漱石の小説中の登場人物と朝鮮 - 『門』『彼岸過迄』の登場人物を中心に -

Abstract

Soseki’s trip to Korea and Manchuria in September and October in 1909 was significant not only because Soseki wrote a travel writing “Mankan Tokoro Dokoro (Various places in Korea and Manchuria)” based on the trip (from October 21 to December 30 in 1909, serially published on the newspaper “Tokyo Asahi Shinbun”), but also because Soseki created a new type of characters in his novel after the trip, who are going to Korea or Manchuria.　 Therefore, when studying what Korea means in the literature so fSoseki, it is necessary to analyze not only his diary and the travel writing but also his novels after “Mon(The Gate)”, which he wrote after the trip to　Korea and Manchuria. The new types of characters created in Soseki’s literatures as a result of the trip to Korea and Manchuria were, for instance, Sakai’s little brother and Yasui, who went to Mongolia in “Mon” (1909), Morimoto, who found a job in Dalian in “Higan Sugimade (To the Spring Equinox and Beyond)” (1911), and Kobayashi, who found a position in a newspaper agency in Korea in “Mei An (Light and Darkness)” (1916). It can be said that these characters are added to the literatures of Soseki as the “outcome” of the trip to Korea and Manchuria. The background of the creation of “outcome” is closely related to the social situation at the time, which changed along with the imperial colonization after Japan experienced the Japan-Sino war and Japan-Russian war. Therefore it can be said that instead of depicting Korea directly, the novels of Soseki describe the persons heading to Korea and the social situation of Japan. It is necessary to further analyze what was the subtext of Korea in the literatures of Soseki, in which Korea is only inexplicitly described.