This most welcome translation of Kim Sŏk-pŏm's novel Mandogi yūrei kitan offers fascinating insight into the concerns of an author considered one of the giants of zainichi bungaku. Zainichi here, of course, refers in the strict sense to residents of Japan of non-Japanese ethnic backgrounds but more commonly denotes residents of Korean heritage. Perhaps it is unfair to immediately tag Kim a zainichi writer, thus forcing upon him the role of representing a larger community. But Kim himself consistently pondered what it meant to be zainichi and rejected any subsumption of his work into the category of “Japanese literature.” More contemporary zainichi writers, such as Yu Miri, have been widely acclaimed and translated into English, but until recently it has been hard to experience the works of the earlier generation of writers unless able to read in Japanese. This translation of Kim's 1970 novel thus contributes an important layer to the historical understanding of the Korean community in Japan.

Kim himself was second generation, born in Osaka in 1925. His parents had only recently moved to Japan from Cheju Island and he spent much of his childhood on the island. His ties to Korea, and to Cheju in particular, were strong. He was also intimately familiar with the early history through which the zainichi community emerged during the last two decades of colonial rule. Osaka housed one of the largest Korean communities in Japan and was the site of some of the most vociferous labor struggles. Wartime Osaka witnessed increasing immigration and the complicated move towards integration under the assimilative slogans of imperialisation alongside the daily encounter of discrimination and labor exploitation. Kim was in his twenties when the war came to an end and the chaotic division of the Korean peninsula prevented the return of so many in Japan to what they considered their homeland. For Kim that experience of national crisis was filtered through its particularly violent manifestation on Cheju Island, where a distinct sense of identity had long coexisted within the national realm. In 1948, in the lead up to separate elections being held in North and South Korea thus signifying an increasing establishment of separate regimes, conflict between guerilla forces and police escalated on the island and led to a brutal crackdown by the South Korean army. What is now known as the Cheju Uprising continued through the following year with the razing of farming villages caught between the police-held coastal towns and guerilla forces in the mountainous interior. The actions of the police in suppressing the guerilla forces, many of whom held the popular support of the peasants, were particularly brutal and culminated in thousands of deaths and imprisonments, and the mass execution of prisoners when the Korean War broke out in 1950.

It is this conflict that forms the background to The Curious Tale of Mandogi's Ghost and, indeed, to many of Kim's other novels, as the translator Cindi Textor tells us in her helpful introduction. In his literary work, Kim repeatedly returned to this seminal event in his political and creative consciousness. When he did so in the late 1960s, it was in the context of the 1965 Treaty normalizing relations between Japan and South Korea, which was to herald another landmark in the history of the zainichi community. It is important, then, that Mandogi's story explicitly retraces the colonial origins of the violence in Cheju and that when Mandogi is faced with the brutality of the South Korean police in Cheju, he recalls his earlier encounter with the force of violence as a laborer conscripted to a mine in Hokkaido at the end of the war. Both situations produce a powerful and desperate plea for humanity in the face of the execution of power through violence.

Mandogi himself is a puzzling and not always sympathetic character, yet not such an unusual one in the literary history of dimwits who somehow force a recognition of fundamental truths where other characters are too caught up in the historical forces surrounding them. Textor's introduction stresses that this novel is not only to be read as a description of the Cheju Uprising but as a commentary upon the situation of Koreans in Japan at the time. The Uprising is, then, also a displaced narrative of the silencing of that community. It is here that Kim's writing takes on the potential force of a minor literature in the sense of Deleuze and Guattari's concept. Even in translation we can detect traces of the minor author they sketched out. In the ethnographic urge of Kim to “explain” Korean customs and terms to a Japanese-language audience we see that Kim was already working in a self-consciously translational mode (which also frees Textor of some difficult decisions in presenting the particularity of detail). Unlike later zainichi writers, for Kim translation allows for a construction of discrete notions of Japanese and Korean identity and this is, perhaps, one of the marks of early zainichi literature which has led to it gaining less scholarly attention than the later more explicitly “hybrid” writers. It is important, however, to recognize the violent history of that celebrated hybridity. The Curious Tale of Mandogi's Ghost is highly recommended for courses on post/colonial histories and in the increasingly popular field of trauma studies.