Confronting a colonial past, challenging a postcolonial present

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Notes

1. Brad Leithauser, ‘An Ear for the Unspoken’, New Yorker (6 March 1989), 105, as cited in Edward Fowler, ‘Rendering Words, Traversing Cultures: On the Art and Politics of Translating Modern Japanese Fiction,’ Journal of Japanese Studies 18:1 (Winter 1992), 9.

2. On the politics and economics of translating Japanese literature, see Fowler (op. cit.).

3. A few other translations of Japanese literature depicting life in colonial Korea do exist: Kajiyama Toshiyuki's The Clan Records: Five Stories of Korea (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1995), translated by Yoshiko Dykstra, would be one example. More translations are in production. As for the original Japanese, recent scholarship has recirculated a sizable body of literary production from the colonies, much of which describes life there – for both Japanese and Koreans – in great detail. Consider the thirteen volumes dedicated to Korea in the 47-volume Nihon shokuminchi bungaku seisenshū (Tokyo: Yumani Shobō, 2000) series.

4. Driscoll here presents us with a provocative distinction between tenkō (political conversion) as performed in Japan and colonial tenkō (17).

5. In terms of textual history, I have found no evidence for Driscoll's claim that Kan'nani ‘won the special prize for a first novel from the left-wing magazine Kaizō (Reconstruction) in February 1934’ (7), but that Kaizō did not publish the novel, as it normally would, because it was ‘apparently too dangerous.’ According to Yuasa, he submitted it for consideration to Kaizō, but the magazine announced that because of difficulties with censorship, ‘a work like Kan'nani could not be chosen for the award’ (as related in Ikeda, ed. Kannani: Yuasa Katsuei shokuminchi shōsetsu-shū [Tokyo: Inpakuto Shuppankai, 1995] 521; the situation is explained in more detail on 527). There may have been some confusion with Document of Flames, which won second place in the April 1935 Kaizō competition (there was no first place) (Ikeda 528). Also, Kan'nani appeared in Bungaku hyōron in April (Ikeda 521), not May (7) 1935. As for that journal, the claim that it ‘enjoyed a considerable circulation in Japan’ (8) should be qualified. While its relative importance, particularly to proletarian writers, was substantial, the circulation during the journal's lifespan (1934–36) was on the order of 3000–5000 copies per month (Nihon kindai bungaku daijiten V:368d); this should be contrasted with Kaizō's circulation of roughly 100,000 in November 1927 (the closest circulation figures I could find; Nagamine Shigetoshi, Modan toshi no dokusho kūkan [Tokyo: Nihon Editaa Sukuuru, 2001] 186) and ‘popular entertainment magazine’ Kingu's circulation of 1.5 million in November 1928 (Iwanami gojū-nen [Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1963] 45).

6. Examples appear in both stories. See pages 91 and 123.

7. One place name is simply mistaken, likely as the result of a typographical error: Tokyo's Hongō ward is presented as ‘Hong O’ (149).

8. Driscoll originally presented the concept in ‘Reverse Postcoloniality’ Social Text 22:1 (Spring 2004), 59–84. There, however, the area studies critique is replaced by a more in-depth examination of the mechanism as part of the current global economy. There too a ‘tropology of cultural-national exceptionalism’ (66) is essential to the ‘revocation of the post-World War II promise of the North to assist in the development of the former colonies of the South and the concomitant rollback of the global advances of postcolonial hybrid politicocultural forms’ (63).

9. While he clearly sees hybridity as a more desirable state, Driscoll explicitly recognises its limitations as well; see Driscoll 2004, 81n5.

10. For example, Masao Miyoshi and H.D. Harootunian, eds., Learning Places: The Afterlives of Area Studies (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002).