discussion of the poem's central importance and thus destabilize chapter four's intricate structure.

There is a great deal of value in this study of Lu Xun in its careful teasing out of aspects of his life and art from fragments and details – some highly significant, some more banal – to add to our knowledge of this major figure of world literature (as Chou rightly argues he should be counted). The linkages between themes and chapters are not always played out as effectively as they might be – but it is in the nature of core samples that you must take the rough with the smooth in sifting through the layers.