This essay by Kim U-Jin was published for the Société Mai (오월회) journal in 1925, circulated among fellow Korean writers and artists, and out of sight from the Japanese censors. Under colonization, under the weight of familial expectation, he wrote with urgency and clarity. I am moved by much in this manifesto. These lines in particular stay with me:
You must feel (感). And you must think. We have nothing other than this freedom. We who live in every kind of unfreedom, oppression, and anguish — we have no way of discovering a true future and creating, save through this life…
What comes from such a life? Strength, heat, light — that is, the awakening to one’s own life force [생명력], to “in heaven and on earth, I alone am supreme” (天上天下唯我獨尊). When this awakening of life force arises and reaches its extremity, there is blood and sweat and revolution.
Below is the text in full:
I URGE YOU TO CREATE
創作을 勸합내다
By 金焦星 (Kim Cho-seong, pen name of Kim U-jin, 1897–1926)
First published in Société Mai (오월회), Third Volume, September 1925
A comrade of mine, who had read three or four German Expressionist plays, said to me that if any artistic activity of true meaning were to arise in our Joseon, this kind of creative work must come first of all. He was a socialist. He is one who deeply believes in Lunacharsky’s [1] view — that “no human activity, however great, can succeed unless it is fused (伴合) with subtle feeling” — that is, in the true mission of art with respect to all the human movements of modern society. I well understand this socialist comrade’s conviction, as well as the recent fervor of the Germans for art.
First of all, it was out of the post-war Germans’ anguish, restlessness, and bitter, miserable suffering (悲慘辛苦) that Expressionist drama [2] developed. To be sure, the seedlings of the Expressionist (artistic) movement had already sprouted in painting in the 1880s of the previous century, and even before the war, around 1913, the first Expressionist plays had taken shape — but what had remained merely buried as seed only emerged in concrete, forceful form, with such gravity (莊重) and depth, after the war. Before the war it was no more than a reactionary current against the extreme deviations of materialism and naturalism, against the whole fin-de-siècle mood. It seems fitting to me that the symphony of Expressionism should ring forth from the breasts of the Germans — those who tasted most fully the great calamities and bitter sufferings (禍毒慘苦) of that so-called unprecedented (未曾有) World War.
Now, these Germans — their sense of life is at once idealistic and utterly, thoroughly sincere. They are neither as adept at commerce as the English, nor as fond of pretty and refined things as the French; yet one need only look at what they have accomplished in culture and society to understand. Had they possessed nothing but theory and reasoning and order — all systematic, like German grammar — and nothing else, then Nietzsche’s philosophy, Schopenhauer’s philosophy, Marx’s revolution, and the plays of Kaiser [3] (not the Emperor — I mean the playwright) would never have come forth. The Germans’ life force [생명력] was great. Or rather — more than great, their power of contemplation, surpassing others, was not squandered in vain; it led their sense and insight into life and living onto the path of truth.
Life (生) is anguish; it is battle. The Germans were not the kind to flee from such a life. Just as only one who has truly hungered knows the taste of good food, so too one who genuinely lacks contemplative power surpassing others cannot escape being feeble and dull (無力遲鈍) in his sense and insight regarding life. Therefore — had the Germans, who tasted to such an extent that war (i.e., imperialism, capitalism, slaughter, the iron hammer [鐵搥], famine, the dilemma between individual and society, between the masses and their oppressors, and all the smarting and pain that issues from them) — had they lacked strength, had they lacked “thought,” then there would have been no chance whatsoever that Expressionist drama — that truly unprecedented new dimension of life — could have appeared.
It is in this respect that I ardently long for a creative life to arise among us as well. Do not let the phrase “creative life” pass you by lightly. Cast off the life of the so-called “literary youth”; even when you hear a single word of speech on the roadside, see a single lonely sprout of grass, hear the heavy, troubled footfall of one solitary person, you must perceive it with the whole of your life force [생명]. You must feel (感). And you must think. We have nothing other than this freedom. We who live in every kind of unfreedom, oppression, and anguish — we have no way of discovering a true future and creating, save through this life. Just as the Russian peasants did before the emancipation of the serfs (Turgenev, Tolstoy, Radishchev), [4] or as all the people and artists of Russia did before the 1917 Revolution. The path of creation is absolute. Like a mother seeking to bring forth new life [생명], it is the gathering-in of the entire universe.
What comes from such a life? Strength, heat, light — that is, the awakening to one’s own life force [생명력], to “in heaven and on earth, I alone am supreme” (天上天下唯我獨尊). [5] When this awakening of life force arises and reaches its extremity, there is blood and sweat and revolution. Consider what other effect there could be besides this revolution. Political movements are useless. Petty calculations of profit and loss (利害打算) are useless. The schemings of the vulgar masses (俗民俗衆) are useless. More than reform or progress, more than what is “practical” or “shrewd,” what we need is a chaotic and forceful revolution.
Do not think of this revolution as a matter of guns and swords alone. The artist, it is said, is a revolutionary. Creative work, it is said, is the bomb of life’s revolutionary. [6] Ibsen’s Nora play [A Doll’s House], [7] Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons — there is no need to give further examples. Did Kuriyagawa Hakuson [8] not say it? — that the new currents (新潮流) of post-war political and social thought had already appeared at the end of the nineteenth century, before the Great War. And when one considers that the Expressionist thought and writers of Germany of which I just spoke had already existed in the 1880s of the previous century, will one not grasp the meaning of the artist’s creative life?
Our own creative life ought, in truth, to have appeared from before the World War, as it did with the Germans. And yet — apart from a few peculiar, self-consoling works by two or three literary figures, there has been nothing. Even after the war, even after the March First Movement, [9] what has come forth has been only the still more contemptible verse of the “literary youth,” only a few lifeless Japanese-style short stories by the so-called rising authors. What has caused this? I think it is this: the so-called new thought and new literature came in entirely by way of Japan. And just as cold water poured into a brass bowl takes on the smell of brass, so the Joseon artists, thinkers, and ideologues who came in by way of the vessel called “Japan,” “the Cherry-Blossom Country” (櫻花國), “Yamato” (大和), could not but become Japanized; and consequently, imitating that island national character (島國民性), nothing has come of them but shallow, frivolous (浮華), unthorough, superficial, hedonistic thought and literature.
Beyond this — having immersed themselves only in the kinds of books and digests that dazzle the eyes of literary youth, the publications of Shinchōsha (新潮社), Shun’yōdō (春陽堂), or Arusu (アルス) [10] — they lie idly in vain hedonism, superficial humanitarianism, idealism, with no occupation but trifling (玩弄). If we go on at this rate, Joseon will become truly pitiful. Without cultivating insight into the reality around oneself, the creative life — the life that is thoroughly faithful to oneself and that intuits the whole face (全面) of life — cannot be glimpsed in the slightest. How could anyone undergoing such suffering as ours possibly have nothing to show but this? Look once more at the Germans, the Expressionists, whom I cited at the head of this piece. And on the other hand — see how no superb artist or thinker has emerged from the materially abundant, frivolous, vulgar nation (下俗輩) of the Yankees; consider this, and how could it not be that something powerful, something of meaning, will come forth from our own life, which so resembles the German condition?
Let us now collect ourselves; let us cast off the superficial, frivolous (浮薄), vain life we have led until now; let us be thoroughly faithful (充實) to ourselves, and so look directly at all things around us. Let us escape the playful mood of hitherto, and stake our lives [생명] in battle-fashion to give our whole heart (全心) to true creative work. Do not lend your ear to the empty words of others. Reflect on that line of Dante’s that Karl Marx so often quoted — [11]
Segui il tuo corso,
e lascia dir le genti.
(Pay no heed to others' words —
walk your own road.)It is in this spirit that I urge upon all of you the creative life, and at the same time long ardently for many works of creation — fiction, drama, poetry — to come forth. The motive that prompted me to write this piece is that the other day a member of our circle remarked that creative work among us is still premature (judging by the present state of the Joseon literary world), at which thoughts came rushing upon me, and I came to write this. Forgive me where my words have gone astray. But I will assert without hesitation that our creation must be art directly bound up with our life. And further: how would it be if, by mutual recommendation among the members within the next year or year and a half, we gathered the fine works (佳作) produced in that interval and put them out in print? Since our society’s (會) magazine has not yet been released to the world or come under police scrutiny, [12] and since this publication too will not be a formal one, let us proceed without any need for hesitation about our claims or attitudes.
Lastly, I have, on my own personal selection, set out some range of themes (テ−マ) for creative work. I would be glad if you took it for reference.
- In terms of class, our need to open our eyes is urgent. As things stand around us today, there is no awareness whatsoever. But the need is great. There is the economic class as defined by the socialists, of course; but also the political class, the ethnic class — and, more thoroughly still, that class of those in certain social positions called “the good and the moral,” the educated class and the unlettered class. Around us nothing exists that is not a class. The counterparts to such classes are those of the general populace standing in the disadvantaged position. For one with the strength to live, there will be the awakening and the anguish to break free of this state — and there, at that very point, our creation must take place.
- Ethically, all the values around us must be inverted. Within the single phrase “Land of Eastern Courtesy” (東方禮儀之國) the entire venom (惡毒) submerged in our past life — and consequently in our present life — is plainly evident. Our life must change to such a degree that a man who lies with his mother might appear, that a man who kills his father might appear, and that the ethical value of such acts could come into being. [13] For consider: the conception of the ancient “king” [임금] and “Son of Heaven” [天子] [14] — held to be the most noble, inviolable position in the human world — has it not today been entirely overturned? It is the same with all else. If I were now to say, Lie with thy mother, the one who heard would at once rise up sword in hand. But who can declare with certainty that there will not come, some ages hence, a time when this is regarded, on the contrary, as the rightful way of a son? We must only investigate the ethical old tales (古談) of our present life around us — that poison, that mere shell from which life [생명] has departed. Out of this investigation must come the creative work that overturns our life and guides us onto a new road.
- Sexually — needless to say, this means love, marriage, motherhood, the economic and social problems of women. I have nothing further to say on this. Since it is a universal theme, I will leave it at that.
- Philosophy of life — life [생명], death, God, the Ideal, and so on. Note that this theme is one which wells up out of the four themes named above. Only one thing must be observed; what I would urge upon you is this: all such ideational themes are not absolute — they appear in our consciousness only upon the foundation of a relative life. We must throw out such worldviews as that of Buddhism, where one speaks of the relation of eye-consciousness (眼識 — thought) and mind-consciousness (心識 — spirit), with the latter constraining the former, [15] or where one says the Idea is “transcendental.” Why? Because such transcendental, absolute thoughts, too, have appeared inside the heads of human beings who possess eyes, ears, mouth, and nose just as we do. It is not that the gods (神) suddenly let them drop down out of the sky. Just as a human life [생명] lasts a few decades and then dies, so too such absolute thoughts, before some hundreds of years pass — often within less than a quarter-century — wither away.
Let us create freely to the very end. Let us create thoroughly. If we create much, much will come forth. Let us sweat. [16]
— August 1925.
Société Mai, Third Volume. Published September 1925.
NOTES
[1] Lunacharsky. Anatoly Vasilyevich Lunacharsky (1875–1933) was the People’s Commissar for Enlightenment of the Soviet Union from 1917 to 1929 — Lenin’s first culture minister, and the dominant theorist of early Soviet aesthetic policy. A playwright and critic himself before the revolution, Lunacharsky’s particular contribution to Marxist aesthetics was his sustained insistence that art could not be reduced to propaganda or to the schematic illustration of class analysis: that the affective, sensuous, “subtle feeling” dimension of art was constitutive of its political force, not separable from it. The view Kim’s comrade quotes — “no human activity, however great, can succeed unless it is fused (伴合) with subtle feeling” — captures this position exactly. The phrasing is paraphrastic; I have not been able to locate it as a direct citation, and Kim is almost certainly receiving Lunacharsky through a Japanese intermediary translation. The Tokyo socialist circles in which Kim moved during his Waseda years were saturated with translations of early Soviet theory; Lunacharsky’s writings appeared in Kaizō and other left journals from the early 1920s. What is striking is how completely Kim’s comrade has internalized Lunacharsky’s anti-mechanistic aesthetic: this is not socialist realism’s later doctrine but its open, expressionist-friendly Soviet predecessor.
[2] German Expressionist drama. Kim’s chronology is sharp and substantially correct. The Expressionist current in painting did begin in the late nineteenth century — he is presumably thinking of the proto-Expressionist generation around Ensor, Munch, and the early German Symbolists in the 1880s, before Die Brücke (1905) and Der Blaue Reiter (1911) gave the movement its name. The first Expressionist plays — Reinhard Sorge’s Der Bettler (1912), Walter Hasenclever’s Der Sohn (1914), Georg Kaiser’s Von morgens bis mitternachts (1912) — were indeed written immediately before the war. But Kim is right that the explosion of Expressionist theatre — the Toller, Kaiser, Hasenclever, Goering, Werfel period of intense activity — followed the catastrophe of 1914–18 and its psychological aftermath. The pre-war “reactionary current against the extreme deviations of materialism and naturalism” Kim names is the post-Naturalist generation’s revolt against Hauptmann and Ibsen-style Naturalism (interesting in light of his retention of A Doll’s House as a touchstone two paragraphs later). Kim’s framing — that catastrophe produces depth, that suffering is the precondition for major art — is itself an Expressionist commonplace; it is also exactly the framing Kuriyagawa Hakuson built his major book on.
[3] Kaiser the playwright. Georg Kaiser (1878–1945), the most prolific and theatrically successful of the German Expressionist dramatists. Von morgens bis mitternachts (From Morn to Midnight, 1912; first staged 1917) and the Gas trilogy — Die Koralle (1917), Gas I (1918), Gas II (1920) — were the works Kim almost certainly had in mind. Kaiser’s exiled stations-of-the-cross dramaturgy, his typological characters (the Bank Cashier, the Father, the Son), his dystopian industrial allegories, and his ecstatic-collapse arcs were directly formative for Kim’s own Expressionist plays — Iyŏng-nyŏ, Sannyangkae, and especially the late Nansa. Kim’s parenthetical “황제 말이 아니요, 극작가의” — “I don’t mean the Emperor; I mean the playwright” — wards off the unavoidable pun (the Kaiser of WWI Germany), and signals that for his Joseon readers in 1925, Georg Kaiser was not yet a household name. The triangulation in this sentence — Nietzsche / Schopenhauer / Marx / Kaiser — is itself revealing of Kim’s intellectual map: Kaiser is named in a single breath with three philosophers because, for Kim, the Expressionist drama is a thinking form, not just a literary one. This is the conceptual basis for his own dramaturgy.
[4] Turgenev, Tolstoy, Radishchev. The transliteration 라디―시체푸 is Aleksandr Nikolaevich Radishchev (1749–1802), author of Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow (1790), suppressed by Catherine II and the writer most often invoked as the inaugural figure of Russian conscience-literature. Kim’s grouping of Radishchev with Turgenev (1818–1883) and Tolstoy (1828–1910) is significant: he is constructing a lineage of Russian writers who wrote before the institutional change they made imaginatively possible. Radishchev wrote before the 1861 emancipation of the serfs (농예해방, literally “agricultural-slave emancipation”); Turgenev’s A Sportsman’s Sketches (1852) is the proximate Russian literary cause to which the emancipation is often traced; Tolstoy’s late religious-anarchist writings prefigure the 1917 revolution Kim names a sentence later. The whole point of the analogy is that Korean writers in 1925 are in the position of Russian writers before 1861 — that is, that the political horizon they are writing toward has not yet arrived, and that their writing is itself the action by which it might be brought into existence. This is a remarkable claim, and a deeply political one: it positions Korean creative writing as the equivalent of pre-revolutionary Russian literature in its world-historical ambition. The “1917 혁명” reference in the next clause — the October Revolution — completes the geometry.
[5] “In heaven and on earth, I alone am supreme.” 천상천하 유아독존 (天上天下唯我獨尊) — traditionally the words spoken by the newborn Buddha, who is said to have taken seven steps in each direction at birth and pronounced this declaration. The line is a fixed expression in East Asian Buddhist culture and circulates well outside formally Buddhist contexts. Kim’s deployment of it is striking: he attaches it not to enlightenment but to the artist’s awakening to her own creative Lebenskraft (생명력 — life force). The phrase becomes, in his hand, a Nietzschean-Stirnerian figure of artistic self-sovereignty. The Buddhist source is not ironized; it is repurposed. This is a recurring move in Kim — a kind of disinhibition of inherited religious vocabulary into the service of a thoroughly modernist self-conception. The same tonal gesture appears in his treatment of “안식/심식” three pages later.
[6] “The artist is a revolutionary. Creative work is the bomb of life’s revolutionary.” The figure of the artwork as bomb (폭탄) is not Kim’s invention. It circulates through European anarchist and avant-garde rhetoric from the 1880s onward — through the propaganda-of-the-deed tradition, through Italian Futurism, and especially through early Russian Futurism (Mayakovsky’s “A Slap in the Face of Public Taste” had been published in 1912, and was widely known in Tokyo socialist circles by the early 1920s). What is distinctive is the Korean phrasing: 인생의 혁명가의 폭탄 — “the bomb of life’s revolutionary,” not simply “a revolutionary’s bomb.” The grammar makes “life” itself the agent of revolution, with the artist as life’s instrument. This is consonant with Kim’s underlying vitalism: the artwork is what life uses to detonate the conditions that suppress it. The locution is also unmistakably aimed at the colonial reader: this is a Korean essay published in 1925, in which an artwork is being figured as a bomb. The strikethrough marks on 임금 / 天子 a few paragraphs later suggest that this kind of language was indeed read with attention by some authority.
[7] Ibsen’s Nora play and Korean reception. 노라劇 — Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House (Et Dukkehjem, 1879), known in East Asia almost exclusively by its protagonist’s name. The play arrived in Korean colonial literary culture by way of Japan: Shimamura Hōgetsu’s 1911 production at the Geijutsu-za in Tokyo, with Matsui Sumako as Nora, was a watershed; the Korean translation by Yang Baek-hwa was serialized in Maeil Sinbo beginning in 1922, and the play was repeatedly cited by Korean New Women writers — Na Hye-sok, Kim Won-ju, Kim Myeong-sun — as a touchstone for women’s social emancipation. Kim’s invocation of Nora here is therefore also implicitly an invocation of the Korean New Woman discourse he had been in close dialogue with throughout the early 1920s, especially through the figure of the soprano Yun Sim-deok, with whom Kim’s name is irrevocably entangled (her recording of “Sa-ui ch’anmi” — “Hymn of Death” — would appear posthumously after their joint death by drowning in the Genkai Strait, June 1926). The pairing of Ibsen’s Nora with Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons in Kim’s sentence is not arbitrary: both are touchstones for the rejection of inherited authority — patriarchal in Ibsen, generational and political in Turgenev — and both were absorbed in colonial Korea through Japanese intermediation.
[8] Kuriyagawa Hakuson. 廚川白村 (1880–1923), Japanese literary critic and English literature scholar at Kyoto Imperial University. His major work, Kumon no shōchō (Symbols of Anguish, 苦悶の象徵), was published posthumously in 1924 — Kuriyagawa had died in the Great Kantō Earthquake of September 1923 — and immediately became a defining text for both Japanese and East Asian colonial literary modernism. Lu Xun translated it into Chinese the same year (1924); a Korean translation by Bang In-geun appeared shortly after. The book’s central argument — that art is the symbolic expression of repressed psychic suffering, drawing explicitly on Bergson, Freud, and the German Romantic tradition — gave a generation of East Asian writers a vocabulary for thinking about modernist form as a response to historical wounding. Kim’s reference here is therefore freighted: he is invoking the most influential single critical text in his immediate intellectual environment. The specific argument he attributes to Kuriyagawa — that the post-war “new tide” of political-social thought already existed in nineteenth-century European modernism — is consistent with Kuriyagawa’s framing of post-war literature as the surfacing of currents long buried beneath nineteenth-century positivism. The Bergsonian element in Kuriyagawa is also probably the channel through which Kim’s 생명력 vocabulary acquires its specifically vitalist charge.
[9] After the March First Movement. 3·1운동, the nationwide independence demonstrations of March 1919, in which an estimated two million Koreans participated and which were brutally suppressed by Japanese colonial military and police. The Movement is the single most important event in Kim’s adult lifetime, and his casual invocation of it here — “even after the March First Movement” — registers a generational disappointment. The post-1919 period was, in colonial cultural-policy terms, the “Cultural Rule” (문화통치) era — a relative loosening of press restrictions that produced the first sustained Korean-language literary periodicals (Kaebyeok, Changjo, Pyehŏ, Baekjo, etc.). The “literary youth” Kim is excoriating are precisely the writers who emerged in this opening: the Decadents and aesthetes around Pyehŏ, the lyric symbolists, the early proletarian writers. His charge against them is essentially that they have responded to the post-1919 opening by producing aesthetic poses rather than the kind of life-staked, revolution-bearing creative work the moment requires. Whether this judgment is fair to writers like Kim Tongin, Yi Sang-hwa, or Hyon Chin-gon is debatable; what matters here is that Kim is positioning himself against the dominant tendencies of post-1919 Korean literature even as he is institutionally part of that generation.
[10] Shinchōsha, Shun’yōdō, Arusu. Shinchōsha (新潮社, founded 1904) was the dominant publisher of Japanese literary fiction and translated Western literature, anchored by the magazine Shinchō. Shun’yōdō (春陽堂, founded 1878) was particularly important as a publisher of European literature in translation and of standard editions of Meiji and Taishō literature. Arusu (アルス, founded 1915 by Kitahara Tetsuo, the elder brother of the poet Kitahara Hakushū) was a smaller, more aestheticist publisher, oriented toward children’s literature and art books. Kim’s naming of these three together is a sharp piece of cultural-political analysis: he is identifying the precise apparatus through which Japanese literary modernity arrived in colonial Korea, and arguing that the apparatus itself imposed the limitations of Taishō-era Japanese aesthetic culture (refined hedonism, lyric humanitarianism, idealist abstraction) on the Korean writers who consumed it. This is a sophisticated theory of mediated cultural transmission and one that anticipates by several decades the postcolonial critique of how colonial modernity is filtered through metropolitan institutions.
[11] Marx’s Dante. “Segui il tuo corso, e lascia dir le genti” — “Follow your own course, and let people say what they will.” This is the closing line of the preface to the first edition of Capital (Hamburg, 1867). Marx’s exact phrasing is an adaptation of Purgatorio V.13: “Vien dietro a me, e lascia dir le genti” — “Come after me, and let people say what they will” — spoken by Virgil to Dante. Marx made the line his motto. Kim’s transmission is exact in sense: he gives the Italian, attributes it to Dante via Marx, and provides his own Korean gloss (“남의 말에 귀 기울이지 말고 / 너의 길은 네가 거러라”) which is a paraphrase rather than a literal rendering. The Italian as printed in the source carries minor typesetting errors (tiw for tuo; dirle for dir le) — almost certainly artifacts of the Korean printer’s typecase rather than Kim’s own readings; I have given the standard text. The fact that Kim cites the Italian rather than a Japanese or Korean translation is itself information: it tells us he is reading Capital in some form (or reading at least the preface, or a citation of it that preserved the Italian original) and that he is alert to the line’s status as Marx’s signature emblem. The placement is rhetorically beautiful: in an essay about how Korean creative life has come to Korea by way of Japan and arrived deformed, Kim makes his own quotational chain — Dante to Marx to himself, in the Italian — visible. The chain demonstrates the kind of unmediated international intellectual life Kim is calling for.
[12] Police scrutiny. 경찰의 눈에 띄일 염려 — literally, “the danger of catching the eye of the police.” Under colonial press laws (출판법, 1909, and the more restrictive 신문지법, 1907), all Korean-language publications intended for public circulation were subject to prior censorship by the Government-General. Kim is making a precise jurisdictional point: Société Mai, as an in-circle bulletin not registered for public sale and not distributed beyond the Society’s membership, occupies a legal grey zone in which prior censorship does not apply. This is why Kim believes he can urge his fellow members to “proceed without any need for hesitation about our claims or attitudes” — and it is also why this essay can include the inflammatory passage about killing the father and lying with the mother (and why, presumably, the strikethrough marks on 임금 and 天子 in the source were applied at some later editorial stage rather than at original publication). The footnote also tells us something about the Society itself: it was small, semi-clandestine, oriented to genuine creative work rather than to the public literary marketplace. This is the institutional matrix of Kim’s intellectual life in his last year.
[13] Lying with the mother, killing the father. The most volatile passage in the essay. Kim is making a Nietzschean argument about the historicity of ethical categories: that values once held to be eternal — the inviolability of the Son of Heaven, the prohibition on parricide, the prohibition on incest — are in fact products of particular historical conditions, and that as those conditions change, so do the values. The example of monarchic inviolability (overturned, Kim says, “today” — 1925, six years after the abdication of the last Korean emperor and twelve years after the Xinhai Revolution in China) functions as a proof-of-concept: that taboo has fallen, and so others may also. The passage is striking for several reasons. It explicitly invokes the Oedipal triad — mother, father, son — at the moment Freud’s theories were beginning to circulate in Japanese intellectual life (Yabe Yaekichi began publishing on Freud in 1912; Marui Kiyoyasu’s translations of The Interpretation of Dreams appeared in the early 1920s). Whether Kim had read Freud directly is unclear; what is clear is that he is mobilizing the same imaginative material — the prohibition that founds the ethical order — and arguing that it too is historical. It is also striking for its rhetorical risk: the explicit imperative “내가 지금 네의 모(母)와 간(姦)하라 하면” — “if I were now to say, Lie with thy mother” — is bracing in any literary register, and remarkable in a 1925 Korean essay. The fact that the editor of the modern reprint felt the need to footnote the strikethrough marks confirms that the passage was, and remains, the part of this essay where Kim’s polemical edge cuts deepest.
[14] The strikethrough marks. The reprint’s editorial footnotes (numbered 4 and 5 in the source) note that the words 임금 (“king”) and 天子 (“Son of Heaven”) are marked with red strikethrough X-marks in the source text. The provenance of these marks is not specified in the reprint. Three plausible accounts: (i) they are Japanese colonial police censorship marks on a circulating copy that the modern editor used as base text; (ii) they are later editorial marks made by someone preparing the text for republication, perhaps during the late colonial or early post-liberation period when imperial vocabulary was politically charged; (iii) they are Kim’s own self-redaction marks on a working draft that became the printer’s copy. The first hypothesis is complicated by Kim’s own claim, three sentences earlier, that Société Mai escapes police scrutiny — though this claim may itself have been over-confident. Whichever provenance is correct, the marks function bibliographically as a record of the passage’s perceived danger. They are also the sole instance of editorial intervention preserved in the reprint.
[15] Eye-consciousness and mind-consciousness. 안식 (眼識) and 심식 (心識). The vocabulary derives from Yogācāra Buddhism’s eight-consciousness schema (八識), in which 眼識 is the first of the five sense-consciousnesses (visual perception) and 心識 — though the standard Yogācāra terminology would more strictly be 意識 (mano-vijñāna) or 阿賴耶識 (ālaya-vijñāna) — generally indicates a higher, more comprehensive level of mental activity. Kim’s gloss (“생각” / “정신” — “thought” / “spirit”) is loose, and the doctrinal point about the latter constraining the former is not standard Yogācāra; he is using the Buddhist vocabulary instrumentally, as a recognized East Asian articulation of the idea that there exists a transcendental level of mind that conditions ordinary perception. The polemical move is to reject this whole picture: Kim insists that even the most exalted “transcendental” thought is the product of a particular human head with a specific biological apparatus, and is therefore historical and mortal. This is a remarkably strong claim, and it places Kim in clear opposition not only to Buddhist transcendentalism but also to the Kantian and idealist traditions that were the dominant frameworks of Japanese academic philosophy in his student years. The genealogy of the position is recognizably Marxian (the famous formulation in The German Ideology: “Consciousness can never be anything else than conscious existence”), with a Feuerbachian-Nietzschean flavoring. Kim is, in effect, performing a vernacular Korean translation of nineteenth-century European materialism, using Buddhist categories as the inherited terminology to be overcome.
[16] “Let us sweat.” 땀 흘닙시다. Kim’s closing line is deliberately anti-rhetorical. After eight pages of dense argument moving through Lunacharsky, Kaiser, Ibsen, Turgenev, Marx, Dante, and Buddhist epistemology, the essay ends on a single colloquial imperative: let us sweat. The choice is consistent with the essay’s repeated insistence on the embodied, life-staked character of true creative work — “battle-fashion to give our whole heart,” “blood and sweat and revolution,” “stake our lives.” Sweat is the figure of effort that does not stand at any rhetorical distance from the body. It is also worth noting that the dating “(1925. 8.)” places the essay’s composition in late summer in Tokyo — physically, in heat. The signoff is therefore both metaphorical and weather-accurate. As a closing gesture for a polemic whose argument is precisely that creative work must be paid for in lived intensity, “땀 흘닙시다” earns its place. It is the kind of ending that is easy to overlook on a first reading and that resolves on re-reading into one of the essay’s most carefully placed sentences.
For the Itinerary of a Soul archive.