In light of recent studies that situate the early twentieth-century Korean-Manchurian writer Kang Kyŏngae within the global formation of colonial modernity rather than the chronicles of nationalist anticolonialism, this article argues for the relevance of Kang and of the state of Manchukuo to the ongoing study of the relationship between peripheral literary forms and capitalist modernity. Because it was an economic and ideological testing ground, Manchukuo challenges the apparent characteristics of a periphery. Examining Manchukuo’s cultural and literary production thus calls for a new means of understanding peripheral literature’s capacity to reveal nuanced dimensions of the capitalist world-system. This article shows how the idea of peripheral realism, a theoretical framework proposed by Jed Esty and Colleen Lye (2012), makes it possible to constellate Kang’s novelistic form within new horizons of comparability and recovered histories of cultural production far from capitalism’s centers. Viewed through this lens, Kang’s work in turn helps to break up a falsely monolithic notion of the non-Western periphery and illustrate its variegated texture. To demonstrate this process, Kang’s 1934 novella Salt (Sogŭm) is examined through the protagonist’s incongruous yet highly reflective cognitive capacity, which operates as the very mode of registering and responding to Manchukuo’s internal contradictions. To the extent that Salt attempts to grasp the reality of a complicated capitalist imperialist society from a peripheral subject’s compromised vantage point, Kang stands as a consequential voice for coming to terms with peripheral realism and its possibilities. Keywords: Kang Kyŏngae, Manchukuo, peripheral realism, Japanese imperialism, Manchurian literature, Korean literature, derangement

The basic parameters for physiological measurements provided by near-infrared spectroscopy are the local absorption and scattering coefficients. For the adult human head, they have been difficult to measure noninvasively because of the layered structure of the head. The results of measurements of absorption and reduced scattering coefficients through the forehead on 30 adult volunteers using a multidistance frequency domain method are reported. The optode separation distance ranged from 10 to 80 mm and measurements were recorded at 758 and 830 nm. The measured absorption and reduced scattering coefficients of the forehead were used to evaluate the hemoglobin content in the scalp and brain as well as cerebral oxygen saturation. We found that cerebral oxygenation was relatively narrowly distributed within the subject group (the standard deviation was about 3% for scalp and 6% for brain, respectively), whereas hemoglobin concentrations had a relatively broader distribution. We found that as the optode distance increased, the absorption coefficients increased and the scattering coefficients decreased, retrieving the optical values of scalp and brain for shorter and longer optode distances, respectively. We present the transition curves of the absorption and reduced scattering coefficients as functions of the optode distance. In order to verify the values for each layer, a comparison between the experimental data and a prediction based on the two-layer model of the adult head was carried out. The thicknesses of scalp and skull for the two-layer model were obtained by magnetic resonance imaging of a subject's head. The optical parameters obtained from the two-layer model agreed very well with those measured by the multidistance method.