Comparación de resultados con marco teórico

Obi Jūzō was born in 1909 in Yamanashi Prefecture and died in 1979. He attended a local commercial school in Yamanashi for one year but dropped out at the age of 15, enrolling instead at a train driving school in Nagano. In his youth he took on a variety of jobs related and unrelated to the railway, and became involved in various leftist movements (only to recant his sympathies later). He eventually found work in the colonies as a teacher, first in northern Korea and later in Shinkyō (present-day Changchun), then the capital of Manchukuo.

159 The writer Pak Yŏnghŭi (1901– ?) was a member of the proletarian literary movement in Korea in the early 1930s but underwent an ideological conversion (tenkō) after he was arrested for his activities in 1934. Yu Chin-o (1906–1987) was a writer, law scholar, and (after liberation) politician. He is also known for drafting the Republic of Korea’s first constitution. Terada Akira (1893– ?) was the chief of the Arts and Cultural News Department of Keijō nippō, the official Japanese-language organ of the Government-General. Karashima Takeshi (1903–1967) was a scholar of Chinese literature who taught at Keijō Imperial University.

It was in Manchuria that Obi began writing “Tōhan.” The short story was published first in Kokumin bungaku in February 1944 and re-published ten months later in Bungei shunjū as the 19^th Akutagawa Prize winner.¹⁶⁰ Modeled in part on Obi’s own life, the story depicts the

relationship between the Japanese teacher Kitahara Kunio (北原邦夫) and his Korean student An Juzen (安壽善; Korean reading, An Susŏn). At the beginning of the story, Kitahara is a teacher at a school in Shinkyō, having been transferred there from Korea. He receives a desperate note from Juzen, a former student from his previous school in Korea; Juzen is under suspicion by the police, and needs Kitahara to vouch for his good character. The postcard triggers a long

flashback sequence where the reader learns how the two characters became so close. While Juzen had originally been a “problem” student, he gradually blossomed into a loyal subject of Japan under the constant care and supervision of Kitahara. Troubled by Juzen’s note and refusing to believe he would have reverted to his former ways, Kitahara writes to the head teacher and principal at his former school and urges them to help Juzen. At the end of the story, Kitahara receives two letters from his former pupil. The first asks Kitahara to “cast him aside” because

“the polluted and corrupted blood” (p. 139) of his (abject, Korean) mother runs through him. The second reverses position; Juzen declares that, despite his tainted ethnic blood, he has found the resolution to live as a “Japanese” (Nihonjin). The story ends with Juzen’s final words to Kitahara: “Farewell.”

160 Kokumin bungaku 4:2 (February 1944), pp. 78-143. Bungei shunjū 22:12 (December 1944), pp. 23-63. Unless otherwise noted, page citations refer to the Kokumin bungaku publication. “Tōhan” was also anthologized in Akutagawa shō zenshū dai6kan (Tokyo: Oyama Shoten, 1949). In the author’s postscript, Obi Jūzō notes that the story was first published in Kokumin bungaku through the aid of Yamada Seizaburō, who at the time was living in Manchuria along with Obi; and his “friend in poetry” Abe Ichirō (who was friends with Ch’oe Chaesŏ). Iwakura Masaji (who had previously published a story in Kokumin bungaku) was the one who recommended Obi’s story for the Akutagawa Prize. See pages 285-287. As mentioned in Chapter 1, it is important to keep in mind these personal, elite connections in thinking about the “free” circulation of texts.

In the editor’s notes at the end of the December 1944 Bungei shunjū issue, it is noted that

“Tōhan” is a story about the issues surrounding naisen ittai and “the problem of our Korean brethren.”¹⁶¹ The text begins with a short, evocative description of the “green glossy” leaves of poplar trees being battered by snow and wind – a landscape that is forbidding and devoid of people, nameless and placeless. Strangely, with only a line break to mark the change, the scene then shifts to a different kind of narration entirely, one that begins with a call to “my teacher”

(sensei) from “me” (watakushi). From the diction and the content, we are made to understand that this is a letter written by someone who calls himself “a Korean – no, a single human being”

(p. 79). When the letter ends we are finally introduced to the man reading it: Kitahara Kunio.

After finishing the letter, Kitahara gazes out the window and notices the landscape earlier described. Suddenly he realizes that he has seen the same sight before: “A single picture rapidly unfolded beyond the cloudy window glass. In that picture as well, snow was piled on glossy green leaves. And Kitahara and Juzen were gazing at the scene in deep contemplation” (p. 79).

The long flashback then unfolds.

On the page, these shifts in narrative point of view and time are marked only by dashes and line breaks. The deliberately dialogic voices introduced at the beginning are finally unified by Kitahara’s all-encompassing gaze: the landscape, the letter, the rift between past and present can all exist simultaneously on the same textual plane because it is Kitahara’s interiority that provides the locus for contextualization. Juzen – or rather his textual presence, as represented by the letter – is not set apart from Kitahara but made intimately part of him. Interestingly, it is only as a static picture that the two can be seen together as distinct and equal beings. The text seems torn between these two modes of media, representing two different strands of discourse: Korea as part of Japan textually; Korea as equal to but apart from Japan visually.

161 Bungei shunjū, p. 65.

This disjunction is replicated in the issue of names. The characters for Kitahara’s first name, Kunio, are “country” and “man” – a highly suggestive pairing indeed. Juzen’s last name, on the other hand, is given in the story as Yasuhara, the sōshi name his uncle chose for the entire family. At one point, Juzen asks Kitahara what he should do about his first name:

“ I think I’ve made up my mind. I want to change to a Japanese-sounding name . . . ” “Japanese-sounding? But Koreans are perfectly respectable Japanese people too, you know.” (p. 92)

In the end, Kitahara convinces Juzen to keep the original characters but simply read them in the native Japanese way, as Hisayoshi. In the text, the two are consistently referred to as 北原 and 壽善, as if in an attempt to avoid the political minefields entangled in the names 邦夫 and 安 原. Furthermore, by using the name 壽善 (which is never glossed, aside from this one passage), the text is able to preserve the simultaneous possibility of Korean and Japanese identity (Susŏn/

Juzen/Hisayoshi), as suggested in Kitahara’s comment above – but only when perceived as text.

The act of speaking must necessarily prompt a choice of either/or. What I find significant is that Juzen’s name is never glossed in dialogue, and never spoken by Juzen himself. The radical potential of a hybrid identity is made possible by the ambiguity of text, but is also limited by the very same.

For Kitahara, Juzen’s physical body is an enigma, something to be read visually for clues into a hidden interiority. Juzen is first described as having “thin, bony cheeks and humorless eyes” (p. 82) that would at times hint at some unknown sadness. During a visit to Juzen’s home, Kitahara learns that the reason for that sadness lies in the boy’s family situation. His father having died young, Juzen and his younger sister were brought up in his uncle’s home. But his mother (described by Juzen to Kitahara as lazy and selfish), clashed frequently with the uncle

and his wife over matters of work and money. Twice the mother ran away with her lover, bringing her children the first time but abandoning them the second; only after Juzen tirelessly pleaded on behalf of his mother was she allowed to come back to the uncle’s house. When Kitahara learns of the situation, he does everything in his power to aid his pupil, going so far as to find student lodging and tutoring work that allows Juzen to become semi-independent. This situation considerably eases the tension between the mother and the uncle’s family, and it further deepens the “love” (ai) between student and teacher.

Meanwhile, Kitahara’s own family situation deteriorates after he discovers his wife’s affair with another man. He decides to go hiking up Mount Kŭmgang in order to find catharsis for his problems, and he invites Juzen to go along with him. The hike is more arduous than expected, and Juzen almost gives up at several points. Finally, however, Kitahara leads him to safety, supporting him with the climbing rope that connects them together.

The sound of Juzen’s approach was conveyed through the ladder. There were only two steps left. He hauled the rope in and reached down for Juzen’s hand with his own. Juzen’s face was pale as he looked up and wordlessly gripped Kitahara’s hand. He had taken off his gloves, and his hand was frozen cold and slightly trembling.

“Come on! Just keep going!” (p. 120)

Finally, the two crawl into a calm space protected by a hanging crag, where they are greeted by “the strange beauty of white snow piled on leaves that were still dark green and glossy” (p. 121). It is there that Juzen and Kitahara finally have a conversation:

[Juzen said,] “This must be what life is about.”

“Hm?”

“This may sound brash (namaiki), but today I keenly felt that this is what life is all about.”

“What do you mean? You do sound rather brash.”

“I realized that life needs to be like this. Up until now, I had always blamed my own immorality and laziness on my environment. But today has really shown me that you can

do anything if you put your mind to it . . . I think today has had much more of an impact than all those hours of moral training over the years.” (p. 121)

This moment of confession takes place in a space that is deeply private and distinctly homosocial, one that has been enabled only after other gendered relationships (Juzen’s

relationship to his mother, Kitahara’s to his wife) have been severed. Juzen avoids any mention of the political situation, instead opting to couch his observations through a universal rhetoric of

“life.” (Just as, in his later letter to Kitahara, he chooses to supersede the ethnic category of

“Korean” with the universal one of “human being.”) But because the text thus far has already conditioned the reader to see the metaphoric significance of this scene, through the deliberate language of the opening pages to revelations of Kitahara’s own dedication to naisen ittai to even the title of the story itself, it becomes all too easy to make the leap from the personal to the political. In a time when “even a single piece of paper is a bullet,”¹⁶² the personal must be political. Juzen’s epiphany is all the more powerful in its seeming universality, first because it hides the actual mechanisms of force at play (Juzen’s reformation interpreted as “spontaneous,”

rather than engendered by state laws and social pressure) and second because it suggests that subjectivity does not stand apart from the “current situation” (jikyoku) but emerges from it (subjectivity as unnarratable outside the hegemonic structure of jikyoku). Is this the true manifestation of naisen ittai – a transcendent moment of unity and self-transformation?

If so, it is a fleeting one, and incomplete. The passage ends with a reversal: now it is not Juzen but Kitahara who is speechless. Kitahara has successfully led Juzen to the “correct” path, but instead of showing the reader the next logical sequence – the two walking down the

mountain together as equals, for instance – the scene ends on a note of silence and inaction:

162 Niwa Fumio, “Watashi no kokumin bungaku” in Bungakukai 11:2 (February 1944), p. 10.

Admittedly, he was unable to properly accept Juzen’s deep emotions, made so clear by his unexpected words. Moreover, no matter what his sympathies, in these kinds of situations Kitahara did not like glibly revealing his thoughts. Nevertheless, while the meaning being conveyed was vague, he thought he could deeply understand, and he continued to gaze intently at the thick, deeply green rhododendron leaves, which almost seemed to slightly tremble under the falling snow. (p. 121)

What on first glance seemed like a celebration of naisen ittai appears, on closer

examination, to be instead a more ambiguous tale of missed connections. For whatever reason, Kitahara finds himself unable to respond directly. Part of the reason may be that to do so would be to acknowledge the potentially subversive message behind Juzen’s words. Having led Juzen to this moment of self-determination, Kitahara is now no longer needed, either as an educator (for “hours of moral training”) or as a spiritual model. Thus rather than listening to Juzen’s words, Kitahara tries to listen to the emotions behind them. But this leads to another stalemate as Kitahara finds himself unable to respond in kind. Instead, he finds himself projecting a memory onto the landscape: the rhododendron leaves “slightly tremble” in the snow, just as Juzen’s hands did in the moment before Kitahara grasped them.

By returning to this earlier point in time – just before Juzen’s revelation, just after

Kitahara’s gesture of assistance – Kitahara is able to recuperate, in a way, a position of authority.

It is his gaze that once again provides context and meaning to the entire scene, and it is his gaze that returns the narration back to the present in the sentence that immediately follows: “The landscape that unfolded within Kitahara’s breast as he gazed out the window at the snow falling on the poplar leaves was the snow on the rhododendron and Juzen’s words at that time, brash for the boy that he was” (p. 121). The question of naisen ittai and Kitahara’s own responsibilities in it has been safely deferred. What is also telling about this remark is that Juzen has been removed from the picture, so to speak; at this critical juncture, when everything has been thrown into

doubt, what remains is not the sight of Juzen and Kitahara together (the snapshot that began the story, one may recall) but the empty landscape of snow and leaves overlaid with Juzen’s words.

Later that evening, Kitahara delves again into past memories “with an almost crazed single-minded intent” (p. 123) in order to reevaluate Juzen’s “heart” (kokoro). In the new context created by the letter, what had seemed like a heartfelt confession now threatens to be exposed as a lie. He recalls an incident that occurred soon after the announcement of the Greater East Asian War. Juzen had failed to show up for class on the day when teachers were to collect “monetary contributions” from every student in the school. Kitahara, the narrator states, tried to “guess at the state of mind of Juzen, whom he loved” (p. 124) and concluded that the boy skipped school out of a sense of shame from being unable to afford a contribution. Later that day, a fellow boarder informed Kitahara that Juzen was at the fish market. When he went to the fish market to check, he found Juzen “dressed in filthy white Korean clothes” (p. 125) working at the docks. At that moment, “Kitahara experienced an unspeakable feeling at the sight of Juzen, a student who was connected to him through spiritual blood, in a sense” (p. 125). Still shocked, Kitahara left without speaking to Juzen. The next day, Juzen came to class with more than his fair contribution of money. Kitahara acknowledged the money “with a silent nod” (p. 126), hiding his own

understanding from him.

Again and again in the story, the spiritual bond between Kitahara and Juzen is brought up against the physical barriers of the body. The sight of Juzen’s body at the fish market is shocking not simply because of its ethnic markers but also because of its class. After all, Juzen looks just like his Japanese classmates when clothed in the standardized uniform of the school, allowing Kitahara to “forget” class biases and Juzen’s home(ly) origins. Just as we saw in Kim Saryang’s

“Hikari no naka ni,” these origins are not associated with his father or his uncle, a man who lives

in relative comfort and who had the means to learn Japanese, but with his uneducated, penniless mother.¹⁶³ Having insisted all this time on the community of spirit, Kitahara finds himself driven into silence when confronted with Juzen’s dilemma: in order to prove himself a loyal “Japanese”

subject, Juzen is expected to contribute money to Japan’s war efforts, but he can only do this by working as a Korean laborer (and, in doing so, removing himself from the imperializing

environment of the school). This is, furthermore, a dilemma Kitahara himself had helped bring about, as it was he who first urged Juzen to leave his family’s care. Perhaps silence is the only way Kitahara can reconcile these contradictions – or rather, perhaps it is the only way he can avoid them.

Back in the present, Kitahara receives a letter from a former “naichijin” student with more news on Juzen. Unlike the letters from Juzen himself, this one is set apart from the rest of the text through quotation marks. The content of the Japanese boy’s letter are not called into question; the words are taken as unproblematic tools for the conveyance of information. One may compare this to Juzen’s two final letters, which are marked apart from the narration only by a dash mark, as was the case with the letter at the beginning of the story. Juzen’s ultimate

resolution – to “believe in the emperor” (p. 142) as a loyal Japanese subject, and to teach other

“Korean brethren” to do the same – are again made part of Kitahara’s own interiority, absorbed into the rest of the narration and made inseparable from it. At the end of the letter, Juzen rejoices in the fact that Koreans too will be conscripted for the war. He asks Kitahara if he remembers that day on the mountain: “My heart now and my heart then are no different” (p. 143). The implication is clear: If you could believe in me then, you can believe in me now.

163 Although I do not have the space to discuss the role of the mother in detail here, I should note that the mother often stands as a barrier to Juzen’s educational and social advancement. A few days after receiving Juzen’s letter, for example, Kitahara gets a letter from a former Japanese student informing him that Juzen has not been attending class for the past week because he has been taking care of his sick mother. The mother’s death is what also forces a crisis in faith for Juzen, prompting him to write another letter to Kitahara asking him to “cast him aside.”

On the one hand, the story as a whole can be taken as a straightforward celebratory message on the power of imperial discourse: the colonized man has successfully transformed himself through the help of the benevolent colonizer. With his inclusion in the empire via

military participation, he is no longer an incomplete or inferior subject but an equal brother to his

military participation, he is no longer an incomplete or inferior subject but an equal brother to his