Missing Keystones: Echoes of Empire in Kobayashi Masaru’s “Bridge Building”

Abstract

Postwar writings by and about Japanese repatriates often serve to illustrate the incomplete nature of Japanese decolonization. While the process of repatriation physically removed Japanese colonists from the former empire, it also deferred the necessary process of coming to terms with Japan’s imperial past. This article examines how unresolved memories of empire reemerge in the postwar writings of Kobayashi Masaru (1927–1971), a Japanese author who was born and raised in colonial Korea. Through an analysis of Kobayashi’s Akutagawa Prize-nominated short story “Bridge Building” (“Kakyō,” 1960), set in Japan during the Korean War, it shows that although Kobayashi depicts Japanese and Korean characters who are united by a common goal and their past experiences of imperial violence, the gap between them remains insurmountable. The article contends that Kobayashi’s work represents an attempt to counteract romanticized repatriation narratives that had been coopted for new nationalist ends at the beginning of the Cold War.