Li Xiang Yu
Ocean University of China
Received May 30, 2025; Revised version received July 30, 2025; Accepted August 20, 2025
Abstract
This study reexamines the meaning of “liberation” as experienced by Koreans in Japan after independence from the diasporic perspective and analyzes the historical and cultural significance of self-narratives in Korean–Japanese literature. For Koreans in Japan, liberation marked not only a rupture from colonial rule but also the onset of a condition of being “abandoned people” (kimin 棄民), deprived of a nation to which they could belong. Subjected to institutionalized discrimination and assimilationist pressures within Japanese society, as well as to the structural constraints imposed by the division of the Korean peninsula, Koreans in Japan endured a triple fracture of nationality, language, and identity, existing as an “externality that must be internalized.” Focusing on works by Korean–Japanese writers such as Kim Saryang, Kim Sokpom, Lee Hoesung, Kim Sijong, and Yu Miri, this article demonstrates that post-liberation Korean–Japanese literature has articulated collective memory and historical experience beyond individual lives through autobiographical narratives and the “I-novel” (shishōsetsu 私小説) form. In particular, it shows that the disjunction between mother tongue and national language, the spatial condition of being chaeil 在日 (“in Japan”), and the lack of agency surrounding repatriation and settlement emerged as central dynamics of literary expression. In Korean–Japanese literature, liberation is thus represented not as the fulfillment of a singular ethnic belonging, but as an ongoing process of confronting the trauma of division while seeking possibilities for listening and coexistence. This perspective offers important humanistic insights in the present moment, as the 80th anniversary of liberation invites renewed reflection on complex post-division subjectivities beyond frameworks that define ethnicity and language in singular or essentialist terms.
Key Words : liberation, Koreans in Japan, Korean diaspora, Korean–Japanese literature, Korean–Japanese writers
