Timothy Unverzagt GODDARD (UCLA/University of Tokyo)
“Borders of Language, Nation, and City in the Writings of Yi Sang”

With Japan’s modernization and emergence as an imperial power at the turn of the twentieth century, the city of Tokyo became an enviable destination for many East Asian intellectuals. By the 1920s and 1930s, a cosmopolitan urban culture had developed in the Japanese capital, inaugurating new modes of everyday life and artistic expression. Many writers who crossed linguistic and national borders to experience life in this city beheld its modern spectacle with considerable ambivalence. In my paper, I focus on one such individual, the Korean author Yi Sang 李箱 (1910–1937), whose ill-fated move to Tokyo in October 1936 ended with his death in April 1937 at the age of 26. A key figure in Korean literary modernism, Yi Sang was deeply engaged in Seoul’s urban culture and was active as a member of the 1930s literary coterie known as the Group of Nine (Ku’inhoe 九人會). I examine representations of Tokyo in two of Yi Sang’s posthumous works: an essay, “Tokyo,” (Tonggyŏng 東京), and a short story, “Lost Flowers” (Shilhwa 失花). I argue that in his contestation of temporal and spatial borders, Yi Sang unsettles the discursive foundations of modernity and Japanese imperialism, collapsing boundaries in his radical representations of urban space.



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