‘봄을 등진 자’에 대한 필경 노동자 미타 교카의 찰나적 엠파시 —1920년대 『조선급만주』 문예란 소재 미타 교카의 창작 소설을 중심으로 —

Abstract

This study concerns a creative novel by the young journalist and writer Mita Kyoka. It was published in the literary section of Joseon and Manchuria, a long-running Japanese-language magazine during the colonial period. In the 1920s, unlike in the earlier or later parts of the colonial period, creative novels were serialized and presented in an expanded literary section of the magazine. This resulted from the influence of cultural politics and Taishō Democracy. The literature created by Japanese colonial settlers in the 1920s has not previously received a detailed analysis and discussion, so this study examines the work of Mita Kyoka. He was a journalist at the Ministry of Social Affairs, and his creative novels reflected his self-awareness as a ‘journalism laborer.’ Four main characteristics of Mita Kyoka’s creative novels can be identified. First, his dystopian emphasis, upon fatalistic emotions of sadness, misfortune, and anxiety, stem from his own experience. Second, as a social affairs reporter from the Gyeongseong Branch Office of Osaka Asahi Shimbun, Mita Kyoka sawhimself as a marginalized intellectual proletarian, within the colonial Joseon society but not part of the ruling elite. This perception is deeply reflected in the novel as ugliness, evil, and madness. Third, the experience of the proletariat class, and of an absent mother, gives rise to pessimism, alienation, and a distorted view of love in which both the protagonist and the source of his frustration are eliminated from the text through madness and suicide. Crucially, this madness and death does not lead to new life or hope. Instead there is a permanent cycle of repetition, losing all hope and expectations for life, and never offering any solution to the problem. Fourth, facing such insurmountable problems, and excluded from the powerful class, the subject in the novel has a fluctuating reactionary sense, a ressentiment, and reveals some emotional empathy for the Koreans, who seem for a moment to be similarly situated. This study analyses Mita Kyoka’s creative novel to reveal that the Japanese literature of the colonial period takes a very different emphasis from that presented by the dominant Japanese class, whose propaganda was concerned with enlightenment, self-improvement, and education.