Problematising the frontier in Mitsuharu Inoue: Sasebo in 1950

This article examines how writer Inoue Mitsuharu, a member of the International Faction (anti-mainstream faction) of the Japanese Communist Party, confronted the contemporary situation under the Korean War. Inoue wrote ‘The Unwritten Chapter’, which is directly related to the party"s factional strife (the ‘50 Probrem), and in the following “The Sick Part”, while describing the situation of the factional strife, he sought the possibility of solidarity with the Korean people by quoting the words of a poem by Nam-Gi Heo. In ‘Heavy S Port’, the city of S, which has become a logistics base for the US military, is depicted from the perspective of a dock worker. After leaving the Communist Party, Inoue defined the phenomenon of the political conversion in postwar not as a departure from the party, but as a departure from the ‘Front populaire’ that encompassed Marxism and liberalism. Fujita Shozo appreciates that the ‘frontier’ of Sasebo, the setting of Inoue"s novels, could have been an international point of solidarity with the Korean people, but criticises Inoue"s latent inclination towards ‘literarism’. This tendency is evident in his long novel The Summer of Desolation, which synthesises the motifs of his early short stories, but Inoue was trying to point to the possibility of ‘solidarity’ that politics had left behind through a method unique to literature.