ScholarWorks@숙명여자대학교

초록

Using a chronological perspective, I explore transnational solidarity and the interconnectedness of Korean and Japanese pollution (disease) literature. By analyzing how these literary traditions document environmental destruction, my research evaluates whether these narratives reflect the inseparable nature of the shared industrial histories of the two nations. I identified a foundational link between Han Seol-ya’s Transitional Period (1929) and Ishimure Michiko’s Paradise in the Sea of Sorrow (1969), which is mediated by the corporate presence of Nippon Chisso and its colonial subsidiary, Hungnam Nitrogen Fertilizer. Although Minamata disease serves as a shared symbolic benchmark in Ishimure’s work and the fiction of the Korean author Kim Won-il, Itai-itai disease is associated with a notable divergence in Japanese and Korean literature. Unlike in Japanese literature, Itai-itai disease figures prominently in Korean fiction due to domestic cadmium poisoning cases like Onsan disease. Beyond documentation, these texts also investigate the ‘practices of solidarity’ among victims, students, and citizens. The joint occupation of urban centers—Tokyo in Ishimure’s the third volume of Paradise in the Sea of Sorrow (1974) and Seoul in Kim Won-il’s Flames of Hiroshima (2000)—is analyzed as ‘reterritorialization’. Marginalized groups reclaim exclusionary spaces as sites of resistance. My study concludes that literature functions as a vital medium for solidarity by textualizing suffering. Just as recent works like Kim Jong-seong’s Land of Fire trilogy (2022-24) depict harsh realities, literature emphasizes the necessity for future narratives that are grounded in the authentic voices of victims to overcome structural environmental constraints.

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