Rat Fire: Korean Stories from the Japanese Empire

by Theodore Hughes (Editor), Sang-kyung Lee (Editor), Jae-Yong Kim (Editor)

Proletarian writing dominated the colonial Korean literary scene from the mid-1920s to the mid-1930s and left a lasting legacy in the later, post-1945 literatures of North and South Korea.  Rat Korean Stories  from the Japanese Empire   brings together thirteen short stories by colonial Korean writers, as well as two works written in 1946 under U.S. military occupation. Political cartoons, illustrations, newspaper clippings, and photographs--over sixty included in the volume--place the works of Korean writers in close conversation with the rich history of colonial proletarian visual culture. This anthology moves across verbal and visual media and geographical borders, following characters making their way through disintegrating rural areas and flourishing colonial urban centers, from the alluring margins of the Japanese metropole to the expanding Manchurian frontier.  Rat Korean Stories from the Japanese Empire  broadens and complicates the definition of the colonial Korean proletarian culture movement. In this volume, writers and artists confront the shifting boundaries of ethnicity/race, class, and culture that were reconfiguring both colonial Korea and the Japanese metropolitan center in the context of global imperialism in the first half of the twentieth century.
Contributing Ruth Barraclough, Mee Chang, Kimberly Chung, Bruce Fulton, Ju-Chan Fulton, Theodore Hughes, Young-Ji Kang, I Jonathan Kief, Ross King, Jin-kyung Lee, Samuel Perry, Christina Yi

Genres: Japan, Academic

350 pages, Paperback

First published May 31, 2013

Reviews

[Richard · Rating 4 out of 5]

Generally, I am not a big fan of short stories because I typically find the lack of plot and/or character development to be frustrating. In other words, in many instances I end up thinking that the story had an abrupt ending and/or that the main character(s) were poorly developed. Finally, I often find that collections of short stories vary greatly in quality. A few stories may be good, many are average, and a few or even more are poor.

I found this collection to be better than most. Despite the lack of closure most of the time the majority of the stories had good to excellent character development. In the space of a few pages most of the authors provided poignant depictions of Korean nationals struggling to cope with the psychological, social, and/or economic disruptions, if not the trauma, which Japanese occupation forced upon them and their loved ones. The portrayals were wide ranging: tenant farmers displaced from their homes in Korea and living in Manchuria, transportation workers in Seoul trying to unionize to gain better representation of their rights, homeless people in a large city simply trying to survive day to day, a star crossed love affair between a Korean man and a Japanese women working in a factory together, spouses or parents trying to cope with the untimely death of a loved one who had been participating in the anti-Japanese movements, and/or Korean intellectuals searching for a way to express their creativity in a society which increasingly demands submission to the conquering Japanese authorities. Most of the stories were intense and grim. A couple of stories made their points via the use of humor, irony, or parody. It was probably the latter which allowed the author to get the approval needed to publish from Japanese censors.

I have two modest criticisms of this book. First, the translators did not always provide English translations for some of the Japanese or the Korean terms used in the stories. Being familiar with Japan's culture and language I was able to grasp what was intended when that language was used. But I do not speak Korean and am admittedly quite ignorant of that culture. Thus, there were many occasions when I could not really grasp the reference being made. A few more footnotes here and there would have helped a great deal.

Second, something else that would have made the book more reader friendly would have been a map of the country during the Japanese occupation from 1910-1945. As is often the case with colonialism the Japanese occupiers renamed many places in their own language. A map showing both the original Korean name and the Japanese one would have been helpful.

Overall, however, I came away having learned a lot about life in Korea during and shortly after the Japanese occupation. Kudos to the editors for having made some very prudent selections. I now have a short list of Korean authors whose fiction I will try to gain access to in the coming months. The Cornell East Asia Program has published a number of books related to Japanese, Korean, and/or Chinese culture. There might be a number of books worth reading.

One final note: this book proved to be a nice comparison and a bit of relief from the Abacus/Sword book by Duus which I was reading at the same time. It provided some almost real life substance to the theoretical discussions Duus engaged in about the impact of the Japanese occupation on Korea.

[Veronika · Rating 5 out of 5]

Rating Kang Kyeongae's Darkness:
Out of Kang Kyeongae's short stories, this one is my favorite so far. Amongst the female socialist writers Kang Kyeongae's talent was outstanding. Her ability to construct stories that were both narratively and formally well-done and at the same time expressed her leftist leanings is what makes her fiction stand out amongst the often dry and didactic leftist fiction of this time period.

[Hannah Kwak · Rating 3 out of 5]

I found the quality of the translations to be very inconsistent. The ones near the end were generally great and read naturally. Some of the translations, however, especially the ones in the first half of the book, were very awkward and often distracting, preventing me from focusing on the stories themselves.

[maya 🦦 · Rating 2 out of 5]

Read for my Intro to Modern Korean Literature class. I've only read "Rat Fire" so I'm not gonna write for too long. I don't remember much about this story honestly , it wasn't superr interesting me like the other pieces we read in class.