Yu Dafu

(1896 - 1945)

After studying economics at Tokyo Imperial University in the 1910s, Yu Dafu published a story collection, Sinking, in 1921, establishing him as a literary success. He returned to China the next year. In 1923 he contracted tuberculosis and abruptly shifted his work’s focus away from personal concerns to communalist ideas. During the Sino-Japanese War of 1937–45, Yu became an editor in Singapore, where he wrote anti-Japanese propaganda, before fleeing to Indonesia, where he was found after the war by Japanese forces and executed.