하라 다미키(原民喜) 「여름꽃」 시론

Abstract

Tamiki Hara was born when the imperialism of Japan substantially started after the country’s victory of the Russo Japanese War. Hara had the sense of inferiority about his own name Tamiki as well as the fact that the Hara family became rich due to their business concerning military materials. Perhaps because of this, Hara wrote up Natsu no Hana, a literary work depicting the tragedy resulting from the explosion of atomic bombs, immediately after Japan was defeated. The literature of atomic bombs constitutes a unique literary genre which exists only in Japan, a sole country where atomic bombs were actually dropped. In the process of creating literary works, Tamiki Hara and other writers of the atomic bomb literature had to endure the “double agony of radiation exposure,” which includes not only the actual exposure to radiation but also the process whereby they need to remember the tragic history. Furthermore, they were concerned with the fear of death and with the sense of guilty arising from the fact that they alone survived the war. The main character of Natsu no Hana miraculously survived the war despite the explosion of an atomic bomb, and decided to write about the unimaginable tragedy and agony of those who died or was seriously injured by atomic bombs and the town of Hiroshima which was instantly devastated entirely. In this writing process, Hara got angry with people’s “stupidity” and wrote about the terrible situation of “Shin Jigoku” (new hell) in a single poem. In order to achieve the literary condensation of radiation exposure and to express it, Tamiki Hararesorted to the genre of poetry and the katakana notation.