The Curious Tale of Mandogi's Ghost
Page 1
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Ye Zhaoyan, Nanjing 1937: A Love Story, translated by Michael Berry (2003)
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Eileen Chang, Written on Water, translated by Andrew F. Jones (2004)
Writing Women in Modern China: The Revolutionary Years, 1936–1976, edited by Amy D. Dooling (2005)
Han Bangqing, The Sing-song Girls of Shanghai, first translated by Eileen Chang, revised and edited by Eva Hung (2005)
Loud Sparrows: Contemporary Chinese Short-Shorts, translated and edited
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Hiratsuka Raichō, In the Beginning, Woman Was the Sun, translated by Teruko Craig (2006)
Zhu Wen, I Love Dollars and Other Stories of China, translated by Julia Lovell (2007)
Kim Sowŏl, Azaleas: A Book of Poems, translated by David McCann (2007)
Wang Anyi, The Song of Everlasting Sorrow: A Novel of Shanghai, translated by Michael Berry with Susan Chan Egan (2008)
Ch’oe Yun, There a Petal Silently Falls: Three Stories by Ch’oe Yun,
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Inoue Yasushi, The Blue Wolf: A Novel of the Life of Chinggis Khan, translated by Joshua A. Fogel (2009)
Anonymous, Courtesans and Opium: Romantic Illusions of the Fool of Yangzhou,
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Cao Naiquian, There’s Nothing I Can Do When I Think of You Late at Night, translated by John Balcom (2009)
Park Wan-suh, Who Ate Up All the Shinga? An Autobiographical Novel, translated by Yu Young-nan and Stephen J. Epstein (2009)
Hwang Sunwŏn, Lost Souls: Stories, translated by Bruce and Ju-Chan Fulton (2009)
HISTORY, SOCIETY, AND CULTURE Carol Gluck, Editor
Takeuchi Yoshimi, What Is Modernity? Writings of Takeuchi Yoshimi, edited and translated, with an introduction, by Richard F. Calichman (2005)
Contemporary Japanese Thought, edited and translated by Richard F. Calichman, (2005)
Overcoming Modernity, edited and translated by Richard F. Calichman (2008)
Natsumi Sōseki, Theory of Literature and Other Critical Writings, edited and translated by Michael Bourdaghs, Atsuko Ueda, and Joseph A. Murphy (2009)
The Curious Tale of
MANDOGI’S
Ghost
KIM SŎK-PŎM
TRANSLATED FROM THE JAPANESE,
AND WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY
CINDI L. TEXTOR
This publication has been supported by the Richard W. Weatherhead Publication Fund of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University.
Columbia University Press
Publishers Since 1893
New York Chichester, West Sussex
cup.columbia.edu
Copyright © 2010 Columbia University Press
All rights reserved
E-ISBN 978-0-231-52672-2
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Kin, Sekihan, 1925–
[Mandogi yurei kitan. English]
The curious tale of mandogi’s ghost / Kim Sŏk-pŏm ; translated and with an introduction
by Cindi L. Textor
p. cm. — (Weatherhead books on asia)
“A historical novel”—CIP data.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-0-231-15310-2 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-231-15311-9 (pbk.) —
ISBN 978-0-231-52672-2 (electronic)
I. Textor, Cindi L. II. Title. III. Series.
PL855.I528M313 2010
895.6’35—dc22 2010000981
A Columbia University Press E-book.
CUP would be pleased to hear about your reading experience with this e-book at cup-ebook@columbia.edu.
References to Internet Web sites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor Columbia University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.
Contents
Acknowledgments
Note on Romanization
Translator’s Introduction
Chapter I
Chapter II
Chapter III
Chapter IV
Chapter V
Chapter VI
Chapter VII
Chapter VIII
Chapter IX
Chapter X
Bibliography
Acknowledgments
I am indebted to a number of people for their aid in preparing me for this project and for their support through its completion. Seiichi Makino, Yukari Tokumasu, and Tomiko Kuwahira are excellent teachers who not only helped me to learn the Japanese language but also made themselves available for language questions that I had throughout the translation process. Richard Okada, Michael Emmerich, and David Goodman helped me to develop my skills as a reader and as a translator. Joy Kim answered questions about the Korean language and made thoughtful comments on my translation. My readers’ insightful comments were a big help, especially with the introduction. Finally, all of the above could be said of Atsuko Ueda, who was my mentor throughout the entire project, from the time she recommended the novel to me, all the way through to the final draft. Last, but not least, I would like to thank Matthew for all of his support along the way.
Note on Romanization
Japanese words are romanized using the Hepburn romanization system, and Korean words are romanized using the McCune-Reischauer system. Exceptions are made for the names of major cities (such as Seoul and Tokyo), as well as for the names of individuals who prefer one spelling over others.
Translator’s Introduction
In an afterword to the 1991 reprinted edition of Mandogi yūrei kitan (translated here as The Curious Tale of Mandogi’s Ghost and originally published in 1970), Kim Sŏk-pŏm writes that “Mandogi went against the current of the Japanese literary establishment from the beginning. The same is true of myself, the writer.”1 He might have stopped at “went against the current.” Whereas it is true that the novel does not fit neatly into the Japanese literary establishment, neither does it fit neatly into any other category. What strikes me most about Mandogi is its rich and multifaceted nature, each reading revealing a new layer of complexity and meaning. The text could be read fruitfully in any number of ways.
Perhaps the most basic of these methods is to read Mandogi as a historical novel. It takes place on Cheju-do, a volcanic island situated fifty miles off the southwestern coast of the Korean peninsula, and it tells the tale of a dimwitted and innocent temple hand, Mandogi, who is unwittingly dragged into the chaos and tragedy of the Cheju-do Rebellion of 1948. Usually called the “Four-Three Incident,” the rebellion began on April 3, 1948, when a group of peasant guerrillas attacked some of the island’s police stations, killing several government officials. Though the guerrillas were ostensibly protesting the United Nations’ decision to hold separate elections in North and South Korea, making official the de facto division of the peninsula, the rebellion was treated as a communist insurgency. Over the course of the following year, as the U.S.-backed Syngman Rhee regime made efforts to suppress the rebellion, thousands of lives were lost.2
However, the Four-Three Incident, despite its gravity, has been largely ignored
. In fact, the silence surrounding the incident is perhaps one reason for the passion and frequency with which Kim writes about it. Most of his major works of fiction deal in some way with the issue, including Karasu no shi (The death of a crow, 1957), Kazantō (Volcanic island, 1983), and, of course, The Curious Tale of Mandogi’s Ghost. However, Cheju-do is important to Kim not only in terms of his career as an author but on a personal level as well. Born in Osaka, Japan, in 1925 to Korean parents recently immigrated from Cheju-do, Kim considers the island his ancestral homeland.
This brings us to a second possible reading of Mandogi, one employed by Christopher Scott in “Ghost Writing: Kim Sok-pom’s Mandogi yūrei kitan,” the third chapter of his 2006 doctoral dissertation titled “Invisible Men: The Zainichi Korean Presence in Postwar Japanese Culture.”3 Scott argues thoughtfully that in many ways, Mandogi and his “ghost” represent the “invisible” Korean minority in Japan. While Kim is reexamining an important and underappreciated event in Korea’s past,4 he is also examining a situation in the present: the plight of Koreans in Japan, or “zainichi” Koreans. Indeed, whereas Mandogi highlights the horrors and atrocities of the Four-Three incident, the novel also examines issues of identity and belonging, which were facing the Korean population in Japan at the time of the novel’s publication and which continue even today.5
“Zainichi” is a term that refers to those residents of Japan who, like Kim, come from non-Japanese ethnic backgrounds. Most of the time, though, the term is used to refer specifically to those of Korean descent, who constitute the largest ethnic minority in Japan.6 Because most first-generation zainichi came to Japan, by choice or by force, during the period of Japan’s colonial rule over Korea (1910–1945), they serve as a constant and perhaps unpleasant reminder of Japan’s imperialistic past. As a result, they have met with various forms of discrimination and marginalization. In addition, ever since the division of the peninsula and the Korean War (1950–1953), zainichi have struggled not only with the question of how to balance their Korean heritage with their Japanese residence, but also with the question of whether to identify as North Korean or South Korean.
As is the case with the Four-Three Incident, Kim is deeply concerned with these zainichi issues both in his writing and in his personal life. Although technically second-generation zainichi, Kim spent much of his childhood on Cheju-do and in other parts of Korea, so he shares a first-generation affinity toward Korea as the homeland, resisting naturalization and other forms of assimilation into Japan. After the war ended, however, he was not able to return to Korea. In 1945, he wrote, “While I greeted the independence of the fatherland with great joy, after the ‘8/15 Liberation,’ I was suddenly empty, and shut myself away inside.”7 Kim felt trapped between two worlds, unable to return to Korea, yet also unable to feel at home within Japanese society.
Nevertheless, Kim writes almost exclusively in Japanese, a practice adopted by second-generation zainichi writers and resisted by those of the first generation. Kim felt that Korean authors situated in Japan and publishing their works for an audience of Japanese readers had no choice but to write in the Japanese language.8 At the same time, however, he felt that it was important for Koreans writing in Japanese to inscribe a “Korean flavor” into their writing to avoid being too “Japanized” by writing in Japanese.9 He strongly resisted the notion that writing in the language of the Japanese automatically made him Japanese in some way, insisting that regardless of the language in which he chose to write, his individuality would come through in the text. Moreover, Kim thought that because his Korean identity was very much a part of that individuality, his “Korean-ness” would be apparent in his writing.10 In fact, Kim rejects the categorization of zainichi literature as “Japanese literature” and instead refers to it as “literature in Japanese,” arguing that language alone is not enough to categorize literature as Japanese or Korean, given all the other cultural and historical factors at work.11
The division of the Korean peninsula left Kim similarly straddling a border. Since the normalization of relations between South Korea and Japan, zainichi Koreans have had the option of either taking on South Korean (Kankoku) citizenship or remaining under the designation “Korean” (Chōsen), which although referring to the old, undivided Korea, is usually associated with the North. Though Kim’s “homeland” is Cheju-do, which geographically aligns him with the South, he is perhaps ideologically aligned more closely with the North. In the end, however, Kim argues that zainichi Koreans, being in a position to carry on the legacy of a single, unified Korean community, should not be obligated to declare allegiance to either government on the peninsula, but only to an undivided Korean homeland. Kim famously argued this point to another prominent zainichi author, Ri Kaisei, who changed his citizenship to South Korean in 1998 in order to be able to take part in political reforms in the South. Kim attacked Ri’s decision, arguing that “Korean” citizenship is the only way to establish oneself as a member of the Korean community without acknowledging the division of the peninsula.12
Kim’s pattern is to defy categorization. He will not have his identity defined in terms of simple dichotomies, such as Japanese versus Korean, North Korean versus South Korean, or perhaps even first- versus second-generation zainichi;13 instead, he chooses to occupy the blurry area between the two. In many ways, The Curious Tale of Mandogi’s Ghost highlights such overlapping, in-between areas. As Kim notes in his afterword, novel and author alike are difficult to categorize, so it is no surprise that Scott’s reading is concerned with how the narrative, characters, and events within the novel might be difficult to categorize; in his words, it “[focuses] on [the] question of zainichi-ness as it is articulated through Mandogi’s fractured identity and through critical gaps or aporias in the narrative itself.”14
In “Ghost Writing,” Scott argues that Mandogi’s many different names, the ambiguity surrounding his manhood, and the narrative’s ambiguous status with regard to Mandogi’s “ghost” render Mandogi a nebulous character, his identity “fractured,” and therefore representative of the zainichi. Scott’s reading is insightful. It is important to see that in Mandogi, Kim is doing more than simply retelling the Four-Three Incident; he is making an effort to problematize the boundaries that fracture zainichi identity. And yet, there is much more to The Curious Tale of Mandogi’s Ghost. The novel goes beyond its effort to tear down these boundaries and seems more concerned with what is left when they are gone. If the zainichi are not quite Korean and not quite Japanese, then what are they? We might call them both, or neither, or something else altogether. Alternatively, we might simply call them human.
Yet another reading of the novel, then, might view it as Kim’s attempt not only to deconstruct the lines that are drawn to place us into categories but also to catch a glimpse of the raw humanity that transcends those categories. Perhaps it is not coincidental that the journal that originally published Mandogi in 1970 is called Ningen toshite: “Being Human.” I see the novel, more than anything, as an attempt to grasp what it means to be human.
Throughout the story of Mandogi’s ghost, Kim takes issue with any number of ways in which humanity is defined superficially. Take Mandogi’s names, for example. The novel begins with a discussion of Mandogi’s various names:
At Kannon Temple, in the heart of a deep valley, there was a young priest who worked in the kitchen, a temple hand, in other words. People called him “dimwit.” When they didn’t call him that, they called him “Mandogi.” And when they didn’t call him that, they called him plain old “temple hand.” Of them all, “Mandogi” was the least insulting, but that was the Buddhist name given to him when he entered the priesthood. If you have a priest’s name, you should still have the secular name you had before you became a priest, but he didn’t have a common name like that. He just had the nickname “Keiton” (meaning “dog shit”), and that was it for his names. In other words, he had been nameless since birth. People feel strange around the nameless; they make you wonder what it is to
be human.
Scott discusses Mandogi’s names at length in “Ghost Writing,”15 focusing largely on the name “Mantoku Ichirō,” a Japanese moniker that Mandogi is given when he is drafted as a laborer and sent to Japan during the colonial period. Scott points out that here, Kim is clearly criticizing the Japanese policy of sōshi kaimei, an effort to assimilate Japan’s colonial subjects by giving them Japanese names.16
However, nowhere in Scott’s analysis does he note that, in Mandogi’s case, his Japanese name is meant not only to “Japanize” him but to humanize him as well. When Mandogi rejects his new Japanese name and insists that his name is still Mandogi, the Japanese official responds by shouting, “Idiot! How can you complain, when you don’t even have a name? There is no one without a name in Japan! You have the honor of being given a Japanese name, of being treated like a human being!” In this passage, it is clear that Kim is taking issue not only with the notion that a name could define someone as Korean or Japanese, but also, and perhaps more importantly, with the notion that a name is what makes a human being. Furthermore, his criticism of the overemphasis on names is not limited to the Japanese. In the first paragraph of the novel, the narrative says that “people [in general] feel strange around the nameless; they make you wonder what it is to be human.” Clearly, Kim is concerned with more than just the divisive properties of names. In Mandogi, he is searching for a more intrinsic way to define humanity.
Kim hints at such a definition later in the novel, when Mandogi is ordered by the police to shoot one of the rebels they have captured. Mandogi hearkens back to a similar situation he encountered during his time as a mine laborer in Japan, when all the Korean workers were ordered to take turns beating one of their countrymen who had tried and failed to escape. When Mandogi’s turn came, he found himself unable to strike the body of his fellow man, reduced now to a mangled corpse, barely recognizable as human. The narrative continues: “He didn’t have a reason. Mandogi’s body just refused to do it. His stomach, his guts, the whole makeup of his body just didn’t mesh with the white birch rod, sticky with bloody handprints. He translated his feelings into the simple words, ‘This ain’t something a human should do.’ ”