Identità nazionali e logiche di potere nella narrativa di Kuroshima Denji

The works of Kuroshima Denji (1898-1943) are usually divided into two main groups. On the one hand the works of nōminbungaku (rural literature), written by Kuroshima from 1925, which granted him the acknowledgment and the appraisal of the literary establishment. On the other hand the short stories based on the author’s experience as a soldier during the Siberian Intervention (1918–1922), filled with antimilitarism. However, this subdivision does not take into account a series of works written between 1929 and 1932 and set in the mainland (China, Korea, Manchuria). In this paper I analyze comparatively these works by Kuroshima and his Siberian stories, focusing on the issue of otherness and elucidating their founding ideology. This will prove that the former series, which we can refer to as “China stories”, is an intentional development of the latter, endowed with its own consistency and underlying literary and political outlook.