경계를 묻는 문학적 실천: 이시무레 미치코 『고해정토』로부터

Abstract

This paper suggests that Ishimure Michiko’s Kugai Jodo(Paradise in the Sea of Sorrow), which is dealing with Minamata victims, is about redrawing certain boundaries. While this novel has been read mainly as criticizing modernity or modernization, Kugai Jodo also asks who is/becomes the person concerned and where the line between the dead and the living or the victims and non-victims. And this can be related to the questions about how we, as outsiders, understand other people’s deaths, for example Tsunami victims during East Japan Earthquake disaster. In Kugai Jodo, although characters including the narrator experiences “philosophical split”, that does not mean that they can easily transcend the gaps between them and Minamata patients. Rather, this novel brings these gaps on surface, which is expressed well in the ‘violence’ occurred at Minamata factory in 1959. Through this event, Kugai Jodo shows Minamata patients are ‘taboo‘ and surplus who cannot be included in Japanese national narrative at the time represented by high economic growth or the Security Treaty Struggle. It also asks about the boundaries of death itself. In the novel, the dead and the living exist together and can replace each other. And this potential ‘dieablity’ might be a clue of the universality which one can find in reading the literature. Minamata as a place exists in the overlapping times and spaces. For example, this place is also related to the history of colonized Chosun. Minamata and Kugai Jodo provides the possibility of common experience which cannot be divided by national boundaries, or any kind of given boundaries for that matter.