This paper sets off to re-read the stories, dealing with nae-sun-il-che(All in one Korea-Japan, 內鮮一體), the assimilation of Korea and Japan, of love and marriage, in the late Japanese imperialism, not as merely stories, but as texts of Korean-Japanese(內鮮人), a Korean who realigns himself with a Japanese policy of becoming Japanese. The previous studies see the stories merely as the either-or of resistance/collaboration, but I argue that the oblique line could be effaced and the uncertain space between them could be explored. This means that they are not the narratives of Korean-Japanese love and parting, but melodramas of the relationships between Korean-Japanese and Japanese.
First of all, in this paper, I investigate some facts of the theory of nae-sun-il-che, and trace along the conscious depths of Korean-Japanese connected with the theory, which is a critical reference point for re-reading the relation between the melodrama of assimilation and Japanese colonialism. Based on this standpoint, I attempt to find out the rupture of colonialism in Lee Kwang-soo’s works.
For the being of the colonized cannot but be that of flowing between colony and empire, Korean-Japanese, in a sense, may be the name which should be given to all the koreans in that era, but as Choi Jae-suh remarks it, the doctrines of nae-sun-il-che caused chaos and disruption, more intensively. Korean-Japanese eliminate the conflict between the koreans and the Japanese with faith/fantasy, imitate the empire’s desire, and set up for becoming Japanese. But It is when their narratives are returned to the nation/ the korean that they reveal a number of rupture that were ignored in the transparent frame of resistance/collaboration, which means that in an effort to re-read the works of Korean-Japanese love and marriage under the influence of nae-sun-il che, they can be regarded as the narratives, not between Cheo-sun people(Koreans) and Japanese, but Korean-Japanese, placed in the rift between them, and Japanese.
The ruptures of which a few intellectuals who could translate the language of the colonizing empire conceive in the frame of the double language(Japanese or Korean-Japanese) leaves traces of surplus uncaptured by the notion of resistance/collaboration.
The surplus inscribed as traces fundamentally interrogates the colonialism of nae-sun-il-che and are the utterance of the texts beyond that of the writers. It is the reason that Lee Kwang-soo’s works of nae-sun love and marriage do not purport nae-sun-il-che, but confess the impossibility of the theory.