It's stupid to work these days. It's smarter to have a good time, let me tell you," he said. "Look at this Japanese era. All the work where you can make a lot of money, they've taken it all away. Right? I say it's stupid for us to work." (The "they"are probably " Japanese.") "Rice is cheap, fertilizer is dear." Everything was the fault of the Japanese era.

     Since the author has not made the mistake of artlessly laying bare his consciousness, the wretchedness of life he describes here is all the more true to reality.  However, the meticulous attention to detail that strikes us in the works of Yang K'uei is something that we cannot hope to find in Lü He-jo.  When we come to "The Town with the Papayas,"the anguish resembling anger has changed to resignation and the empty sorrow that comes after defeat.

     Ch'en Yu-san, who got through five years of school with scholastic honors and was chosen from among many applicants to take the seat of an accountant's assistant in a town hall at a salary of twenty-four yen, was confronted there with a stagnant pool of corruption and degeneration.  There were Tai Ch'iu-hu, an assistant official, who behaved obsequiously to higher officials and people from the mother country (Japanese) but was indiscriminately arrogant to the people below him, who, dazzled by the prospect of reputation and money, foisted his younger sister onto a debauched young man; Su Te-fang, barely thirty years old yet surrounded by five children and just about at his last gasp because of his poor salary; Hung T'ien-sung, who, dreaming only of the joy of living in a house in the style of the mother country and leading a life in that style, tried to marry for money; and Liao Ch'ing-yen, who led a life of pleasure and devoted himself to inducing a mindless lethargy. Among all these, Ch'en Yu-san, who had passed the general civil service examination and had his sights set on becoming a lawyer in ten years, when he planned to be ready for the bar examination, pursued this path with all his might;  but when a young woman colleague of his with whom he had fallen in love, Ts'ui-o, was sacrificed for the sake of her family and sold to a wealthy man in a neighboring village, he could think of no better solution than to get drunk in order to dispel the shattered hope and emptiness.  "Although the power of the individual is weak and insignificant, one must improve life and live correctly as far as possible." So said Ts'ui-o's tuberculosis-stricken elder brother in his personal journal, which he left to Ch'en Yu-san after he died.  And Ts'ui-o's father also fared badly;  he went crazy and took to wandering around the lanes and alleys.

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