오에 켄자부로(大江健三郎) 문학 속의 ‘조선인’상 –『만엔 원년의 풋볼(万延元年のフットボール)』을 중심으로–

Abstract

Minority is one of major themes embodied in the novels of Oe Kenzaburo (1935-), which treat the existential issue related to so-called “the incarcerated situation” and the disabled child after the defeat of the World War II. We observe “the Korean” often represented in the early periods of Oe’s literary works and this provides cases for us to study the minority. Examples are as follows: a confrontation and a compromise between a Korean boy and delinquent boys in Sweeping Child Hunting(「芽むしり仔撃ち」1958); mass protest rallies on the part of the Korean village residents including Mr.Kang(康さん) who is a friend of the protagonist in A Young Man Who Comes Late(「遅れてきた青年」1960); In Shouting Cry(「叫び声」1962), Kure Takao who claims his identity by murdering a Japanese high school girl and his father who is a Korean living on only garlics and wandering around the country. Above all, The Football of the First Year of Manen(『万延元年のフットボール』1967) appears to make the strongest impression on the reader. In the novel, the story takes place in “the valley village(谷間の村)” located in Sikoku(四国) from the first year of Manen to 1960s. The stories of the family Nedokoro(根所) over 100 years are overlapped from the historical point of view. The issue of Korean residents in Japan and the relation between the Korean and the Japanese play an important role in developing the plot. A Korean resident in Japan characterized as “the Japanese emperor of the supermarket” seems to be an effective device for the author to emphasize powerlessness and misery the postwar Japanese feels. Oe might not intend to negatively portray the Koreans in his early works, but we can assume that Oe uses the Korean characters to maximize distress and helplessness the Japanese have to experience when the Koreans reappear as big other whom they used to discriminate, marginalize and alienate by drafting and forcing labor. Oe seems to recognize minority affected by his consciousness of humanism. It might be that his hatred of war and anti-war consciousness developed into a longing for democracy and humanism. This explains he was engrossed in reading Sartre’s Existenalism and humanism influenced by his mentor Watanabe Kazuo(渡辺一夫) when he was graduating from the college.