UCLA

This dissertation focuses on literary texts produced within and about Ikaino, an ethnically Korean enclave in Osaka, Japan, where residents faced intersecting issues of race, class, language, gender, generation, and national identity in the postwar era. I argue that literary representations of Ikaino, as a simultaneously local and transnational space that cannot be assimilated into the national spaces of either Japan or Korea, have shaped a distinct Zainichi Korean intellectual discourse from the 1950s to the present that challenges prior notions of unified ethnic identity and national belonging. In particular, by examining the various writing practices of working-class women in Ikaino, I shed light on the ways in which feminist and minority discourses intersected in Japan’s postwar period and consider the limitations of existing frameworks of national literature, minority literature, Japanese-language literature (Nihongo bungaku), and women’s writing. The four chapters of this dissertation excavate the multilayered literary production of Ikaino through a consideration of four major themes: literary representations of landscape, local political activism and visions of transnational solidarity, gender politics and feminist critique, and literary multilingualism. Through this process, I consider Ikaino literature as a multigenerational, ever-evolving body of texts comprised of poems, prose essays, fiction, political writings, amateur compositions, and experimental writings that question the boundaries of form and genre. Through close readings of this dynamic literary ecosystem, I argue that the changing representation of a mythologized Ikaino over time reflect authors’ evolving attempts to critique both shifting state policies and local, domestic, and transnational social movements. In doing so, I explore not only Ikaino’s specific significance as a trope within Zainichi Korean literature, but also more broadly the way that landscape has emerged as a literary technique through which authors confront the lived realities of precarious personhood and experiences of displacement in postwar Japan.