ScholarWorks@숙명여자대학교

초록

This paper is to compare a fiction work from modern Korean literature with that from the Taiwanese and the Okinawa literature within colonial and post-colonial contexts. Korea and Taiwan was the colony of Japan from 1910 to 1945 and from 1895 to 1945, respectively. Okinawa has been a part of Japan since its annexation in 1888. These three regions all experienced the Japanese imperialism, and the legacy of the Japanese colonialism has been still prevalent even under the American political and cultural influence since 1945. The autobiographical short story, “The Woman Who Fulled Clothes,” portrays a Zainichi Korean family who had been forced to move to and stay in Karafuto, Hokkaido. The narrator ‘I’ delineates his identity, oscillating between his motherland, Japan, and his parents’ home, Korea. Korea and Taiwan shared the cultural dynamics of hegemonic transition from the Chinese civilization to the Westernization via Japan. The orphan of Asia reflects such historical background in East Asia as close as shown in “The Woman Who Fulled Clothes.” The Taiwanese family had moved from the mainland China to Taiwan, and the second son of this family experienced diverse life in the imperial Japan, the semi-colonial China, and the colonial Taiwan. However, he cannot find where his identity is anchored and becomes mad in the end. The colonial circumstance of Okinawa seems even as worse as that of Korea and Taiwan. A short story “The Droplet” deals with the issue of survival guilt from the Battle of Okinawa. The author problematizes how Okinawan survivors can cope with their war memories using Bakhtin’s discourse of ‘grotesque realism’ to depict an abnormal Okinawan society in the postwar period.

키워드