CONDONING AND CONTESTING COLONIAL NARRATIVES OF SPACE, IDENTITY, AND BODY IN THE EARLY WORKS OF NAKAJIMA ATSUSHI (1927-1932) by DREW KORSCHUN B.A., Duke University, 2016 A thesis submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Colorado in partial fulfillment of the requirement for the degree of Master of Arts Department of Asian Languages and Civilizations 2019 i This thesis entitled: Condoning and Contesting Colonial Narratives of Space, Identity, and Body in the Early Works of Nakajima Atsushi (1927-1932) written by Drew Korschun has been approved for the Department of Asian Languages and Civilizations ______________________________ Dr. Faye Yuan Kleeman ______________________________ Dr. Janice Carole Brown ______________________________ Dr. Jae Won Chung Date _______________ The final copy of this thesis has been examined by the signatories, and we find that both the content and the form meet acceptable presentation standards of scholarly work in the abovementioned discipline. ii Korschun, Drew (M.A., Asian Languages and Civilizations) Condoning and Contesting Colonial Narratives of Space, Identity, and Body in the Early Works of Nakajima Atsushi (1927-1932) Thesis directed by Dr. Faye Yuan Kleeman Abstract While Nakajima Atsushi (1909-1942) is well-known in the modern Japanese literary canon for his tales set in ancient China, this project examines six of his early works, written from 1927 to 1932, which have been disregarded in serious literary scholarship. The six short stories take place in Japan, colonial Seoul, Japanese-occupied southern Manchuria, and a frigid city in pre- colonized northern Manchuria, and include some of Nakajima’s most dynamic and diverse works. The project examines the ways in which these texts respond to hegemonic colonial narratives about space and landscape, about gendered and ethnicized hierarchy prescribed by the Empire, and about illness, hygiene, and bodily experience. The introduction situates the project in the understanding that meaning is dynamically negotiated at every instance of reading a text, that all texts are predicated on dialogue with various contexts, and that texts are hybrid spaces wherein the resistance toward and reification of one single narrative have the potential to exist as one multifaceted position. Given this knowledge, each chapter explores the short stories’ complex positions toward the hegemonic narratives in question. Chapter One traces a literary history of spatial representation in modern Japanese literature, which uncovers the privileging of the Japanese settler viewing subject. The chapter reveals the texts’ occasional challenges toward – but usually reinscription of – colonial space narratives. Chapter Two explores the texts’ hierarchical configuration of the multiethnic Empire vis-à-vis male settler desire, showing that although Nakajima’s Japanese male protagonists take a passive role in most situations, they are still privileged figures within this hierarchy, being afforded the most subjectivity. Chapter Three discusses the texts’ many instances of ill or bodily non-hegemonic characters and how their characterizations challenge the Japanese notion of fukoku-kyōhei (“rich nation, strong army”), which idealized strong and healthy male bodies to settle the colonies, and how they also assert notions of Japanese male settler privilege. This analytical project, followed by original translations of the six stories, aims to present the dynamicity of understudied stories within the realm of Japanese colonial literature. iii CONTENTS INTRODUCTION Scope and Aims of the Project…………………………………………………………….1 Biographical Details and Introduction of the Stories in Question………………………...3 Theoretical Approach and General Findings……………………………………………...7 CHAPTERS I. CONDONING AND CONTESTING NARRATIVES OF COLONIAL SPACE IN KOREA AND MANCHURIA Introduction and Aims…………………………………………………………13 Duplicitous Landscapes: Uncovering the Subjective Constructions of Space in Modern and Colonial Japanese Literature……………………………14 Complicating Nakajima’s Textual Constructions of Keijō/Seoul………………19 Complicating Nakajima’s Textual Constructions of Manchuria………………...32 Conclusions………………………………………………………………………44 II. CONDONING AND CONTESTING NARRATIVES OF GENDERED AND ETHNICIZED HIERARCHY Introduction and Aims…………………………………………………………...47 Colonial Hierarchy and the Male Gaze in the Japanese Empire…………………47 Looking for ‘Womanhood’ in the Naichi: Desire and Gender in “The Girl from Shimoda”…………………………………………………………...50 The White Woman as Exotic Mystery: Desire and Gender in “A Life”………...57 Japanese Settler Male Subjectivity as Agent of Desire in “By the Poolside”…...60 Conclusions………………………………………………………………………67 iv III. CONDONING AND CONTESTING NARRATIVES OF ILLNESS AND NON- HEGEMONIC BODILY EXPERIENCE Introduction: Language and the Subjectivity of Illness………………………….69 Illness and Non-Hegemonic Bodily Experience Among Colonized Characters...72 The Sick/Non-Hegemonic Japanese Body in the Naichi and Gaichi……………75 CONCLUSION…………………………………………………………………………………91 BIBLIOGRAPHY………………………………………………………………………………..95 APPENDIX: TRANSLATIONS “The Girl from Shimoda” (下田の女, Shimoda no onna) 1927…………………………99 “Fight” (喧嘩, Kenka) 1928…………………………………………………………….110 “A Life” (ある生活, Aru seikatsu) 1928……………………………………………….118 “A Policeman’s Landscape: A Sketch of 1923” (巡査のいる風景：1923 年の一つのス ケッチ, Junsa no iru fūkei: 1923-nen no hitotsu no suketchi) 1929…………..126 “A July Scene in D City (1)” (D 市七月叙景(1), D-shi shichigatsu jokei (1)) 1930…..142 “By the Poolside” (プウルの傍で, Pūru no soba de) 1932…………………………....168 v INTRODUCTION Scope and Aims of the Project I encountered the work of Nakajima Atsushi in Professor Faye Kleeman’s Fall 2017 seminar, when we read his 1942 short story “Sangetsuki” (translated as “The Moon Over the Mountain” by Paul McCarthy). This metamorphosis tale takes place in ancient China, and recounts the story of a failed poet who transforms into a tiger as a mark of his shame. I was struck by Nakajima’s ability to merge the rich details of the historical setting with the poignant human emotions of ambition and dejection, and sought to know more about this writer. My interest multiplied when I learned that Nakajima’s literary career spans not only the cultural realm of ancient China, but also the colonial and semi-colonial spaces where he spent foundational time in his life: Korea, Manchuria, and the South Pacific Islands. Nakajima’s early works stood out to me as especially productive sites of research and analysis, given their tone of youthful vigor and their diverse and multicultural settings across Northeast Asia. While a handful of Japanese-language journal articles take Nakajima’s early works as their object of study, and a select number of English-language scholarly works discuss them in connection to biographical details or as precursors to his more famous works published late in his life, this master’s thesis project aims to be the first full-length investigation that takes Nakajima’s early works as its principal subject matter. Indeed, the notion that these early works – for whatever reason, whether it be that Nakajima was a high school or university student at the time of writing, or that the stories are “practice stories1” (shūsaku) as the publisher Chikuma Shobō labels them – fail to attain the sufficient “literariness” to merit serious analysis is widespread. This project does not 1 Nakajima Atsushi zenshū. (Tokyo: Chikuma Shobō, 1993), 3. 1 purport argue for such a notion of literariness, but rather argues that these stories are some of Nakajima’s most dynamic literary works and provide a fuller context for the study of Nakajima’s literary career. On a larger scale, this fuller understanding of Nakajima Atsushi will in turn contribute to the study of literature from the Japanese colonial empire and the study of global colonial literature. While translation is not the primary aim of the project, it is fair to say that translation has shaped the direction of the project, given translation’s ability to make readers think about texts across cultural and linguistic boundaries. And since none of the texts (except one2) had been translated before, I undertook the project of translating the works into English, mostly while I was studying in Yokohama at the Stanford Inter-University Center during the summer of 2018, although I finished some of the translations while back in Colorado during the late summer season. The translation of these texts was a most worthwhile endeavor that allowed the themes of this project to emerge in the first place. Reading through these early works, one cannot help but be fascinated by Nakajima’s various representations of spaces, of gender and ethnic identities, and of illness and body image. Resolving to conduct my own research about these representations, I set out to look at the ways in which they relate to hegemonic narratives of the Japanese colonial regime: do they hesitantly condone them, do they offer points of contestation, or do they do both? And if both condonation and contestation are at play, how do such sentiments coexist within the texts? Such questions I wrestle with and aim to resolve in this project. After contextualizing the project with details 2 “Junsa no iru fūkei” appears under the English title of “Landscape with an Officer” in Angela Yiu’s edited volume Three-Dimensional Reading: Stories of Time and Space in Japanese Modernist Fiction, 1911-1932. (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2013). However, my translation of the story departs significantly