역사적 트라우마와 기억 투쟁 - 사키야마 다미 『달은, 아니다』를 중심으로 -

Abstract

The present dissertation examines the comfort women narrative and the politics of representation through Okinawan author Sakiyama Tami’s novel Tsukiya, Aran. Postwar Japanese literature took several issues related to the Asia-Pacific War including defeat and occupation as its literary and philosophical task but has dealt with the comfort women issue very restrictively. Despite forcing numerous women in Asia including Korea, China, Taiwan and the Philippines to do sexual labor, the Japanese rarely ever posed the problem of violence during the war or of colonialism and imperialism that even followed after defeat. Even in works where comfort women play a large role, they are placed far away from military domination, colonial criticism, or a hierarchical gender composition. The voice of comfort women in these novels are uniform and even their appearances are signified and stereotyped. Some discussions have a relatively positive assessment of sharing the memories of comfort women, the overcoming of trauma, and mourning, through literary works, but if literary representation, which is assumed for carrying out the sharing of memories and mourning, is restricted in terms of stereotypes and objectification, then the discussion on the politics of representation involving ‘sameness’, which works within the literary narrative, is an area that cannot be neglected. Sakiyama’s novel does not recreate the lives of comfort women in detail, but it deals with the political nature of representation in regards to records, memory, and narrative concerning comfort women, and suggests broad implications in terms of how to accept the comfort women narrative. Within the work, visual and auditory hallucinations, transcending time and space, intermittently intervene, but they are at least consistent as to one theme, which is the continuous problem posing of violence and the politics of sameness that is inherent within the memories and records. The present dissertation examines the political implications and dynamics inherent to the representation of comfort women by organizing the various forms of records and voices that appear in the novel, as well as the positions of the characters who accept and understand them.