| This dissertation examines representations of romance and marriage between Japanese and colonized subjects in literature produced in and about the Japanese empire between 1937--1945. The introduction provides a discussion of the historical and cultural contexts of literary production in Japan's colonies, as well as an overview of recent critical approaches to shokuminchi bungaku (colonial literature). The subsequent three chapters focus on works by Sakaguchi Reiko, Yuasa Katsue, and Yokota Fumiko, Japanese writers who participated in literary circles in different sites of the empire (Taiwan, Korea, Manchuria). Each chapter reveals the complexity of the colonial context by showing how these works simultaneously critique and collaborate with colonial discourses of "race," hegemony, gender, and ethnicity. In Chapter two, I investigate different forms of mediation in language, performance, and romantic fantasy in Yokota Fumiko's short story, "Koibumi" (Love Letter, 1942). Yokota emphasizes the mediation of discourses on race and gender between colonial subjects, and shows how subjects, both colonizing and colonized, were bound by such rhetoric, despite gestures of resistance. Chapter three addresses the ways in which Sakaguchi Reiko's novella "Tokeiso" (Passionflower, 1943) transforms tropes such as nature, culture, and marriage used in popular discourse in Taiwan to support the colonial project. While critiquing an "old" form of colonial policy, Sakaguchi's work rewrites these images to negotiate its position in relation to a constructed colonial legacy and create a "new" form of colonialism. In Chapter four, I discuss the transformation of family discourse in the short story "Natsume" (Jujube, 1937) by Yuasa Katsue. "Natsume" centers around the struggle for legitimacy by individual subjects as well as the colonial territory of Korea and the larger empire in the latter years of Japanese colonialism. Yuasa shows how the colonial context produces a crisis in identity for both colonizing and colonized subjects. The dissertation concludes with a discussion of the ways in which colonial discourse contributed to contemporary notions of Japanese language and identity. |
