Modernity and the Colonial Cityscape in the Works of Kim Tongni and Kajiyama Toshiyuki

Cynthia Childs
Comparative & World Literature, University of Illinois a

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Abstract
The first half of the twentieth century was a time of rapid change and conflict in Korea: ideas from the outside world were pouring in under the rubric of modernity and, coevally, the age of empire had also arrived with the colonization of Korea by Japan. This paper will trace the themes and images of modernity and colonization as they appear in the works of two writers of the period–Kim Tongni and Kajiyama Toshiyuki.
The time was the late 1930s and early 1940s and the Seoul cityscape was a site of change and conflict: the impetus toward modernity and ambiguity of being a colonized locale and the search for identity and place within this experience of displacement were being played out. Kim Tongni was just emerging on the Korean literary scene and would become one of the best-known Korean writers of the twentieth century. Kajiyama Toshiyuki was a high school student in Seoul, soon to be repatriated to the Japanese homeland, who would go on to become a prolific humanist author in Japan. This paper will focus on how the aspects and issues of modernity and coloniality were represented in a number of the works by these two authors. It will attempt to identify how these two writers–recorders of the same era, one on each side of the boundary of colonizer and colonized–are in many ways in consonance with each other in the themes and purposes of their literature and are thus well worth being considered in dialog as well as for being evocative voices of the Korean-Japanese age of empire.

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