Intellectuals and cultural products circulated vigorously in early twentieth-century East Asia. After Japan defeated China in the Sino-Japanese War (1894–95) and Russia in the Russo-Japanese War (1904–5) and became a semicolonial, colonial, and world power, hundreds of thousands of educated Chinese, Koreans, and Taiwanese streamed to Japan's cities.Footnote ¹ They went primarily for practical training in engineering, medicine, science, and technology, but also for political reasons and to study the arts. While in Japan, a number of them forged ties with Japanese and other East Asian counterparts (Chaeil Hanguk Yuhaksaeng Yŏnhaphoe 1988; Kōain Reference Kōain1940; Lamley Reference Lamley and Lamley1999, 230–34; Sanetō Reference Sanetō1960). At the same time, thousands of Japanese educators, journalists, artists, scholars, and other professionals traveled to China, Korea, and Taiwan, drawn by curiosity about the lands and peoples of Japan's new dominion, as well as by economic opportunities. While abroad, some established links with Chinese, Korean, and Taiwanese intellectuals (Fogel Reference Fogel1996). Educated Chinese travelers to Korea and Taiwan were not nearly as numerous as those to Japan, but they, too, played important roles in intra–East Asian cultural dialogues, as did Koreans in China and Taiwan, and Taiwanese in Korea and China (Lin and Chen Reference Lin and Chen2002; Yang Reference Yang1988).

Accompanying this intra–East Asian travel were multidirectional flows of cultural products. With the exception of writings on early twentieth-century Taiwanese engagement with mainland Chinese cultural movements, most comparative scholarship on twentieth-century East Asian cultures explores Chinese, Japanese, Korean, or Taiwanese involvement with the West; it posits imperial Japan as a relatively unproblematic conduit of American and European creative output to semicolonial Chinese and colonial Koreans and Taiwanese. There is no question that early twentieth-century Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Taiwanese fascination with Western cultural products was profound. Just as some nineteenth-century colonial Bengali writers longed to be labeled the “clones” of certain English writers (Trivedi Reference Trivedi1993, 120), so, too, some early twentieth-century Chinese writers engaged in a “fetish of personal identification” with their Western counterparts (Lee Reference Lee1973, 277). It is also clear that Japan and its cultural products facilitated Chinese, Korean, and Taiwanese encounters with American and European cultural products. But whether at home or abroad, early twentieth-century East Asians actively consumed and transculturated not only Western but also one another's creative output, including literature and other arts, sports, and a variety of media phenomena (Fujii Reference Fujii2002, 216–31; Kim Reference Kim2005; Shih Reference Shih2001, 292–99; Thornber Reference Thornber2006, Reference Thornber2009; Wong Reference Wong2006).Footnote ²

Flows and interactions of people and cultural products made early twentieth-century East Asia a site of intense intraregional transculturation, where transculturation is understood as the “many different processes of assimilation, adaptation, rejection, parody, resistance, loss, and ultimately transformation” of cultural products and cultures (Spitta Reference Spitta1995, 24; cf. Ortiz Reference Ortiz1987, xi; Pratt Reference Pratt2008, 7; Rama Reference Rama1982). Mary Louise Pratt identifies transculturation as a phenomenon of the “contact zone,” a term she coined to describe “the space of imperial encounters, the space in which peoples geographically and historically separated come into contact with each other and establish ongoing relations, usually involving conditions of coercion, radical inequality, and intractable conflict” (2008, 8). Here, I am particularly concerned with the transculturation that took place in early twentieth-century intra–East Asian artistic contact zones, or more precisely—considering their ambiguous, constantly changing, semiborderless character—artistic contact nebulae. Artistic contact nebulae are spaces where dancers, dramatists, musicians, painters, sculptors, writers, and other artists from cultures, societies, or nations in unequal power relationships grapple with and transculturate one another's creative output. These spaces diverge in two principal ways from the contact zones discussed by Pratt and others (Curley Reference Curley and Barnett2002; Fitz Reference Fitz2001, 32–42; Green Reference Green2003; Lape Reference Lape2000, 1–18; Pickles and Rutherdale Reference Pickles and Rutherdale2005; Reichl Reference Reichl2002, 1–8, 40–45). Not unique to artistic contact spaces in (semi)colonial East Asia, these differences reveal underexamined facets of transculturation in empire, interpreted broadly.

First, imperial encounters in early twentieth-century East Asia, far from occurring among peoples geographically, historically, and culturally distant, instead were dominated by exchanges among regional neighbors with long-standing relationships. As is well known, China was the cultural center of East Asia until the late nineteenth century, and Korea was an active transmitter of Chinese as well as Korean culture to Japan. Internal chaos and foreign oppression in China, paired with Japan's emergence as a (semi)colonial power at the end of the nineteenth century, radically transformed rather than introduced contacts among East Asian peoples and cultures. Scholarship that posits imperial encounters, let alone power imbalances, as necessarily occurring between the West and the Rest risks becoming ensnared in some of the same biases it deconstructs (e.g., Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin, Reference Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin2000, 2002; Bhabha Reference Bhabha1994; Harrison Reference Harrison2003; Moniga Reference Moniga1997; Moore-Gilbert et al. Reference Moore-Gilbert1997; Williams and Chrisman Reference Williams and Chrisman1994).Footnote ³

Second, as in other empires, transcultural encounters among artists and creative products in intra–East Asian artistic contact nebulae rarely were characterized by the steep hierarchies promoted by official discourse or presupposed by (semi)colonial peoples. Our understandings of empire, and the Japanese empire in particular, derive in good part from accounts that focus on the doctrines and methods of imperial state formation as absorbed under duress or voluntarily by colonial and semicolonial peoples. This absorption has been presented as occurring in two principal forms. Imperial powers, often with the support of local collaborators, impose policies that enable them to increase their political and economic penetration; these policies generally exploit colonial and semicolonial resources and frequently attempt to assimilate colonial and semicolonial peoples (Barrett and Shyu Reference Barrett and Shyu2000; Brook Reference Brook2005; Duus, Myers, and Peattie Reference Duus, Myers and Peattie1989, Reference Duus, Myers and Peattie1996; Eckert et al. Reference Eckert2000, 254–326; Fu Reference Fu1993; Myers and Peattie Reference Myers and Peattie1984). In contrast, colonial and semicolonial peoples, as part of national self-strengthening, enthusiastically seek out from imperial powers what they regard as superior ideas, practices, and institutions, including social and political doctrines, technology, medicine, and linguistic and artistic reforms (Kim Reference Kim Ch'aesu2002; Liu Reference Liu1995, 265–374; Lo Reference Lo2002; Sanetō Reference Sanetō1960, 331–407; Yi Reference Yi1987). Both modalities of foreign-system integration, while necessarily entailing transculturation, presume a clear hierarchy, whether of oppressor/oppressed or benefactor/supplicant.

More fluid forms of transculturation also proliferate in empire, particularly in artistic contact nebulae, which are characterized by atmospheres of greater reciprocity and diminished claims of authority. As in other empires, among the most dynamic artistic contact spaces in early twentieth-century East Asia were literary contact nebulae. Literary contact nebulae are best understood as vibrant sites of readerly contact, writerly contact, and textual contact, intertwined modes of transculturation that depend to some degree on linguistic contact and often involve travel. Here, “readerly contact” refers to reading creative texts from cultures/nations in asymmetrical power relationships with one's own, “writerly contact” to creative writers from conflicting societies interacting with one another, “textual contact” to transculturating creative texts in this environment (whether explicitly through commentaries and translations or intertextually by weaving fragments from other literatures into one's own creative products), and “linguistic contact” to engaging with the language of the society oppressing or oppressed by one's own.Footnote ⁴ In the following pages, I develop a general conceptualization of early twentieth-century intra–East Asian literary contact nebulae and then look closely at two striking manifestations of their intriguing conflation of collaboration, acquiescence, and resistance vis-à-vis metropolitan cultural and imperial authority: the subversive yet conciliatory anonymous Korean translation (May 1929) of the censored poem “Ame no furu Shinagawa eki” (Shinagawa Station in the Rain, February 1929) by the preeminent Japanese proletarian writer Nakano Shigeharu (1902–79), and wartime Chinese translations of the banned novella Ikiteiru heitai (Living Soldiers, 1938) by the prolific Japanese writer Ishikawa Tatsuzō (1905–85). I also address the subsequent intertextualizations of both the Japanese texts and their (semi)colonial translations in Chinese and Korean creative works.

Intra–East Asian travel, as well as linguistic, writerly, readerly, and textual contacts, however uneven and ambiguous because of Japan's dual position as imperial power and gateway to coveted Western science and culture, all were hallmarks of early twentieth-century East Asian literary interactions. Just as (post)colonial African, Caribbean, Latin American, and South and Southeast Asian writers often were educated in (former) imperial metropoles, so, too, did the majority of East Asia's prominent (semi)colonial literary figures study in or at least visit Japan. The leading Chinese writer Guo Moruo (1892–1978) once asserted, “The modern Chinese literary world has been constructed for the most part by writers who studied in Japan … We can even say that China's new literature was baptized by Japan” (Cheng Reference Cheng and Goldman1977, 63). Encounters with Japan were even more decisive for Korean and Taiwanese literatures; it is generally understood that three-quarters of Korea's and Taiwan's major early twentieth-century writers received at least part of their education in Japan or spent significant time there (Hotei Reference Hotei, Masuo and Toshihiro1997, 3; Shirakawa Reference Shirakawa1981, 6). In addition, just as European writers frequently traveled to colonial sites, nearly all of Japan's principal early twentieth-century writers visited China, however briefly (Fogel Reference Fogel1996, 251), as did a number of Korean and Taiwanese writers, while Japanese writers also ventured to Korea and Taiwan.

Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, and Taiwanese wrote many volumes about their travels in East Asia, revealing a broad range of conflicting experiences and impressions. In Nubing zizhuan (A Woman Soldier's Autobiography, 1936, 1946), the Chinese writer and revolutionary Xie Bingying (1906–2000) describes Honma Hisao (1886–1981), a prominent Japanese scholar of English literature, as particularly courteous toward Chinese students. But she also paints life in Tokyo as pure torment after the Japanese seizure of Mukden in northeastern China in 1931, remarking, “Things daily grew more difficult. Subject to constant humiliation, all of us felt heavily oppressed … Leaving Tokyo [that fall] was like leaving hell” (Xie, Reference Xie Bingying1999, 234–38). Likewise, in “Shanhai yūki” (Shanghai Travelogue, 1921), the Japanese writer Akutagawa Ryūnosuke (1892–1927) comments sarcastically that “Japanese beggars are not endowed with the supernatural filth of Chinese beggars” and declares contemporary China “licentious, barbaric, and gluttonous.” On the other hand, he is not without praise for the mainland, declaring traffic control in Shanghai more sophisticated than in Tokyo and the orchestra at a dance hall in Shanghai superior to those in the Asakusa entertainment district of Japan's capital city (Akutagawa Reference Akutagawa Ryūnosuke1996M, 10, 13, 21, 24).

Linguistic contact involved even more writers than did travel. To be sure, although generally trained in classical Chinese, few early twentieth-century Japanese writers were proficient in vernacular Chinese, much less Korean, and still fewer Chinese and Taiwanese writers knew Korean. But imperial Japanese language policies, like those of other metropoles, mandated Japanese language instruction in schools in Korea, Taiwan, and Manchuria. This ensured that most writers from these regions had at least a rudimentary knowledge of Japanese.Footnote ⁵ Chinese institutions began offering Japanese language instruction in the late 1890s (Reynolds Reference Reynolds1993, 111; Xu Reference Xu1996), and Japanese engaged in a number of cultural enterprises in China (Teow Reference Teow1999), but the early twentieth-century Chinese writers who learned Japanese often did so in Japan. The large numbers of early twentieth-century Chinese, Korean, and Taiwanese writers who attended Japanese institutions both at home and in Japan, as well as those who, whether or not they spent time in Japan, read and translated Japanese literature and published creative work in Japanese, in many cases long before they were officially prohibited from publishing in Chinese and Korean, together demonstrate significant intra–East Asian linguistic contact throughout the (semi)colonial period. Linguistic contact was particularly complex in Taiwan, where writers negotiated among modern Japanese, literary Chinese, vernacular Mandarin, and vernacular Taiwanese dialects (Kleeman Reference Kleeman2003, 122), but throughout the empire, it resulted in the production of hybridized creative work.

Linguistic contact and travel enable substantial readerly, writerly, and textual contact.Footnote ⁶ Japanese, Korean, and Taiwanese readers alike voraciously consumed creative works by preeminent contemporary Chinese writers, particularly Lu Xun (1881–1936). As the Korean writer and revolutionary Yu Su-in (1905–?) recalled, “We read [Lu Xun's] ‘Kuangren riji’ [Diary of a Madman, 1918] many times and talked about it a lot, until we were so excited we too practically went mad” (Li Reference Li1981, 34). Even more striking was Chinese, Korean, and Taiwanese consumption of Japanese literature. By most estimates, Chinese, Koreans, and Taiwanese read more Japanese drama, poetry, and prose during the first decades of the twentieth century than their predecessors had in the previous thousand years combined.Footnote ⁷ (Semi)colonial East Asians read Japanese literature voluntarily and voraciously, both at home and in Japan, and often in conjunction with Western and other East Asian literatures.Footnote ⁸ The Taiwanese writer Ye Shitao (1925– ) notes that as a student in Taiwan,

Ye Shitao's enthusiasm for Japanese literature recalls the ardor of (post)colonial literary artists from around the world—including the Indian writer Anita Desai (1937–) and the Trinidadian writer C. L. R. James (1901–89)—vis-à-vis the textual products of the (former) imperial hegemon (Desai Reference Desai and de Courtivron2003, 12; James Reference James1993, 18, 28–29, 34). Not surprisingly, a number of Chinese, Korean, and Taiwanese writers disparaged Japanese literature, but even their criticisms suggest considerable consumption of this corpus. For instance, in “Dui Taiwan xinwenxue luxian de yi ti-an” (One Proposal for the Course of Taiwanese New Literature, 1935), the Taiwanese writer and critic Zhang Shenqie (1904–65) asserts,

Zhang dismisses Japanese literature as merely copying other literatures, a common accusation at the time, but suggests that this shortcoming has not stopped him from studying the corpus extensively, or at least pretending to have done so.

Intra–East Asian readerly contact frequently intertwined with writerly contact as Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Taiwanese literary figures sought out their East Asian counterparts at home and abroad. From early in the (semi)colonial period, metropolitan and (semi)colonial writers regularly socialized with one another, joined one another's literary societies, published in one another's periodicals, and forged deep friendships (Thornber Reference Thornber2006, 150–223, 311–91; 2009). The Korean poet Chu Yohan (1900-79), who lived in Japan from 1912 to 1919 and was one of the first twentieth-century Korean writers welcomed into Japanese literary circles, recalled, “I grew close to [the Japanese poet] Kawaji Ryūkō [1888–1959] so was treated as a colleague in his journals, including Gendai shiika [Modern Poetry] and Akebono [Dawn], and I continued to experiment with writing poems in Japanese” (Chu Reference Chu Yohan1956, 135). Encounters outside the metropole were facilitated by Japanese expatriates such as Uchiyama Kanzō (1885–1959), who hosted grand parties and intimate gatherings at the Uchiyama Shoten (Bookstore) in Shanghai to introduce visiting Japanese writers to local talent. But imperial discourse and embedded biases exacted their toll, complicating artistic relationships.

The case of the Korean writer Chang Hyŏkju (1905–98) is particularly notable. Criticized by some Korean intellectuals for writing in Japanese, Chang Hyŏkju enjoyed friendships with many in the Japanese literary establishment, his work appeared in a range of Japanese periodicals, and in 1933, he even won the prestigious Kaizō (Reconstruction) Prize. Yet Japanese critics insisted on pigeonholing him as a colonial writer. In a 1935 letter to the Japanese novelist Tokunaga Sunao (1899–1958), he protested,

That Chang Hyŏkju's comments to Tokunaga and other Japanese intellectuals did little to change entrenched attitudes is suggested by the Japanese literature scholar Kataoka Yoshikazu's (1897–1957) discussion several years later of the Korean writer's short story “Ken [Kwŏn] to iu otoko” (A Man Named Kwŏn, 1933). Kataoka emphasizes the importance of Chang Hyŏkju's depictions of “local color” but undermines even this ambiguous praise, surrounding it with allegations concerning Chang Hyŏkju's dependence both on metropolitan predecessors and on Chinese writings tied to these predecessors:

Without question, colonial Korean writers, like cultural figures the world over, discussed their homeland in their creative texts. But no less than their counterparts in other fields, they longed for recognition as artists who transcended the local and who could stand on their own in the East Asian regional and ultimately global arenas. Furthermore, the strands of Japanese and Chinese texts woven into their creative works generally result much more from active negotiation with literary predecessors than from simple plagiarism or influence, as Kataoka implies (Thornber Reference Thornber2006, Reference Thornber2009). Also interesting here is how Kataoka differentiates between colonial Korean and semicolonial Chinese engagement with Japanese cultural products, depicting the relationship between Lu Xun's and Sōseki's works as one of “resemblance,” rather than indebtedness. In general, the Japanese literary establishment held contemporary Chinese creative production in higher esteem than that of Korea or Taiwan, despite (or because of) decades of colonial occupation.

For much of the (semi)colonial period, intra–East Asian writerly contact was characterized by unstable amalgams of supporting and undermining. As Kataoka's and Zhang Shenqie's comments suggest, so, too, was textual contact, the most striking aspect of intra–East Asian literary contact nebulae. Early twentieth-century Japanese, Korean, and Taiwanese writings on and translations and intertextualizations of Chinese literature were significant, as were Chinese and Japanese transculturations of Korean literature (Thornber Reference Thornber2006, 311–89; 2009), but Chinese, Korean, and Taiwanese transculturations of Japanese creative works greatly overshadowed other intra–East Asian textual contacts. Japanese literature generally has been understood as reenacting other literatures—classical Chinese literature from its beginnings through the Meiji (1868–1912) and Taishō (1912–26) periods, and Western literatures from Meiji to the present day. Likewise, studies of early twentieth-century Chinese, Korean, and Taiwanese writings tend to focus on relationships with Western counterparts, positing Japanese literature, or more frequently Japanese translations of Western texts, as mostly smooth gateways to Western cultures.

In fact, in contrast with their counterparts in many other colonial sites, where the most active textual contact with imperial literature took place after decolonization (Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin Reference Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin2002, 6), (semi)colonial Chinese, Korean, and Taiwanese writers not only appropriated metropolitan narrative patterns but also transculturated thousands of Japanese novels, plays, poems, and short stories. They transculturated everything from late nineteenth-century political novels, plays, and shintaishi (poems in the new style), to “I-novels” (shishōsetsu) and proletarian and modernist writings of the early twentieth century, to battlefront literature on the war with China.Footnote ⁹ Far from being passively “influenced” by Japanese literature, as has been argued, or simply “writing back” to or even just “reading” the metropole, as frequently is asserted in studies of (post)colonial intertextual engagement with canonical metropolitan works (Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin Reference Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin2002, 186–92; cf. Caminero-Santangelo Reference Caminero-Santangelo2005; Granqvist Reference Granqvist2006), Chinese, Korean, and Taiwanese writers instead wrestled dynamically and creatively with metropolitan textual predecessors. By both affirming and denying imperial cultural authority—the former by permanently incorporating Japanese literary works into their own cultural fabrics and, in so doing, contributing to the survival of these texts, and the latter by picking Japanese creative works apart, if not dismembering them entirely—they simultaneously resisted against and collaborated with Japanese discourse. Especially interesting in this regard are their translations and intertextualizations of censored Japanese literature. Close readings of two key examples of this phenomenon—colonial Korean transculturations of Nakano's poem “Ame no furu Shinagawa eki” and semicolonial Chinese transculturations of Ishikawa's novella Ikiteiru heitai—provide insight into the ambiguities of the travel as well as the linguistic, readerly, writerly, and particularly textual interactions that flourish in literary contact nebulae and are inseparable from creative consumption and production.

Korea, Korean Language, Korean People, and Nakano Shigeharu's “Ame no furu Shinagawa eki”

Few Japanese writers were as popular with colonial Koreans as Nakano Shigeharu, the leading poet and organizer of Japan's prewar proletarian literary movement. Nakano wrote extensively on Korea and, like many Japanese proletarian figures, was critical of Japanese imperialism. His work, some of which recast writings by Korean colleagues (Mizuno Reference Mizuno1977; Takagawa Reference Takagawa1984, 82–89), was itself a frequent target of intra–East Asian textual transculturation. This was particularly true of “Ame no furu Shinagawa eki.” The first published version of this poem appeared in Kaizō (Reconstruction) in February 1929. Punctuated by three sets of censorship marks, it depicts a Japanese revolutionary bidding farewell to and imagining the eventual glorious return to Japan of Korean revolutionaries who are being deported on the occasion of the enthronement of the Shōwa emperor (November 10, 1928); the revolutionaries include Yi Pukman, a Korean proletarian writer, and Kim Hoyŏng, a leader of the Korean labor movement in Japan, both of whom were friends with Nakano (Ogasawara Reference Ogasawara1988).

“Ame no furu Shinagawa eki” was quickly translated into Korean as “Pi nal-i nŭn P'umch'ŏn-yŏk” (Shinagawa Station in the Rain, May 1929); this anonymous translation was published in the Tokyo-based Korean-language journal Musanja (Proletariat), which was edited by Nakano's friend Kim Duyong (1902–?). Several months later, the leading Korean revolutionary poet Im Hwa (1908–53), another of Nakano's friends, intertextualized both Nakano's poem and its Korean translation in “Usan pat-ŭn Yok'ohama ŭi pudu” (Yokohama Pier under the Umbrella, August 1929). Im Hwa began reading Japanese literature passionately as a child; he lived in Japan for several years as a young adult, and published some of his work in Japanese periodicals, including Nakano's own Puroretaria geijutsu (Proletarian Arts) (Han et al. Reference Han1989, 38–39; Ko Reference Ko1991). Transculturating a Japanese poem that maligns colonial Koreans, “Pi nal-i nŭn P'umch'ŏn-yŏk” smudges collaboration and resistance by repeating its predecessor's stereotypes of Koreans yet calling for a physical attack on the Japanese emperor, while Im Hwa's “Usan pat-ŭn Yok'ohama ŭi pudu” does so by refuting these stereotypes but remaining silent on changing the imperial status quo.

“Pi nal-i nŭn P'umch'ŏn-yŏk” translates the Japanese poem's first extended set of censorship marks into lines that unflatteringly corporealize the emperor. Whereas in “Ame no furu Shinagawa eki” the Japanese revolutionary notes that his drenched Korean friends “call to mind ˋˋˋˋˋˋˋ / call to mind ˋˋˋˋˋ ˋˋˋˋˋ ˋˋˋˋ ˋˋˋˋˋˋ” (Nakano Reference Nakano Shigeharu1929a, 82), the Japanese revolutionary in “Pi nal-i nŭn P'umch'ŏn-yŏk” comments, “You all, soaked with rain, think of the Japanese XX who is kicking you out/You all, soaked with rain, engrave before your eyes the hair on his head, his narrow forehead, his glasses, his mustache, his curved spine” (Nakano Reference Nakano Shigeharu1929b, 69).Footnote ¹⁰ Undermining Japanese imperial authority, this depiction of the unidentified but clearly identifiable emperor corresponds closely with those in postwar versions of “Ame no furu Shinagawa eki”: “You all, soaked with rain, think of the Japanese emperor who pursues you/You all, soaked with rain, think of his mustache, glasses, and stooped shoulders” (Nakano Reference Nakano Shigeharu1959, 93; Reference Nakano Shigeharu1996, 114). These similarities reveal contact between Nakano and the Korean translator/translation, although we cannot be certain just when this contact occurred.

Even more dramatically, the Japanese poem concludes with the Japanese revolutionary urging his Korean friends to return to Japan and to do the literally unspeakable:

The Korean translation converts these censorship marks into words, concluding with the body conjured becoming the body assaulted by Korean revolutionaries who have boldly returned to Tokyo:

This Korean translation retains a few censorship marks, referring to the emperor as X, and substituting Xs for Korean syllables, including “capXre” for “capture,” “Xoat” for “throat,” “veX” for “veins,” “sickleX” for “sickles and other tools” or “sickle-tips,” and “reX” for “revenge” (Chŏng Reference Chŏng2002, 353–55; Kim Reference Kim1989, 244). But by hiding so little, the Xs mock rather than reinforce censorship. In another faux bow to the censors, “Pi nal-i nŭn P'umch'ŏn-yŏk” is pointedly ambiguous about the fate of the emperor. The Japanese revolutionary urges his Korean friends to aim their weapons at the emperor's neck, but he does not actually tell them to wrap these curved tools around the emperor's throat, let alone push the blades into his flesh. Yet the verb ddwida (뛰다, here translated as “to pulsate”) also can mean “to spatter,” giving the line after the reference to sickles an alternate reading: “In the blood [from the emperor's veins] spattering [you/him] from head to foot” (Mizuno Reference Mizuno1980). Either way, with vengeance “burning” inside revolutionaries aiming lethal weapons at the emperor's neck, regicide appears inevitable (cf. Chŏng Reference Chŏng2002).

Postwar Japanese renditions of “Ame no furu Shinagawa eki” also replace the final stanza's censorship marks with words, but they greatly dilute the discourse of the colonial Korean translation:

This version of “Ame no furu Shinagawa eki” alludes only vaguely to Koreans returning to Japan, and while the poem speaks of “revenge,” it gives few specifics and omits any hint of lèse majesté.

Without question, “Pi nal-i nŭn P'umch'ŏn-yŏk” challenges imperial authority more dramatically than Japanese-language permutations of Nakano's poem. On the other hand, the Korean translation repeats and in some ways strengthens the poem's anti-Korean prejudices. It initially does the latter by deleting from “Ame no furu Shinagawa eki” wording that points to Korean humanity. The Korean-language “Shinagawa Station in the Rain” reproduces faithfully the Japanese revolutionary's assertion early in the poem that the hearts of the Koreans leaving Japan are frozen, and it repeats the Japanese version's description of departing Koreans as “black shadows.” Yet by failing to translate the stanza that speaks of these revolutionaries' “boiling young cheeks on which water disappears” (Nakano Reference Nakano Shigeharu1929a, 83), which in the Japanese poem mitigates the claim of icy hearts, the Korean-language translation leaves unchallenged the idea of Koreans as virtually frozen shadows until such time as they attack the emperor. Also significant is how both the Japanese poem and its Korean translation declare Koreans the “front and rear shield of the Japanese proletariat,” a comment that Nakano later confessed deeply bothered him and was motivated by “ethnocentric egoism” (Nakano Reference Nakano Shigeharu1975, 78). Identifying Koreans as the head and tail of the Japanese proletariat reinforces segregation along national/ethnic lines, not unlike the imperial decree expelling Koreans from Japan. Furthermore, it urges Korean revolutionaries to protect their supposedly superior Japanese counterparts and likely sacrifice their lives for them. Repeating and in fact highlighting expectations of Korean subordination even while it advocates the murder of the figure who most readily epitomizes Japanese oppression of Koreans, “Pi nal-i nŭn P'umch'ŏn-yŏk” embodies the many paradoxes of literary contact nebulae in empire.

Im Hwa's poem “Usan pat-ŭn Yok'ohama ŭi pudu,” published only three months after “Pi nal-i nŭn P'umch'ŏn-yŏk,” intertextualizes both “Ame no furu Shinagawa eki” and its Korean translation.Footnote ¹² Narrated by a young Korean revolutionary about to be expelled from Japan, it subverts the biased rhetoric of its textual predecessors by asserting the humanity of Korean revolutionaries, underlining the joint responsibilities of the Japanese and Korean proletariat, and ultimately obscuring national boundaries. Like many autoethnographic texts, “Usan pat-ŭn Yok'ohama ŭi pudu” depicts colonial peoples as more human than do the writings it intertextualizes.Footnote ¹³ Declaring in the opening stanza, “My heart blazes with the fire of sadness at being separated and anger at being chased away” (Im Reference Im and Oegon2000, 66), the Korean revolutionary challenges the assertion of the Japanese revolutionary of “Ame no furu Shinagawa eki” and its Korean translation that “your rebel hearts freeze at the moment of departure” (Nakano Reference Nakano Shigeharu1929a, 82; 1929b, 69). Throughout the poem, Im Hwa's Korean revolutionary highlights his strong feelings for his Japanese girlfriend and his dedication to the revolutionary cause. In addition, he makes it clear that the Japanese need to do more than simply wait for Korean revolutionaries to sweep back into Japan. He tells his Japanese girlfriend to keep busy helping recently freed prisoners, child laborers, and others in need. Unlike Nakano's poem and its Korean translation, which assign revolutionary duties based on ethnicity, “Usan pat-ŭn Yok'ohama ŭi pudu” for the most part speaks simply of revolutionaries; the Korean poet predicts that demonstrations will “flow down the street” in his absence (Im Reference Im and Oegon2000, 68), but does not specify just who is demonstrating. Explicitly referring to both Japan and Korea as “foreign lands,” the Korean revolutionary alludes to his isolation from both sites, but he also points to the arbitrary nature of the national categories that his predecessors take for granted.

On the other hand, by not calling for overt rebellion, “Usan pat-ŭn Yok'ohama ŭi pudu” undermines its predecessors' challenge to the imperial status quo. Im Hwa's Korean revolutionary refers to exhibitions of revolutionary fervor, speaking, for instance, of “young men's speeches” that “pour like flames on the heads of laborers” (Im Reference Im and Oegon2000, 69). He even urges his girlfriend, when she no longer can tolerate the injustices heaped on her jailed comrades, to hurl her pale skin against “that face” and “that head” (Im Reference Im and Oegon2000, 69). But this clear echo of the final lines of Nakano's poem and especially its Korean translation is subverted almost immediately. The Korean revolutionary suggests that when he and his friends return to Yokohama, his girlfriend might “bury [her] cute head into [his] chest and try crying, try laughing” (Im Reference Im and Oegon2000, 69). The laughing and crying that in “Ame no furu Shinagawa eki” and “Pi nal-i nŭn P'umch'ŏn-yŏk” were to have taken place in the “ecstasy of burning [revenge]” now are a private affair. Love replaces rather than complements revolution; Im Hwa's “Usan pat-ŭn Yok'ohama ŭi pudu” at the end lessens potential for their symbiosis. And so the text that destabilizes prejudices against colonial subjects, prejudices propagated by Nakano's poem and reinforced by the poem's Korean translation, does so while submitting to the imperial authority that is challenged in Nakano's poem and even more deeply undercut by its Korean translation.

China, Chinese Language, Chinese People, and Ishikawa Tatsuzō's Ikiteiru heitai

Wartime intra–East Asian literary contact nebulae entailed even more ambivalent readerly, writerly, and textual interactions, as Chinese writers strived to expose Japanese aggression while preserving national dignity. Their struggles are especially poignant in transculturations of Japanese battlefront literature, and Ishikawa's banned novella Ikiteiru heitai in particular. Based on Ishikawa's eyewitness observations and interviews with soldiers who participated in the Nanjing massacre of 1937, Ikiteiru heitai depicts a platoon of patriotic soldiers who, in addition to slaughtering Chinese on the battlefield, ruthlessly loot Chinese homes and shops, rape Chinese women, and murder innocent civilians. The novella also reveals Japanese anxieties about the war and the effects of war on individuals and societies.

Censored more severely but transculturated more vigorously than Nakano's “Ame no furu Shinagawa eki,” Ikiteiru heitai was known only as a title to most wartime Japanese. The novella originally was included in the March 1938 issue of the journal Chūō kōron (Central Review), which was sent to distributors on February 17 and scheduled to be sold on February 19. But, on orders from the Toshoka (Book Section of the Keihōkyoku, or Police Bureau), on the night of February 18, the staff of Chūō kōron fanned out to police stations across Tokyo, where distributed copies of the journal had been piled, and literally ripped Ishikawa's novella from individual copies (Cook Reference Cook, Mayo and Rimer2001, 156; Cook and Cook Reference Cook and Cook1992, 65). The version of Ikiteiru heitai printed and then torn from the March 1938 issue of Chūō kōron contained numerous censorship marks, already having been extensively censored by the editors of the journal and by Ishikawa himself (Cook Reference Cook, Mayo and Rimer2001). Far from placating the authorities, these marks only made the novella seem more subversive.Footnote ¹⁴ In the preface to the first postwar Japanese edition of Ikiteiru heitai, Ishikawa refers to this text as “a work I couldn't show anyone [before 1945]” (1945, 1), and it usually is discussed as such (Cook Reference Cook, Mayo and Rimer2001; Fujii Reference Fujii2007, 48).

But in fact, thanks to extensive intra–East Asian readerly, writerly, and textual contact, Ikiteiru heitai circulated in multiple Chinese translations during the war. The first of these translations—Bai Mu's Weisi de bing (Soldiers Not Yet Deceased)—was serialized between March 18 and April 8, Reference Bai Mu1938, in occupied Shanghai's Damei wanbao (Great American Evening News), a daily paper registered under U.S. sponsorship (Fu Reference Fu1993, 32); Weisi de bing appeared as a separate volume in occupied Shanghai in August 1938 from Zazhishe, an anti-Japanese publisher, which, because of the text's popularity, put out a reprint edition in 1939. Zhang Shifang and the revolutionary writer Xia Yan (1900–95), a prolific translator of Japanese literature, also published translations of Ikiteiru heitai in 1938—Zhang Shifang's in June in occupied Shanghai and Xia Yan's in July in Guangzhou. Xia Yan's translation, likewise popular and titled Weisi de bing, was reprinted at least twice in 1940 (Kuroko and Kang Reference Kuroko and Kang2006, 38–39). These translations flout imperial authority by reviving censored words, especially words that expose Japanese aggression and atrocities in China. On the other hand, leaving many crucial censored words unresuscitated, that is to say, further sanitizing Ishikawa's diluted discourse on Japan's war with China, they also are in some ways complicit with the literary silence surrounding Japanese aggression in China.

Bai Mu's Weisi de bing distorts Ikiteiru heitai most dramatically, converting Ishikawa's broad panoramas of wartime into a series of snapshots; although composed of thirteen chapters to Ishikawa's twelve and Xia Yan's ten, Bai Mu's text in fact is a collection of translations of brief passages from Ishikawa's novella. Many of these passages zero in on Japanese brutality, while some depict Japanese anxieties toward war and increased consciousness of life's fragility, in addition to Chinese responses to war. But unlike Xia Yan's translation, which can be read as playing off of its Chinese titular predecessor, Bai Mu's Weisi de bing omits most of Ishikawa's already censored discussion of atrocities committed against Chinese in the weeks surrounding the occupation of Nanjing (cf. Ishikawa Reference Ishikawa Tatsuzō1938a, Reference Ishikawa Tatsuzō and Yan2005). Chapter 10 of Weisi de bing, drawing from an early section in chapter 7 of Ikiteiru heitai, describes the conditions of wounded Japanese soldiers in a makeshift Japanese hospital in Changzhou, near Nanjing; chapter 11 of Weisi de bing, drawing from chapter 9 of Ishikawa's novella, finds Japanese soldiers looking for prostitutes in a defeated Nanjing. Chapter 11 of Weisi de bing is titled “Nanjing,” and its opening page in the August 1938 version features a line drawing of burning buildings, but the narrative gives only a fleeting glimpse of the ruined city. Chapters 7–9 of Ikiteiru heitai describe the havoc wreaked by Japanese troops as they marched to Nanjing and their destruction of the former Chinese capital as well as atrocities committed against Chinese; these chapters are punctuated by censorship marks, but even as they silence words, such marks alert the reader that key and very likely controversial passages have been deleted. In contrast, Weisi de bing devotes only a few lines to the fires that continue to burn and to the corpses, both human and animal, that litter the streets of the city. Its omissions are particularly notable considering the ease with which Bai Mu translates other passages from Ishikawa's novella on the brutality of war.

To be sure, Bai Mu's self-censorship within the serialized Weisi de bing is mediated by surrounding narratives. In remarks preceding the first installment, Bai Mu claims, “I selected some relatively interesting passages from Ikiteiru heitai and translated them for your enjoyment” (Ishikawa Reference Ishikawa Tatsuzō and Mu1938b), revealing immediately that his is an abridged translation. The phrase “relatively interesting,” indicating that the reader is not to expect too much, betrays false humility, but it also suggests that the translator has omitted both the more lackluster and the potentially more interesting or even controversial passages. Several weeks later, the editors of the Damei wanbao complicated matters, encouraging their readers to compare Bai Mu's narrative on Nanjing with other reports. They published the first part of the article “Rijun zhanju hou zhi Nanjing” (Nanjing after the Occupation of the Japanese Army) two days before Bai Mu's chapter “Nanjing” (April 3, Reference Bai Mu1938). This article juxtaposes claims originally appearing in the Xin shen bao (a Shanghai-based Japanese-sponsored newspaper) that Japanese in Nanjing were treating Chinese benevolently with reports that Chinese in Nanjing could not begin to describe the horrors that descended on their city and dispatches from the New York Times on Japanese atrocities in Nanjing. “Rijun zhanju hou zhi Nanjing” illuminates the multiplicity of narratives on Nanjing, cleverly undermining Japanese interpretations, both journalistic and novelistic. The second part of “Rijun zhanju hou zhi Nanjing,” which appeared on the same day as Bai Mu's “Nanjing” (April 5, Reference Bai Mu1938), exposes additional Japanese atrocities in Nanjing. The editors of Damei wanbao call attention to this article, referring readers of Bai Mu's “Nanjing” to “Rijun zhanju hou zhi Nanjing” but not vice versa, thereby subordinating the fictional account. In addition, Bai Mu reveals in the “Translator's Note” appended to the final installment of Weisi de bing (April 18, Reference Bai Mu1938) that he omitted some sections of Ikiteiru heitai concerning Japanese atrocities and that many of his friends told him that Weisi de bing gives a very distorted picture of what they personally witnessed in China. Here, Bai Mu's position differs from that exhibited in his preface, where he focuses on inclusions, not exclusions (Bai Reference Bai Mu1938).

Bai Mu's volume Weisi de bing, published in book form four months after he serialized the novella, is even more ambiguous. In its preface, Bai Mu reveals that his is an abridged translation originally published in Damei wanbao. He notes that for the book, he had wanted to translate more of Ikiteiru heitai than had been possible in Damei wanbao, but “some parts of the original had too many deletions” (1938c, 2). It is probable that by “original,” Bai Mu means the Japanese version ripped out of the March 1938 issue of Chūō kōron, as this version contained numerous censorship marks. In any case, there is no question that Chinese had access to this text. A month before the release of the book version of Weisi de bing, Xia Yan published a closer translation of Ishikawa's novella than anything Bai Mu provides; the existence of Xia Yan's translation suggests that Bai Mu excluded material because it was controversial, not because it was unavailable. It is also possible that he was challenging Xia Yan's intertextualization of the serialized version of his translation by reprinting his own “original.” Significant in this context are Bai Mu's claims, also in the preface to the volume Weisi de bing, that Ikiteiru heitai reveals the “truth” of war: “The novel describes the real conditions of the battlefield in vivid detail. Moreover, the author did not do evil against his conscience and was not willing to cover up the cruel truths of war or the soldiers' disgust of war. So although this text is by a Japanese writer, its immortal value lies in its objectively portraying the facts of war” (1938c, 1). Ironically, by translating only part of Ishikawa's novella, Bai Mu's Weisi de bing covers up some of the “cruel truths” the Chinese translator applauds his Japanese predecessor for revealing, but these omissions are themselves offset to some extent by surrounding narratives.

Ishikawa's “facts” and “cruel truths,” as well as their Chinese translations, were further undermined in the Chinese writer Ah Long's (1907–67) novel Nanjing (1939), which intertextualizes both Ikiteiru heitai and the Japanese writer Hino Ashihei's (1907–60) best-selling battlefront trilogy Mugi to heitai, Tsuchi to heitai, and Hana to heitai (Wheat and Soldiers, Earth and Soldiers, and Flowers and Soldiers, 1938). Nanjing was China's first literary account of the Nanjing massacre; although written in the late 1930s, it was not published until 1987, when it was at last possible to discuss the topic in literature, but even then, it was greatly abridged (Berry Reference Berry2008, 142; Sekine Reference Sekine2004).Footnote ¹⁵ This novel reveals the “truths” exposed in Japanese battlefront literature and in translations of this literature as “cover-ups.” In a striking yet not unusual case of intra–East Asian writerly contact, Ah Long learned of Ishikawa's and Hino's novels from Kaji Wataru (1903–82) and Ikeda Sachiko (1913–76), Japanese antiwar writers living in China who knew a number of Chinese writers, including Xia Yan.Footnote ¹⁶ Deeply frustrated that Japanese writers were transforming the atrocities of Nanjing and the destruction of other Chinese sites into “great works of art” while their Chinese counterparts remained silent, and likely also disturbed by the speed with which Japanese war literature was being translated into Chinese,Footnote ¹⁷ Ah Long argued in the postscript to Nanjing that creative texts on the Japanese invasion of China should be written by Chinese, not by Japanese:

Particularly interesting here is Ah Long's assertion that Japan's “masterpieces” on the war are in fact carbon copies of Chinese texts, but copies that came to light before their sources. Scrambling the usual order of production, he simultaneously confirms and denies Japanese literary authority. Setting off the term “masterpiece” in quotation marks further highlights the ambivalence and the paradoxes of both the Chinese and the Japanese projects.

A mélange of fiction and reportage, Nanjing focuses on events in the city in November and early December 1937; the novel contains longer and more graphic accounts of the destruction wrought by Japanese troops in China than do either the Japanese battlefront novels it intertextualizes or the Chinese translations of these novels. The first chapter of Nanjing describes the damage Japanese air raids inflicted on the city and its people: “Yan Long witnessed a strong young man die an agonizing death, roaring like a mad dog, his neck pierced by the branch of a tree blown down by the bombs. He saw the peaceful restaurant where he had celebrated his wedding completely blown away by the bombs. And he also saw a severed bloodstained leg wearing silver high heels rolling down the street” (1987, 3).

Nanjing speaks openly of the brutality of Japanese soldiers, particularly toward Chinese women:

Even the Japanese are depicted as recognizing the heinousness of their acts: the chapter ends with a Japanese soldier bursting into tears. Further subverting Japanese war literature, as well as Chinese translations of this literature, the novel itself concludes with a Chinese battle victory. The version of Ikiteiru heitai that was to have appeared in the March 1938 issue of Chūō kōron, as well as both Xia Yan's and Bai Mu's translations, close with Japanese troops leaving a defeated Nanjing and marching to new battlegrounds (Ishikawa Reference Ishikawa Tatsuzō1938a, 106; Reference Ishikawa Tatsuzō and Mu1938b; Reference Ishikawa Tatsuzō and Mu1938c, 65; Reference Ishikawa Tatsuzō and Yan2005, 757).Footnote ¹⁸ In contrast, the epilogue of Nanjing depicts Chinese victory at Wuhu, the narrator declaring in the final lines: “Those responsible for the slaughter got their comeuppance … December 20, Chinese troops took Wuhu” (1987, 215). Ishikawa's “living soldiers,” transformed by the Chinese translators Bai Mu and Xia Yan into “soldiers not yet deceased,” here perish.

But in truth, Japanese soldiers in Nanjing were anything but dead on December 20, just a week into the massacre. Moreover, when Ah Long made these remarks in October 1939, the Japanese held an even stronger position in China than at the time of the assault on Nanjing. Here we perceive clearly the struggle of Chinese writers to expose Japanese atrocities while preserving national dignity. The silence of Ah Long's novel concerning events in Nanjing on December 20 and surrounding weeks represents a lost opportunity to counter Japanese denials. On the other hand, spotlighting the weeks immediately preceding the Nanjing Massacre allows Nanjing to expose the atrocities Chinese troops committed against Chinese, a subject for the most part avoided in creative texts. The Chinese military not only torched Nanjing as part of its scorched-earth policy of destruction of land and property in anticipation of invasion, it also killed and wounded Chinese civilians there. By including graphic scenes of Chinese soldiers abusing Chinese civilians, Nanjing stresses more than Ikiteiru heitai joint Chinese–Japanese responsibility. The Chinese troops that in many places are displayed sympathetically, and in the end give the nation hope, also terrorize their own people. Ah Long's novel ultimately reveals an unconscious complicity between Chinese and Japanese forces in the destruction of Chinese civilians.

The Japanese state most clearly articulated its vision of uniting its empire through Japanese language and culture in the final decade of the colonial period, when it outlawed the use of Chinese (in Manchuria and Taiwan) and Korean and dispatched Japanese writers, film experts, painters, publishers, reporters, and theater figures across East Asia to “bear witness to Japan's superior culture” (Mayo Reference Mayo, Mayo and Rimer2001, 15). Capping such efforts were the Dai Tōa Bungakusha Taikai (Greater East Asian Writers Conferences) of the early 1940s, the third of which was held, ironically, in Nanjing in November 1944. These conferences, which assembled leading writers, editors, and critics from Japan, China, Korea, Taiwan, Manchuria, Mongolia, and other parts of Asia, often are seen as marking the formation of an East Asian literary sphere centered on the Japanese cultural tradition and coterminous with the Japanese empire (Kleeman Reference Kleeman2003, 2), but they ultimately had little effect on literary production (Gunn Reference Gunn1980, 31–34). In fact, by the time of these meetings, twentieth-century Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, and Taiwanese had been engaging in readerly, writerly, and textual contact for decades, creating literary contact nebulae oddly suggestive of, but in the end very different from, the imperial cultural ambit trumpeted by the Japanese state.

Scholarship on intra–East Asian transculturation, with its emphasis on pre–twentieth century Sinocentrism and early twenty-first-century popular culture flows, generally overlooks the twentieth century. At the same time, scholarship on twentieth-century intra–East Asian contacts focuses on geopolitical concerns: Japanese imperialism, colonialism, and militarism up to 1945; postwar economic and security rivalries; and Japan's failure even now—at least in the eyes of some Chinese, Koreans, and, to a lesser extent, Taiwanese—to show the proper remorse for early twentieth-century imperialism, colonialism, and militarism. These dominant narratives obscure the vibrant intra–East Asian cultural and particularly literary interactions that took place throughout the turbulent 1900s and continue into the new millennium (Thornber Reference Thornber2006, 743–841). Divisions among peoples and languages rarely restrain cultural products, which throughout the ages have relentlessly interpenetrated and grappled with one another, almost heedless of ethnic, geographic, political, or ideological frontiers. Literature, one of the most widely traveled and frequently transculturated creative forms, is a particularly intriguing site of cross-cultural negotiation and struggle. Examining the linguistic, writerly, readerly, and textual contact inherent in literary contact nebulae opens broad perspectives on the vibrant transculturation that long has characterized human experience.