순수소설의 시초, 『상해(上海)』: 5·30사건의 표상과 기호로서의 신체

Abstract

Yokomitsu Riichi’s “Shanghai” is a feature-length novel about the May 30th Incident, which sparked the murder of a Chinese female worker in a Japanese spinning mill in Shanghai and spread to the anti-Japanese movement as the subject matter. Amid the escalating conflict between China and Japan due to the Japanese army’s dispatch to Shandong, 『Kaizo』 planed to simultaneously publish Hiroichiro Maeda’s report on the May 30th incident, “China Moves,” as in Yokomitsu’s “Shanghai.” This compilation of Kaizo』 was intended to show the readers the process of Japanese aggression using monopoly capital and military power. The main character, Sanki, sympathizes with the May 30th incident caused by the body of a worker, but when the anti-Japanese movement broke out in the colonial city of Shanghai, he was conscious of the ‘body’ of his nationality that was latent in his unconscious, and expresses excess of self-consciousness that belongs to the nation. Such discovery of Sanki’s self-consciousness is the expression of pure novel based on Yokomitsu’s claim of ‘complex consciousness.’ Yokomitsu shows how powerless human beings can be in the modern state system mediated by ‘nation’ through Sanki, a banker in Shanghai in the real world that Maedako describes and Osugi, who eventually became prostitutes after working in a Turkish bath. This study evaluates “Shanghai” which aims to illuminate the way humans exist, saying that human beings are “only a commodity sign that has ideological significance and is at the same time alienated by economics and nationalism” through the description of humans in the May 30th incident, as the beginning of pure novel pursued by Yokomitsu.