4 ideas
A man's diary records his growing conviction that his village, his doctor and his elder brother mean to eat him. Reading a history book with no dates, he sees 'benevolence, righteousness, virtue' scrawled across every page, and between the lines he reads 'eat people.' He comes to suspect his dead five-year-old sister was eaten, possibly by himself, and ends with 'Save the children...'
Read a tradition's professed virtues as the text and its actual practices as the subtext. Where the words 'benevolence' and 'righteousness' are most insistent, look for what they license: sacrifice of the young, the female and the weak to the authority of elders. The ethical language does not restrain the consumption. It is the medium that makes the consumption invisible and respectable.
The diarist, who alone sees the cannibalism around him, comes to suspect that he too may have unknowingly eaten his sister's flesh, so his accusation turns back on himself. The story presents victims and perpetrators as entangled within the same custom, and its closing plea, 'Save the children...', places hope in a generation that has not yet eaten people.
The framing preface, written in formal classical Chinese, reports that the diarist has 'recovered' and left to take up an official post. The only person who perceived the society's violence is labeled insane. His cure consists of rejoining the apparatus he exposed. A society defines sanity as conformity to its norms, so lucidity about those norms registers as pathology, and normalization absorbs the dissenter.