Failed Solidarity: Confronting Imperial Structures in Kim Sa-ryang's "Into the Light" and Kim Tal-su's "Village with a View of Mt. Fuji"

Abstract

ABSTRACT:Published twelve year's apart, Kim Sa-ryang's "Into the Light" (1939) and Kim Tal-su's "Village with a View of Mt. Fuji" (1951) straddle the August 15, 1945 border that separates Imperial Japan (or colonial Korea) from postwar occupied Japan (or "liberated" Korea). Since these two works represent different sides of this chronological binary, it is telling that both represent Japanese society as being stratified based on a social hierarchy of ethnic difference. This article argues that Kim Sa-ryang and Kim Tal-su's efforts to subvert this distinction between the colonizer and the colonized fails because imperial structures, in both Imperial Japan and postwar Japan, prevent solidarity between Koreans and oppressed Japanese groups. The threads of continuity between these two works, therefore, pose a powerful critique of the postwar persistence of these structures and their continued impact on Japan, even while under the occupation of an external power.