Paper short abstract:

This paper analyzes the interactions between class, ethnicity, and genius in the reconfiguration of discourses about literary authorship and value in 1920s Japan, through the media debut as a proletarian writer of Chŏng Yŏn-gyu, the first Korean writer to publish in Japanese in the metropolis.

Paper long abstract:

The first decades of the 20th century were a key turning point in the formation of the modern Japanese literary field. The earlier model centered around coterie journals produced by and circulated among the intelligentsia gave way to a gradual professionalization of literary writing, and an expansion both of its readership and of the range of individuals who could try and make a career out of it. These changes were accompanied by new conceptualizations of literary authorship and value, now less tied to master-disciple genealogies and command of traditional techniques, and centered instead on new notions of individual creative “genius.” At the same time, the growth of proletarian literature brought new ideas about the political role of literature in society, and the source of the writer’s art. Ultimately what was at stake here was the question of who could produce literature, and why (and how) should their voice be valued.

I will analyze how these new ideas of authorship and value intersected with discourses around ethnicity, class, and individual genius through the example of the debut of Chŏng Yŏn-gyu (鄭然圭, 1899-1979) as a proletarian writer. Now relegated to little more than a footnote in most literary histories, in June 1922 Chŏng became the first Korean author to publish in the metropolis in Japanese, when his short story “Kessen no zen’ya” appeared in the anthology Geijutsu sensen: Shinkō bungaku 29nin-shū (ed. Nakanishi Inosuke). The following year Chŏng put out the novel Sasurai no sora and the short-story collection Sei no modae, and was discussed in the Japanese media as an “oppressed genius” leading “the life of a mountain hermit,” but whose work was at the same time the result of his native Korea’s “three-thousand years of despotism and tyranny.” By considering the many sides of Chŏng’s media-generated persona (as an eccentric unkempt artist, a diligent colonial subject, a passionate youthful leftist activist, etc.), my paper will shed light on the varied and sometimes contradictory discourses that negotiated and configured literary authorship, and the purported universality of “artistic genius” in 1920s Imperial Japan.

Paper short abstract:

This paper looks at the circulation and translation of Fujiwara Tei’s The Shooting Stars are Alive (Nagareru hoshi wa ikite iru, 1949) in order to illuminate the gendered process whereby Japan was reconstituted from “multiethnic empire” to “peaceful nation-state.”

Paper long abstract:

Although the Japanese empire theoretically disappeared off the map in 1945 following Japan’s defeat by the Allied Powers, the competing narratives of place and belonging that had been engendered by Japanese imperialism were not so easily erased; instead, they would continue to configure and dis-figure physical, human, and cultural geographies across the transpacific region. This paper looks at repatriate memoirs, interviews, and fiction published in Japan from the 1940s through the 1960s in order to illuminate the gendered process whereby Japan was reconstituted from “multiethnic empire” to “peaceful nation-state.” It focuses in particular on Fujiwara Tei’s repatriation narrative The Shooting Stars are Alive (Nagareru hoshi wa ikite iru, 1949). The wife of a Japanese meteorologist who had been stationed in Manchuria in 1943, Fujiwara fled to Korea after the Soviets entered the war and was eventually repatriated to Japan from there. The novelized version of her experiences was an immediate commercial success when it was published in Japan in 1949 – and became a bestseller in another country as well: South Korea. In tracing out how Fujiwara’s book has circulated in postwar East Asia and how various voices of empire were amplified – or silenced – through the book’s translation, this paper will reveal how the mutually constituted politics of decolonization (in Korea) and postwar reconstruction (in Japan) were not an aberration from the discourse on Japanese national victimhood but the very consequence of it.

Paper short abstract:

This paper investigates the reception of “business novels”, a Japanese popular fiction genre, in 1970s-South Korea. Analysing the compilation Human management based on Kajiyama Toshiyuki’s work, I argue that this genre reflects the complicated relationship to former coloniser Japan.

Paper long abstract:

South Korea’s rapprochement to former colonising power Japan in the 1960s caused a translation boom of Japanese literature, which has not ceased since its onset and witnessed several transformations in its course. In the 1970s, it took the shape of a wave of “popular literature” from Japan that swept South Korea.

In this paper, I investigate a sub-genre of this popular literature, the so-called “business novels” (kiŏp sosŏl) that centred on salary men and enjoyed high popularity from their emergence in the 1970s through to the 1990s. Works by best-selling Japanese writers were compiled in multi-volume editions, which did not exist in this form in Japan and were edited to meet South Korean readers’ needs. More than just light entertainment, business novels were also marketed as manuals for how to succeed in a competitive world. Against the backdrop of high growth, this literature gave a voice to the hopes springing from the promise of easy money for the artful businessman but also the insecurities raised by capitalist competition and the fear of losing out.

This paper discusses by way of an example the 46-volume compilation In’gan kyŏngyŏng (Human management) published in 1974/75, which was based on a selection of pieces by best-selling author Kajiyama Toshiyuki and translated by Yi Kyŏngnam. Targeted at male readers and set within a male-dominated sphere of corporate competition, I argue that this genre provided an outlet for phantasies of achieving success as a self-made man in a country emerging as a player in the global economy. The genre also reflects how old colonial-period dependencies took a new shape as economic entanglement and Japan became a model to aspire to while at the same time, some critics fiercely rejected what they deemed the neo-colonial influence of Japanese popular literature. However, by comparing the compilation to the Japanese original texts, I will argue that Korean readers were by no means passive recipients of Japanese literature but rather appropriated it according to their own needs, as evidenced by the targeted editing of these works for the South Korean market.