2022 Volume 106 Pages 50-63
Literary history, such as Nihon bungakushi josetsu (A History of Japanese Literature), written by Shūichi Katō, has been written to criticize the previous literary histories. This essay, through a literary historical lens, attempts to verify how Japanese colonial literature and Japanese-language literature written by novelists with Japanese roots during the 1950s and 1960s had been understood. Along with the awareness that the Japanese turned into “the people who were oppressed” in the 1950s, postwar colonial literature and Zainichi Chosenjin Bungaku (literary works written by Korean residents in Japan) attracted a growing interest. This perception had evolved into a methodology in the 1960s. This essay will discuss the postwar colonial literature and the way of literary history by taking into consideration Shigeharu Nakano's “Hi-appakusha no bungaku” (“Literature of the Oppressed”) and Shunsuke Tsurumi's “Chosenjin no tōjōsuru shōsetsu” (“Novels with Korean Characters”).
