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‘The Greater East Asia (大東亞)’ and Spy - Imaginative geography of ‘the Greater East Asia’ and ‘Joseon’ from the viewpoint of Typhoon, a full-length novel written by Nae-seong Kim -
Journal of Popular Narrative
2009,
(22), pp.211-247
DOI : 10.18856/jpn.2009..22.008
Publisher : The Association of Popular Narrative
Research Area : Interdisciplinary Research
DOI : 10.18856/jpn.2009..22.008
Publisher : The Association of Popular Narrative
Research Area : Interdisciplinary Research
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This study sought to turn from a conventional practice of literary researches into Nae-seong Kim, a Korean modern novelist, which focused only on A Haunted Man , a typical and famous one of his novels written during period of colonized Korea under the rule of imperial Japan. In addition, this study also sought to review his popular novels such as White Mask (1937), A Haunted Man (1939), Typhoon (1942 ～43) and Traitor (1943～44), which are recognized as a series of detective novels written by Kim after the Sino-Japanese War. Kim's spy-detective novels complied with discourses about spy and those about the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere(大東亞共榮圈) as ideology of imperial Japan, which were widely popularized and propagandized in the late of colonial period. His spy-detective novels are recognized as popular epic works that sought to make a model of colonizer and project desires to form a new subject. In particular, Typhoon , one of Kim's novels, as analyzed intensively in this study, was originally serialized in the Korea Daily News(每日新報) (Nov. 21, 1942 to May 2, 1943) and was published as a separate volume in 1944. Then, Typhoon was ranked as such a popular novel as about total 8,000 volumes of its first edition were sold out just in one month after the first publication. Indeed, this novel deserves re-highlighting in the sense that it contains a pile of major characteristics revealed by Kim's detective novels, and also witnesses an aspect of popular novel readers' consciousness in the late of colonial period. But it has been not analyzed or addressed at all in previous studies. The Typhoon has its major framework of epic novel that depicts intelligence war for latest weapons among countries with the appearance of various national characters(Korean, Japanese, Chinese and Western) against a background of worldwide locations like United Kingdom, France, India and Shanghai(China) beyond the boundary of colonized Korea. It indicates how the geopolitical imagination expanded by war and the ideology of the Greater East Asian War could meet the popular tastes with ‘detective’, a code of popular epic literature. This novel was created under the influence of triumph called ‘the victory of early war’ involving Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor and surrender of Singapore. So it deserves criticism for ‘pro-Japanese novel’ in the sense that it reproduces the imperial Japanese ideology of ‘the Greater East Asia’, but it shares a literary rule of composition for creation of subjective personality revealed by Korean modern literature in the late colonial period, because it boldly deploys Korea and Korean scientists in a core of ‘the Greater East Asia’ and physical power for reorganizing world order and thereby reveals a desire for colonized men as subjects of colonized country to take the initiative to build up Korea as a subjective member of new world. After the 1945 Liberation of Korea, Nae-seong Kim successfully took a new reputation as a master of Korean modern romance. However, his early spy-detective novels against a background of colonized Korea still had influenced his follow-up epic works such as Story of the Youth and Red Butterfly (1955) based on Arirang .
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