Fear, Farce, and <i>Futei Senjin</i> (“Treacherous Koreans”)

This article traces treacherous travels through Korea with Nakanishi Inosuke (1887–1958), an up-and-coming proletarian novelist who emerged in 1922 as undisputed literary authority on the colony. Against the conventions of Taishō travelogues, where timeless “Old Korea” was encountered as mirror of Japanese antiquity, Nakanishi’s textualized travels explored a “New Korea” inhabited by figures that Korea-phobic newspaper reports called futei Senjin (“treacherous Koreans”). In border-crossing narratives, including the parodically paranoid novella Futei Senjin, Nakanishi’s subversion of the gaze dominating literary, popular, and proletarian modes of empire writing can be read as a campaign of ironic terrorism against fearful colonial common sense.