전후 일본의 한국전쟁과 상상의 (불)가능성 : 마쓰모토 세이초(松本清張)의 「존엄(尊厳)」, 「검은 바탕의 그림(黒地の絵)」을 중심으로

Abstract

This paper analyzes Seicho Matsumoto's (1909-1992) “Songen(Dignity)”(1955) and “Kuroji-no-E(Picture on a Black Canvas)”(1958) to understand the meaning of ‘Korean War’ for Seicho. For Japanese, the ‘Korean War’ was ‘HYPER-REAL.’ This refers to the desire of Japanese to produce a new reality by reproducing the unrepresentable original of the Korean War through their imagination. Seicho attempted to twist and reconstruct the ‘imagination’ surrounding the Korean War. In “Kuroji-no-E,” characters and spaces that do not converge into the national metaphors of U.S. military bases, racial issues, and perpetrators/victims appear. First of all, it is necessary to pay attention to the ‘A.G.R.S.’ and its space, which were created to dispose of the bodies of American soldiers killed in the Korean War. The characters witness countless corpses of those killed in the Korean War. They realize that the ‘Korean War’, which they had understood only through reason and logic, can no longer be explained by logic. We can get a glimpse of the author's perception that Japan was involved in the Korean War as a corpse disposal site. Lastly, through “Songen,” which was published three years before “Kuroji- no-E,” we can discover the ‘prototype’ of Seicho’s image of the Korean War. “Songen” is a novel based on the motif of the ‘incident that misdirected Emperor Showa’, and its intention to criticize the emperor in postwar Japan. Through the ‘Korean War’, Seicho captures that the ‘last instance’ of Japanese society is changing from ‘Emperor’ to ‘America.’ And by overlapping the memories of the Pacific War and the Korean War, he requested memory and mourning for those who were deprived of human ‘dignity’ in the name of noble sacrifice. Through the analysis of Songen” and “Kuroji-no-E,” this paper found that Seicho Matsumoto captured the ‘Korean War’ as an important turning point in post-war Japan. After the Korean War, Japan entered a period of economic and political stability, but this also served as an opportunity to forget the shameful past. By revealing this shameful past, Seicho raised the issue of post-war Japan's memory and performed deconstructive work to question the ‘post-war’.