芥川龍之介의 『목 떨어진 이야기』- 역사인식과 사회비판을 중심으로 -

Abstract

AkutagawaRyunoske’s The Story that a Head Dropped(1918.1) is composed of three volumes. In volumes 1 and 2, the theme of pacifism can be seen through KaShouZi, a Chinese officer, whose head was seriously injured in the Sino Japanese war. The third volumedescribes the time when one year passed since the end of the Sino‐Japanese war, and the Peace treaty, disgust, and criticism on the press at that time show up through conversations of the two characters. The theme of this work clearly shows up from the utterance by the officer Kimura, who is the main character and narrator, ‘In different meanings, a human being is unreliable’, and the sentences at the end of the story, ‘It is necessary that we know seriously ourselves to be unreliable,’ ‘You must read the articles of a newspaper of China in this way.’ The ‘newspaper’ stated here is not a Chinese newspaper which is published by Chinese people, but a newspaper published by Japan of the imperialism in Chinese language in China. Further, this novel was written for ‘us’, in other words, for the readers in Japan. Thus, this novel tells that the newspaper of Chinese that Japan published was unreliable and the sentences at the end serve as an aggressive criticism of the ‘kept press’ of the imperialism that suppressed and fabricated the truth.