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Imperial Gaze and Colonial Romanticism: The Place called Ryokan ‘Cheonjinnu’ (天眞樓) in Takahama Kyoshi’s Joseon (朝鮮)

  • Journal of Humanities, Seoul National University
  • 2021, 78(2), pp.315-351
  • DOI : 10.17326/jhsnu.78.2.202105.315
  • Publisher : Institute of Humanities, Seoul National University
  • Research Area : Humanities > Other Humanities
  • Received : April 5, 2021
  • Accepted : May 10, 2021
  • Published : May 31, 2021

Song Minho 1

1홍익대학교

Accredited

ABSTRACT

After the trip to Manchuria and Joseon in 1909, Natsume Soseki (夏目 漱石) had no choice but to take out the ‘Joseon’ part from his travelog for fear of making political conditions worse in the imperial climate of the times. Takahama Kyoshi, who was close to Soseki in the literary world of Japan, also traveled to Joseon twice in 1911, and wrote the novel Joseon. After Japan's defeat and Joseon’s liberation, however, this novel of Kyoshi was excluded from his literary history according to another's will, because it was considered to be too political and too close to the imperial situation. This study attempts to provide explanations on the political orientation that writers of the imperial era had no choice but to face, focusing on these ‘two deleted accounts of Joseon’. Soseki and Kyoshi’s travels to Joseon took place two years apart, and they were connected through the place, ‘Cheonjinnu’ (天眞樓) and the person, ‘Jung UnBok’ (鄭雲復). The Ryokan called ‘Cheonjinnu’ in the novel also displayed colonial romanticism through the conspiracy of the ‘Wando Scandal’, which had been fabricated by political vagabonds. The person at the center of this real ‘Wando Scandal’ was Ryohei Uchida, who had planned the political connections and sought political profits between Iljin Society (一進會) and the the Residency-General (統監府) prior to the Japanese Colonial Period; he was most likely the model for Gojo (剛三), a vagabond in the novel, Joseon. This paper confirms that the romantic approach to the activities of political vagabonds, from the brutal assassination of Queen Myeongseong (乙未事變) to the Wando Scandal (莞島事件), is the background for the novel Joseon of Takahama Kyoshi. Even if Kyoshi himself emphasized his literary position and the technique of literary sketch (寫 生), distancing himself from imperial politics, the atmosphere of imperial politics had ready been forced to be contained in his eyes to make a sketch. This may show the common limitations that all literature of the Imperial Era could not be free from.

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This paper was written with support from the National Research Foundation of Korea.
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