Nayoung Aimee Kwon's Intimate Empire: Collaboration and Colonial Modernity in Korea and Japan analyzes postcolonial encounter between Korea and Japan with the perspective of "intimacy." This essay will suggest the implication and limitation of Kwon's approach by reviewing her work in the context of the studies of Korean literature in the late Japanese empire period. Kwon's study is distinguished from the previous studies, which deny "intimately shared" history between Japan and Korea by underlying only the repressive reality of the Japanese Empire, or which place the repressive reality and the intimate relationship in parallel. By analyzing the intimacy between Korea(n) and Japan(ese), Kwon successfully explores complex, ambivalent, and contradictory relationship between them, and sheds anew light on the historical aspects. The book demonstrates well that the "intimacy" in the context of "trans-colonial" encounter between Japan(ese) and Korea(n) has the complexity of conflicts and confusion under the multi-layered repression and appeasement.
By tracing "affect" in various examples, including young Korean students' affection towards Japanese and their despair (chapter 1), Japanese critics' ambivalent attitude towards Kim Sa-ryang, Akutakawa Prize’s nominee, and Kim Sa-ryang’s reaction to the Japanese critics (chapter 3), the complicated characters in Kim Sa-ryang's novel (chapter 4), the ambivalent meaning of colonial Koreans' writing in Japanese (chapter 5), the repression inherent in the format of round table discussion and the enforced laughs of colonial Koreans, which were used ultimately to promote propagate the idea of 內鮮一體 (Japan-Korea as one) (chapter 7), the study illustrates well how the ‘intimacy’ on the surface is complicatedly related to underlying repression of the empire. However, the analysis has its limits in that all the explanations are reduced to the linear relationship between colonial Korea and the empire.
Given that the research was conducted in the ‘intimate empire,’ the United States, this study allows us to view the postcolonial encounter between Korea and Japan, from the perspective, which is free from the national boundaries; but, on the other hand, the study includes the excess of theories, and uses the studies of Korean literature and texts of the colonial Korea only for the purpose of disputing the concept of "western universality." This, in a sense, seems to repeat the unequal power relation between colonial Korea and Japan, which the author tried to criticize, in the context of the unequal power relation between the Korean academia and the US academia. Admittedly, the relation between Korea's Korean literature studies and studies in the frame of Korean studies in the United States is more complex, and cannot be reduced to the relation between colonies and empires. Sometimes even the Korea's Korean literature claim its position as the 'center' or the 'empire.' In order to ‘collaborate’ between Korean studies in Korea and the U.S. ‘we’ have to welcome others with hospitality and try to self-reflect ourselves by the otherness.